CEPA Gallery : Conversation Pieces

Heather Dewey-Hagborg — Listening Post

Heather Dewey-Hagborg's Listening Post is a system designed to overhear, parse and ultimately learn from the spoken phrases of casual passersby. A remote listening post, installed in the public sphere, constantly monitors its immediate environment and broadcasts what it hears, via cell phone, to a server, or speaking post installed at CEPA Gallery. The server interprets, recombines, and vocalizes the conversation it receives while evolving over the course of the exhibition, developing a new lexicon and grammatical syntax from the input acquired from the listening post and eventually creating new phrases. This process of system accumulation and evolution will be visually represented by a constant printout spooling into the gallery space from the speaking post.