1998
The name of the instrument comes from the name of Athena’s robe or shield. The instrument has to protect its user and help to communicate. Aegis is made of two screens connected to computers and little engine that moves the screens.
Aegis is started up by a voice, additionally by a system of recognizing of the sounds, the instrument reacts on particular words, sentences spoken by its user i.e: Hello, stop, shut up. On the drawing aside screens appears, previously recorded, face of the user in different positions. Thus there exist two or more persons discussing: the user and his/her multiplied alteregos. The user can direct the course of the action: he is simultaneously the animator and the commentator. Aegis is a prosthesis, which has to react in exaggerate way on any symptoms of self-controlling of the user.
Instrument designed in collaboration with members of the Interrogative Design Group,
Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT: Adam Whiton, Sung Ho Kim, Kelly Dobson,
Jerzy Stypułkowski, Bogdan Soboński, Todd Polenberg, Christe Erickson; built at Brooklyn
Model Works.
Projects featuring the Ægis carried out in: Berlin, New York.
The Ægis, the last and most technologically advanced of the Xenological Instruments, was
designed as a dialogic device, allowing the users to dialogue with others and themselves,
multiplied in recordings of their own person screened on two monitors. Each screen is
connected to a computer with a built-in voice-recognition sensor that reacts to certain
predefined phrases. The Ægis facilitates multidirectional dialogue: the screens displaying
the user’s faces can be turned towards each other, towards the user, or towards other
speakers. This is a device, the artist stresses, “serving the immigrant’s art of survival,
but also meant for those who experience alienation for other reasons.” Pre-programmed
dialogues make it possible for the users to talk to themselves about their own alienation.
Allowing us to communicate with others as well as to hide behind a pre-recorded narrative,
the device takes its name from Athena’s protective shield.
