In this episode, we go shopping with artist and performer, Laura Allcorn. We enter into her practice, which is called the Institute for Comedic Inquiry, to learn how she pairs humour and entertainment with participatory public engagement methods to raise awareness about bizarre and dangerous uses of AI. Laura uses comedy to skewer all manner of ethically questionable technologies, from gait surveillance to shopping algorithms. We participate in one of Laura's performances in this episode, 'SKU-MARKET', an algorithmic shopping platform that promises to know you better than you know yourself. Stay tuned for what the algorithm says about us...
Laura Allcorn is a creative director, experience designer, and humorist. She founded The Institute For Comedic Inquiry (IFCI), a comedian-led research group. At IFCI she creates interactive objects and participatory performances that point out absurdities through a technique she calls ‘Participatory Satire.’ Her work focuses on how humor connects people to each other and new ideas–especially the ones that challenge narrow assumptions. She has studied all forms of comedy including satire writing, improvisation, sketch, and stand-up comedy.
Image from the Institute for Comedic Inquiry: https://comedicinquiry.com/humr-2-0.
Reading List:
Institute for Comedic Inquiry: https://comedicinquiry.com/
QualityLand, Marc-Uwe Kling: https://guardianbookshop.com/qualityland-9781409191155/
Transcript:
Kerry: I'm Dr. Kerry McInerney. Dr. Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of the Good Robot podcast. Join us as we ask the experts, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, where we've got a full transcript of the episode and a sample. We love hearing from listeners, so feel free to tweet or email us, and would also so appreciate you leaving us a review on the podcast app. But until then sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.
Eleanor: In this episode, Kerry and I go shopping with artist [00:01:00] and performer, Laura Allcorn. We enter into her practice, which is called the Institute for comedic inquiry to learn how she pairs, humour and entertainment with participatory public engagement methods to raise awareness about bizarre and dangerous uses of AI. Her performances, serve back to audiences the things that are strange and absurd about what algorithms know about you.
Stay tuned to find out why Kerry uses face masks for self-care and why the algorithms say that I'm grumpy. We hope you enjoy the show.
Kerry: Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us today, Laura. So just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and what's brought you to thinking about good technology?
Laura: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be chatting with you both. I'm Laura Allcorn and I'm an artist and performer. And I create. Participatory installations and performances that draw audiences into thinking about emerging technology. [00:02:00] And my practice is called the Institute for Comedic Inquiry and that's very intentional. It's my experimental research Institute to study how humor can be paired with participatory public engagement methods. And I do that because I feel like as adults, we don't get a lot of opportunity. It's to engage with science outside of doing a podcast like we are, which is very important to like disseminating information, but I'm really curious about inviting audiences to process these topics live and in person and through their own bodies and with others.
And so that's why I create these larger scale participatory performances and installations. And I can give you maybe a couple examples because I think it's hard to imagine what is that? What would that be? And last year I made a game show about AI authored emails called 'who wants to write an email?'
So contestants live from the audience were recruited to take the hot seat and to try and figure out [00:03:00] human from AI writing in an email. And talk to an AI expert on stage, use their lifelines, like talking to the audience. So that's like a larger theatrical performance that uses audience participation.
And then I've done a 90- minute workout program that trains you how to thwart surveillance technologies that can track your unique walk, which I didn't know it was possible. So I thought why maybe we could come up with a way to train for that and imagine a future where it's part of our routine where we start to imagine altering our walk, walking strangely to subvert this, and it raises all these ethical questions about who controls these technologies, what do we want from them, how are they being used, and if we get an opportunity to opt out, what does that look like?
And more projects like that I think we're going to talk about later.
Eleanor: So can you help us answer our three good robot questions? What is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can pro justice work help us get [00:04:00] there?
Laura: I answered this question at first in my mind 'cause I knew you were going to ask it.
And then I got into a real debate over the last week thinking about it. Is good technology possible? I hope so. I'm optimistic, but I think good's a tricky word because I think good technology means something different to many different audiences or different people.
