Who Owns
You (2008).
Custom
billboard.
Image courtesy
of the artist.
So Listening Post came out of this line of thinking and came from a different surveillance
culture really than the one we are in now. At
the time we were hearing a lot about the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, and massive
eavesdropping programs, and it occurred to me
it was unlikely that humans were doing all the
listening—it seemed likely speech recognition
programs were doing at least an initial round
of analysis. And then I discovered this DARPA
research project called GALE: Global Autonomous Language Exploitation with the stated
intent to “apply computer software technologies to absorb, translate, analyze, and interpret
huge volumes of speech and text in multiple
languages, eliminating the need for linguists and
analysts, and automatically providing relevant,
concise, actionable information to military
command and personnel in a timely fashion.”
(Quote from the GALE website—no longer online but available through the internet archive).
The idea that a natural language processing
system would be capable of doing all of these
things reliably and accurately enough to create
“actionable information” for the military struck
me as both absurd and potentially dangerous.
So Listening Post came out of an interest in both
understanding these technologies more deeply
and attempting to creatively subvert them.
SciArt in America October 2014
JB: A lot of your older work was created with
the group Future Archaeology. Can you talk a
bit about this?
HDH: Future Archaeology is: myself, Ellie
Irons, Dan Phiffer, Matt Radune, Thomas Dexter, and Joseph Moore.
Future Archaeology was a collaboration that
grew out of a friendship between myself and
several neighbors in Brooklyn. Some of us went
to Bennington College for undergrad together
(Me, Joe, and Tom). Some of us went to the Interactive Telecommunications Program for grad
school together (me and Dan, and by proxy his
wife Ellie), and some of us used to live in a big
crazy loft together in Bushwick (me, Tom, Joe,
and Matt). The work came out of spending a lot
of time together informally, hanging out, and
talking/arguing about themes of the natural and
the artificial, cybernetics, and new media theory. Each of us came to the collaboration with
different skills and interests, and we didn’t all
work on every project together, or necessarily
agree on how to approach each of our projects!
But we had a good time and made some pretty
interesting and at times I think beautiful works.
27