Winnie Soon and Helen Pritchard

Aarhus, Denmark; London, UK; Hong Kong, China

In this work the network asks “If I wrote you a love letter would you write back?” Like the love letters which appeared mysteriously on the noticeboards of Manchester University’s Computer Department in the 1950s, thousands of texts circulate as computational processes perform the questions (perhaps as an expanded Turing test) on its listeners. These questions are extracted in real-time from Twitter with the keyword search of the ‘?’ symbol to create a spatio-temporal experience. The computerized voice the audience hears is a collective one, an entanglement of humans and non-humans, that circulates across networks. If I wrote you a love letter would you write back? (and thousands of other questions’ ) (封不回的情書？千言萬語無人回 was commissioned by the Microwave International New Media Festival 2012.

Winnie Soon is an artist-researcher born in Hong Kong. Her works examine network culture and computational processes which take the form of interactive and network media, installation and digital print. Soon’s works and lectures have been presented at galleries, art events, universities and conferences, including ISEA, tV&A Museum, Pulse Art and Technology Festival, Microwave International Media Arts Festival FutureEverything Art Exhibition, Taipei National University of Arts and Hong Kong Baptist University. She is currently a PhD fellow at the Participatory IT Research Center (Department of Aesthetics and Communication) at Aarhus University (DK), researching the notion of liveness in relation to unpredictability and temporality in the field of Software Studies.

Helen Pritchard is an artist and researcher. Central to her work are ideas of co-research, co-production and co-operation. Her projects often explore computational aesthetics, nonhuman sociality and queer data, often emerging as collaborative events and collective activities. Helen has shown work internationally including DA Fest International Festival of Digital Art, Spacex, Microwave International Media Arts Festival, Future Everything and Arnolfini Online. She is currently a PhD candidate, funded by the EPSRC in the school of Geography at Queen Mary and a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Software application for Mac OS X 10.7+, requires Blueetooth headphones for installation

The audio installation piece If I wrote you a love letter would you write back? uses procedural translation to collect discourse from Twitter and translate it into spoken words. Tweets are chosen from the live web based on the presence of the “?” character, which renders the search an at-times poignant record of questions that might otherwise go unheard and unanswered on Twitter’s broadcast network. The poetics of the piece thus combine human-generated language and computer-generated words, rendering the human inhuman through the process of audio translation while removing the questions from their original context and conversations. As an installation, the piece engulfs the viewers in an endless set of unanswered queries.

Download Source Archive
Description : Source archive
Requirements : Mac OS X (10.7+) with Karen voice (from Australia) installed, Java 1.6+, and Processing 2.2.1 (instructions in readme.txt)

Download Documentation Archive
Description : Documentation Archive
Requirements : Audio player and image viewer