Gisle Frøysland
Norway
Easy Listening
"Easy Listening" is Gisle Frøysland's way of playing around with our excessive belief in technology as a means of seamless interaction and smooth conduction of information.
In a café environment a number of microphones are monitoring the ongoing conversation. The captured sound is fed to a computer, continuously attempting to translate the spoken word into pure text. The result of the ongoing process is presented on computer screens around the café. As the digitalized translation is based upon perfectly spoken English, the computer will constantly misinterpret what is said, thereby creating a surreal sub-text from the conversations. Through his playful use of automatic transfiguration Frøysland points to the existence of a production of meaning beyond, or inside, the circumscriptions of technology.
Frøysland's work is an inquiry into what he himself calls the "hype traps that the computer and media industry wants us to believe in". In pieces like "Dodonews" and "the FaceBot", he turns these traps into dialogic scenes, thereby revealing hidden power structures and presumptions. The dislocations of Frøysland form a media critique that questions not only the cybernetics of the net but also its utopian claim; neither browsing nor digital interpretation can free itself from contextual references.
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