Finding Your Voice

If you don’t speak will anyone see you? Do surveillance technologies modify the way we speak or think about ourselves in public? What happens if we can see conversation dynamics? Will it change the conversation? This work, titled Finding Your Voice, explores these questions.

A viewer of this interactive work first sees on the display a video representation of what the display’s camera sees of the room—but without the viewer in it. Not until the viewer speaks, or makes sound another way, do they appear within the image, fading in and out. The quality of their representation is based on the character of their speech. In other words, how you speak affects how you are seen. The above video demonstrates the work.

Finding Your Voice (installation still), 2010