So I think it's sort of case by case. And what I think would be an improvement is just an improvement in the process of how technology is made. So currently a lot of it is designed by, private companies and we're not really given a lot of transparency in how these things work what they goals for them are what is the real ambition behind them of and we don't choose what they're aimed at. So like but a big part of doing a game show on AI and email was me satirizing this idea that this is what we're applying AI technology to.
This seems absurd to me that we have so many other larger societal challenges and that we've decided that [00:05:00] email embedding this in our email is going to be the biggest investment of our use of this technology and knowing how much power and, server time and all these things it takes. Like those things are pushed out of the equation. So I think if we could alter the development process, we can alter, regulatory processes. If we could give the public more opportunities to be informed about these things. Obviously, we want to weigh in, but I don't know. I don't know how much we can move the needle. I can't answer if that can all happen, but I'm still aspiring towards it or working in some sort of humorous resistance around it, or just trying to become a savvy, educated citizen myself of these technologies.
Eleanor: I really like the fact that what you're doing is using the idea of the provocation and the idea of the good robot is very much a provocation rather than some kind of utopian pipe dream. But I think we'll draw that out in the next question, which is about [00:06:00] humor and entertainment and leisure.
And the role that this plays in getting people to think about good technology because entertainment is nothing, if not a series of sort of provocations to the audience, whether it's a game show or whether it's some of my favorite comedians who managed to be provocative in just the right way, in whatever you is think is just the right way -very much depends on who you are and the kinds of provocations that you think are acceptable and not. So yes, tell us about entertainment and leisure and humor in your practice.
Laura: Absolutely. Yeah, I like to really, this might be annoying, but I like to remind people how incredible it is that we've evolved to have a sense of humor.
Because we get to, we're constantly encountering new information. Things confound us. The world is complex and confusing. And so we have a sense of humor because it, we can laugh, we can have pleasure in exploring those new ways of thinking. We can [00:07:00] literally change our perspectives. And so some people like myself are just a little more biased. Like I always think, I think humorously, I think I look at the world that way. That's just, I can't stop that, but I think humor serves to tackle topics where we think they are boring. They're complex. They're challenging. And I think we need an extra layer of humor to break that barrier down and to imagine encountering and holding another idea in our minds.
And so that's when I think humor is really at its best and when it should be applied is to those sorts of topics that are a bit touchy, tricky, that's when we really need humor to crack that window open for us. So I use it that way. And then, I think, again, back to this idea of maybe framing this because I love stand up comedy as well.
That's a comedy of speaking, and obviously a lot of popular comedy is about [00:08:00] speaking from personal perspective or from something you've experienced in the world and making commentary on it and hopefully helping the audience feel like they're not alone. They're not, this isn't just happening to them, but when we're talking about larger ideas about speculative technologies or how technologies might shape us, I have landed on pushing past just a spoken word medium or written medium and moving into this idea of bringing the audience into a state of play.
And this is a bit of a high wire act. And I, I've tried a lot of different methods for this and I found some that have been successful. And it really depends on the subject matter. So I start from the actual question or provocation that I have in mind. And I say, what would happen if this played out? What would happen to society?
What would be the new social rules of this world? If this technology came into play and what will we have to then negotiate as a society? And then I try and, Insert the audience into this [00:09:00] situation, this scenario, and I asked them to play themselves. I don't, you don't need to play any other part. You just need to bring yourself and your own interests, your own personal experiences, whether you've even touched this technology before, it doesn't really matter.
It's you can find an analogy to something in your life and you can share that with everybody else who's participating and you can start from your own questions. And what often happens with other passive or more consumable mediums is that we're invited to just sort of take it in. And maybe we didn't get the first question we had answered.
So now we're stuck and we can't progress. What I'm looking to do is bring people into a process of sense making, and if we can get past that, we can start thinking critically. And then if we can get past thinking critically, maybe we can think more aspirationally. We can start to imagine alternatives.
We can start to put this technology on our own personal terms and conditions. I like to jokingly say that, because we forget we get to [00:10:00] do that too.
