Goodbye to All That
MIGUEL LORENZO UY
Miguel Lorenzo Uy, Words from the Serpent, 2020, Single-channel audio, Running Time 10min 56secs.
Miguel Lorenzo Uy (b. 1993) ) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. He works with different mediums from painting to photography and sculpture to video. His works revolve around immediate concerns with regard to beliefs, technology, and media.
Words from the Serpent is an audio recording of spoken words. The words are taken from The Serpent’s collected data. The data is then recited as if it were a poem, in a manner which gives a gentle brain stimulus (it hits better with higher sound quality). As much as everyone would like to say goodbye to this year, most social, economic, and cultural activities have become digital and everything we do through the internet is inevitably recorded and I’d like to somehow incarnate this phenomenon through my work. As I recite the collected data, I’d like the people to know that I have access to a point in time where they were near the Serpent’s vicinity.
Miguel Lorenzo Uy, Serpent, 2020, Computer program, microphone, single-channel video, raspberry pi 4
About the Serpent
Serpent references the creature from the book of Genesis which told Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The program is inspired by how advertisements today are determined and displayed in our devices and the speculation of how it secretly captures the words we speak to feed to big corporations' algorithms.
The Serpent is a computer program that uses a microphone and internet connection. It utilizes speech recognition from massive open-source libraries to translate and convert any audible word it detects to written text. The text is then collected and sorted into different excel files (one file for every hundred words/phrases to make it more manageable for the limited hardware) where it is stored in a raspberry pi 's storage drive. The computer program’s code and chain of executed commands are displayed on screen for anyone to see and learn how it works.