Walking out of art installation Scrape Elegy, you’ll either be teary, in a fit of giggles or intensely creeped out.
“It’s so divisive, in a good way,” says Tilly Boleyn, head of curatorial for Swarm, the wide-ranging exhibition that Scrape Elegy is part of. It’s running at Science Gallery in Parkville until December 3.
The installation prompts you to enter your Instagram handle on a screen and accept a follow request. Then, in a pastel pink toilet cubicle, a disinterested robot voice reads your posts back to you, as an ambient soundscape by composer Monica Lim swirls around the room. You’ll discover exactly how many skeletons are hanging in your online closet, where everyone can see them.
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SIGN UP“Some people come out of it so delighted and teary about things they’d forgotten, and other people come out of it horrified at how much information that we put out there,” Boleyn says.
No two Scrape Elegy experiences are the same – even for a single person. You’ll always hear your first and most recent posts. But the algorithm, designed by software engineer Misha Mikho, otherwise moves randomly through your other posts to create an “elegy” that lasts just over five minutes.
“The poetics of the elegy are really specific – you know, it’s traditionally a mourning poem that’s spoken out at a funeral,” says Willoh Weiland, the artist behind Scrape Elegy. She’s known for interactive art installations around Australia such as 2019’s Lick Lick Blink and Mona Foma’s late night party Faux Mo.
The Centre for AI and Digital Ethics came to Weiland with the idea. She was curious about the prospect of reframing our relationship with what we post on social media.
“I was intrigued by how twisting and transforming those very basic texts in this highly formal, melodramatic way would make us feel differently,” she says.
“It’s called ‘scrape’ because often ... ‘evil bots’ to scrape our data when we’re on online, and I was intrigued by just the horrible sound of that word.”
Sinister aspects aside, Scrape Elegy elevates that raw data, showing its humanity. Anniversaries, holidays with old friends, high school graduation posts and moments with lost loved ones become a memorial of your online life so far. And sometimes, an emotional moment will be interrupted by a robotic voice diligently reading out a series of emojis. That’s the unpredictability of Scrape Elegy.
The cubicle was designed specifically to create a private yet accessible space that heightens the impact of these unexpected readings.
“When you’re in the gallery, you’re performing your interaction with the artworks, or the other people who are there with you. It’s the opposite of privacy, and often I find that quite an anxious experience,” Weiland says.
Many of Swarm’s installations are designed with a similar level of interactivity, ensuring no two people will have the same experience. The interdisciplinary exhibition merges science, technology, art, engineering, and First Nations knowledge systems to consider collective behaviour through the key question, “Are we hardwired to be part of the pack?”
Scrape Elegy deals with one of the exhibition’s four major themes – mass information.
“We’re uploading more than 500 hours of video and content to Youtube every minute of every day,” Boleyn says.
It’s a huge amount of content, impossible for any single person to fathom. But another piece, the audioscape Maelstrom, tries to do just that – posing the question “What does the internet sound like?” Its creators, artist duo Daniel Jones and James Bulley, developed an algorithm which samples sounds from thousands of the Youtube videos that are uploaded at any given point in time, organising them into a kind of soundtrack.
The resulting work asks us to consider how much of the content we consume is actually useful, and how much is junk or misinformation. And, just like Scrape Elegy, it presents some harsh truths about the online world that more than two billion users experience in a rather blinkered way.
Weiland says she hopes her installation will change audiences’ perceptions of social media, as it did her own.
“There’s a sadness I think, in the fact that all these experiences that we have that are sold to us as being between friends are actually part of the machine that’s selling ourselves to ourselves.”
Swarm is at Science Gallery until December 3, 2022. Open 11am–5pm, Tuesday to Saturday. Entry is free.
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