Eleanor: Yes, absolutely. That was phenomenal. And I remember encountering your work and seeing This is the perfect picture, this photograph of people stumbling around the streets in New York with silver plastic fringe hanging off them, having the best time ever. And thinking, yes, that's the way of telling people about gait surveillance and what it does.
And then I read a load of papers on gait surveillance and I was mortified by the lack of consistency and results, even results published by people who are defining their own metrics. So just incredible work.
Kerry: Yeah, absolutely. And it's really interesting to hear about your work as like sense making as well in a way in like the, it's very embodied. I remember when everything everywhere, all at once came out, the science fiction film that being, not only I think like really important to a lot of like Asian American, Asian diaspora communities because of the fact that it was this kind of always in fronted Asian told sci fi film, which often are quite rare, but also because it was hilarious. And there's so many of those stories we [00:11:00] tell often these like very narrow stories about migration and trauma and those stories are incredibly important, but they're also the only ones that get funded and get space to be told. And so having this totally absurd film that was being shared by Asian American experiences, I think was really wonderful.
But I remember a common critique of the film was that it's a sensory overload. Like people would say this is completely overwhelming and it's a lot. Undeniably a lot to watch that film. I definitely had to pause it multiple times because yeah. Okay, good. I'm glad it wasn't just me. Cause I was like, I can take a lot of chaos.
Eleanor calls me the number one violator of the open office policy because if someone's disturbing the peace, it is usually me. But even I was like, if I think this is too much, how do other people handle this? But I wonder if there was actually something deliberate in that sensory overload that it was about trying to like, Provoke the imagination and kind of crack open your mind and make you think differently, which is such a central theme to that film.
So that's already made me think a little bit differently about that. So thank you. So we are on to this next stage where [00:12:00] usually Eleanor and I are like the hosts. We're sort of in control of what the episode looks like, but in honor of Laura's appearance, we are handing over all control and we're going to actually now go through one of your incredibly exciting artistic projects.
It's normally an installation called SKU Market. So Laura, take it away.
Laura: Right.
So normally this piece is staged in a gallery setting or a festival, something like that. And if you were to encounter it, you would see a mini market. It looks, it's blue.
It's got interesting packaging. There's 40 products on the shelves and the market says at SKU, we know you. So the promise as you approach, this is you find out how to get onto the web app to start shopping and it's an invitation for you to. See what SKU thinks of you. And the project is about the idea of these algorithms that, that start to build a social profile of us.
And we all have a digital social profile, [00:13:00] maybe many of them floating out there. We can never see them. We don't know what is in them, but we do know that we're servicing ads to us. They're in our feeds, in our scrolls. They're even sometimes. Pushing beyond there they're offering us different services or maybe they're qualifying us for our health insurance or our car insurance.
There's ways that these profiles are actually making real change potentially in your life and you might not be savvy about them. So I partnered with Dr. Jennifer Edmond, who's a professor of digital humanities at Trinity College, Dublin. And this was a residency project with Science Gallery Dublin's Bias exhibition.
So we were paired up in this kind of interesting residency program artists and researchers, and our project was to make this mini market. And to be able to profile all these different audience members and show them a peek behind the curtain of what would an algorithm really look like?
And can you see [00:14:00] your profile mirrored back to you? And so the whole idea is that as you're shopping the market, like what is going through your mind? Is this a moment of reflection for you? Are you making different choices knowing that an algorithm is going to profile you based on what you bought?
Because this is what's happening. It's very strange to think that like we are what we buy and that, that. Our purchasing decisions, let alone our media decisions, or our use of social media is also informing this. And it's this huge like surveillance capitalism apparatus that we can't ever get our minds around, I still can't, and even working on this project, what you probably did is I gave the, I gave them each a work around so that they could shop from home on this occasion. So we could see what their SKU market profiles are. And if you get onto the web app, it just very simple. You can buy five products and SKU will tell you who you are and you get a digital receipt at the end.
So maybe if. Eleanor and Kerry, if you both one of you wants to start and just [00:15:00] take us through your shopping process and what you bought, and then maybe we can read your profile and talk about it.
