Verba manent
An installation designed during the Theories and Technologies of Interaction Design course at LCC MA Interaction Design Communication held by Wesley Goatley.
After an individual research about the hyper object, we started to work in a group trying to aestheticize the invisible part of voice recognition technology. The group was formed by Leo Kosola, Anqi Wang, Ke Wang, Chenyu Zhou and me.
We started from the Latin proverb “Verba volant, scripta manent” that means “spoken words fly away, written words remain”. We believe that now this proverb is not applicable because our devices are always recording our voices and collecting datas from our conversations. Verba manent is an installation designed to make people conscious of this. The “radio” is always recording what visitors are talking about and beyond the wall there is a projector showing how the machine process sound in order to recognize words. Inside the radio, there is a thermal printer that prints exactly what people said putting literally words on paper, making visible how our devices collect data from us.