Ens escolten? is a research-creation project about data extraction and the persistent feeling that our phones are listening to us.
It began with a series of qualitative interviews conducted by social psychologist Sílvia Vázquez, along with Quelic Berga and Marc Villanueva Mir with visitors to the exhibition L’altre costat. Among other questions, we asked:
- Of everything that the digital universe involves, can you give an example of a positive situation? And a negative one?
- Have you thought about what will happen to your data and your digital world when you are no longer here?
- Which three adjectives would you use to describe a radically better digital world? And a radically worse one?
One answer kept returning: the fear of machines listening to us in order to turn what we say into targeted advertising. We chose not to settle whether that is technically true and to treat the belief as material instead. In a workshop built on the interviews, the conversation drifted from computational economy (being listened to is never free) to magical thinking, to loneliness, and to the “My FBI agent” meme, the joke that surveillance is at least a form of company.
From there we built the machine people imagine, and a game to play with it. In Desitjar barat (Desiring Cheaply), improvised couples of strangers compete while imagining out loud their wedding or their grandpa’s funeral, romantic in one case and caring in the other. The software, running on local open-weight models, listens, infers what they desire and goes shopping for it on real marketplaces such as Amazon, showing thumbnails of the products and keeping a running total. The cheapest couple wins, which sets sentiment against budget and makes for very funny moments for players and audience. At the end, the list of desires is printed on a small thermal receipt printer, the kind you find at the till of any shop.
It is possible, that you asked the universe for a sign, and it answered through an ad on Instagram
A project with Ezequiel Soriano