Eleanor: Sure. I'm really embarrassed by what it says about me and I don't think I actually really considered that what I bought would then turn into some kind of personal statement.
I think that's probably the same online. I actually, Kerry and I share an Amazon Prime account
Kerry: I did once look at Eleanor's purchases. I did once text her being like, that's a lot of candles. I'm not trying to be surveillant. I know that's weird, but I was like, do you really love candles?
I think you were in a candle phase because it was like outstanding number of candles.
Eleanor: She then sent me all these memes of Dracula surrounded by candles in the vampire den, and that's genuinely how I live. I've got like a variety of different candlesticks and stuff. And yeah, it's embarrassing.
Laura: You have your own personal surveillance capitalist here.
Eleanor: I do exactly right here. Yeah. And I like the [00:16:00] candles to be red. They have like the tall..., anyway, whatever. It's all really embarrassing. This is worse though. The five things I bought were bacon fries, sounds delicious, football jersey, quite into the like sports- core thing at the moment, an all in one non- stick pan, because they are the best. A cute cat subscription video, because I'm a cat mom, even though I don't have a cat. I spend all my time watching cat videos. And then brainpower dust because I never have enough of my own.
Laura: Let's hear who you are..
Eleanor: Your belief the power of aesthetics guides your decision making- I spend a lot of time buying stuff online. You are highly grumpy, somewhat passive aggressive, but also dramatic and ambitious. You have a low tolerance for pain, which you deal with using protein powder, relationship drama, and a no nonsense ponytail. You might also like predictability, lint rollers, and codependency.[00:17:00]
You remember the stresses of writing the perfect instant messenger away message. If it were possible to actually have 2. 4 children, you would be the person to do it. Kerry, what do you think? Highly grumpy, passive aggressive, dramatic, ambitious.
Kerry: This is very unflattering. I can just, I can safely say Eleanor is lovely.
I feel highly grumpy is a wonderful combination of words because I don't think of grumpy as something that you like fluctuated. I think of it as like a state grumpy. I feel like you're dramatic. I feel like you live the highs and lows of life. I don't feel like you're passive aggressive. Like I feel like you really own and experience your feelings, which is a beautiful thing. I don't know how that corresponds to bacon fries.
Laura: So maybe it helps to say that on the back of the installation, you're shopping on the front of it and you walk behind it and it's dark and shadowy, and this is like the underbelly of the SKU market operation. And our idea was to pull up this curtain on what's going on. So you, your question there about what is [00:18:00] causing this, right? What are the attributes associated with bacon fries that would determine that you're, you're I don't know, highly grumpy or passive aggressive or something like that, which we know that you aren't.
Um, So you can see each item coming on to the screen and it's showing your likes, your behaviors your interests, it's calculating and retabulating all of these in small data visualizations and every product that you buy, then refactors that profile for you. So they really are unique to each person.
It depends on what order you made your purchases in, it depends on the exact items. There's a lot of variables that come into play on how the profile is calculated. And I should say, this is, this is an artificial intelligence. We didn't have the funding or the time to actually build this giant apparatus, but what we did do is we built it more in line, like a relational database, so it does have many different options [00:19:00] and every profile is unique based on so many different factors.
But you can see this all sort of recalculating and then obviously your profile gets locked in the system forever and then that's it. You can never change it. You can never go back. And that's part of another point of conversation around. These things is. Would you like to have more control of this profile that was just written about you?
Did you even want to see it really? Do you really want to know what it says? What kind of psychoanalysis is this? It's really agnostic. It's based on your purchases, but a lot of these companies were, you know, like there was a running joke that I thought was really absurd, which was like a lot of these technology companies were claiming to know us better than we know ourselves.
And that's the central joke of this project. So that's bizarre.
Eleanor: I was going to say, it reminds me of three things. One is like Soviet era 'you bought the wrong soap at the supermarket and they've taken you in for questioning'. And then the second one is the Cambridge Analytica stuff, deciding whether people are going to vote in a certain direction and trying to [00:20:00] manipulate the way that people are voting, depending on what adverts they're seeing on social media.
And then also Kerry and I did a study of recruitment tools that claim to be able to identify your personality from looking at your face. And these tools, we debunked a number of ways. Firstly, I worked with some second year computer scientists at Cambridge that replicated one of these tools. And they showed that if you change the brightness, the lighting and the saturation of the image that changes your personality score.
And what we are trying to do is show that it's not an AI system looking at you and acting as some kind of lie detector test, an omniscient force. Instead, it's to do with the way that the data is labeled by people, and therefore it is the perception of personality that is automated.
Kerry: But before we go onto me quickly, actually, Eleanor, I was wondering, to what extent do you, did you look at your receipt and think Oh, this is, or isn't reflective of me.
And then [00:21:00] did you have second thoughts? Cause I looked at mine and was like, Oh, okay. And then I was like, But am I like this? And it definitely, it does affect, I think you psychologically whenever you do any of these silly like Buzzfeed quizzes that tell you which Disney character you are or anything else that you do start to retrofit your own characteristics and behaviors.
Eleanor: Oh yeah, strong horoscope vibes.
Laura: I think it's really fascinating to imagine, I don't know if you all notice this, but I hear people casually saying things like, 'my algorithm', , I can't believe what my algorithm showed me. This is common vernacular. This is part of the fabric of our everyday lives.
Or people, I know people who try and subvert them or that's a game that they play, that they are trying to upend what they're getting, or they wanna get strange things. They don't want the algorithm to know them. And some people do want the algorithm to know them because they love that idea of feeling seen or feeling catered to, and I think it's to each their own, but I think it's about questioning what it's serving [00:22:00] back to you and then exactly what you're asking, which is, how does that affect, that actually does affect me, that shapes me, that shapes my thinking, that shapes possibly what I'm doing, what I'm looking at, my behavior, I start to get a reinforcement of something in myself, it's really pervasive, and I think that should be challenged.
Eleanor: And you're right that there's so much humor that can be generated around this. I ended up on a North Korean propaganda Instagram page last night, and the comments underneath were so funny. People are hilarious, the way they're responding, ' this is what my algorithm brought me. What have I done?'
What does this say about me? Or, ' I listened to something, I had a breakup, listened to some really bad music for a week, and now I'm only getting this kind of rubbish on my Spotify'. It's a source of great amusement, I think, for people at the moment.
Laura: It gives me hope that people have found the levity in it, right?
Like we're savvy to it now. We're interested. We're like reclaiming it in some [00:23:00] interesting way.
Kerry: The German novel QualityLand cause this is exactly what your project reminded me of when I first was told about it by Eleanor. Which is, it's a novel. It was originally German, only translated to English, I think in 2020.
But it follows the travails of this man who living in this kind of like future world, where everything's dominated by a company I think called QualityLand but I haven't read it. So apologies if that's wrong, like an Amazon knockoff. And this man gets sent this pink dolphin shaped dildo by QualityLand because the whole thing about Quality Land is we anticipate your desires.
We send you what you want. And he gets sent this pink dolphin dildo and he's oh like, No, this is not me. This is not who I am. I don't want this dildo. And the whole story is just him trying to return this dildo with increasing levels of absurdity. And then I think the final part is he finally manages to return it and he goes home and the next day they've just sent him another dolphin dildo.
And so the story just starts all over again. So I was quite excited. Yeah, I think it's really relevant, but I was quite excited. I was like, is this going to be my quality land when I [00:24:00] do SKU market? My pink dolphin dildo equivalent?
Laura: Should we hear it?
Kerry: So the first one is I got the Hydrate and Glow Face Mask because as Eleanor knows, I love some skincare. Trainers because I'm a big investor footwear person. Houseplant, this is for my husband . We have so many plants in our house we actually can't physically but more, and then the next two are very self care-y, but my kind of self care is just also eating and drinking instead of doing exercise or being mindful.
So it was smoky sea salt chocolate and rosé wine. And so I got my list and then I was like, should I go back and change it so I sound more exciting? And then I was like, no, do it. with the spirit of the experiment. But again, that kind of like thinking about how is this going to affect my profile is very true to the art project and also true to the art project.
I'm also taking this interview while drinking kombucha from M&S. So I was like, I'm really not doing myself any favors on this shopping list.
Laura: Okay. So that's interesting. You did [00:25:00] start to debate your purchases. Did you replace anything in your cart? Because you can do that.
Kerry: I strongly considered adding in world building games. I also love like cozy gaming. And then I thought about doing that. But then I was like, no just accept that everything I like is stuff that you can eat and just do while sitting in a chair at home, which is reasonably accurate, to be fair. So I stuck with the list.
Laura: Yeah, in doing this project, there's another like meta layer to this, which is you can observe the different types of SKU shoppers, like people like you who are just like, I'm just going to shop and that's it.
And that's all I want to do with it. But then there's some people who get really interested into it and they keep, shuffling things in their cart. And so yeah, that tells me a little bit about how they're engaging with the content too, but I'm curious to hear yours.
Kerry: Yes, I also considered doing it multiple times and comparing them, but I was like, no, like they would over interfere.
So mine was, you sure know how to cultivate beauty in your surroundings. You are highly indulgent, somewhat chill, but also honorable and [00:26:00] smarmy. You have a weakness for wellness products, which you deal with using notions, deep empathy, and student loan debt. You might also like sheepskin strapped over chairs, escapism, and baths.
You don't care to be labeled and are comfortable with fluidity and constant change. You are a live in the moment, get what you want kind of person. Eleanor, how accurate is my SKU receipt?
Eleanor: How come hers is so nice and mine is so bad?. I think a lot of that stuff is very true. You are highly empathetic. Kerry's desk space at work is like the inside of a home. Thank you. And everyone else's is pretty blank. It's an office full of very serious philosophers. And then Kerry has like a mirror to practice different kinds of extraordinary eye shadow looks in the middle of the day, while she's also thinking about something extremely serious.
And then lots of different like posters. She's also hung stuff up on the wall, which I'm not necessarily sure is like legal within the office space, but she's so respected [00:27:00] by our boss that I guess she's allowed to do what she wants. So a lot of that, a lot of that does ring true.
Kerry: Oh, you picked out the very nice bits. But yes, no, I thought smarmy is such a distinctive word that I was like, Oh, if I don't like that, I see myself in that word. But I also appreciate the specificity of that diction. I was like, I do feel somewhat smarmy.
But yes, I thought Eleanor would laugh at it. Was that you're a live in the moment type of person. As Eleanor knows from when I send her an agenda for our very casual chats, I was like mm,
Laura: you do send an agenda?
Eleanor: I'm like, let's meet whenever we're free and each thing that we have to do together she sends me like particular meeting blocks.
Kerry: I send like a Google calendar link, but the calendar link is catch up in the first 10 minutes is like recap holidays.
Eleanor: I also have a friend who does the same thing so it's very much within my remit of organized friendship. So will you tell us a little bit more about what, yeah, Kerry,
Kerry: yeah, no, I was gonna say so I'd be really interested then what were people's responses like when you watch them in the installation? So you've mentioned that like one thing is that you saw people [00:28:00] engaging with it in very different ways, but like, did you think that it kind of prompted these reflections on like algorithmic behavior, algorithmic culture? Yeah. Like how, what do you think people carried away with them?
Laura: Yeah, I think it's similar to the experience that we just tried to simulate here.
A lot of friends were shopping the market together and would do this same interaction, which is you know me, is this really like me? Holding this mirror back up to themselves from someone they trusted in their lives. So I think, again, this is framed, you're entering into an exhibition that's about bias.
So you're already a bit primed to be looking at the works that are on display in that regard. So you're when people were shopping these same questions that we set up the project with people come to their own conclusions around like we they just walk into a gallery space and they see hopefully an appealing mini- market and they the thing says that it'll tell them who they are and that's an appealing thing to people like to be mirrored back to be shown this.
And as the project unfolds, and I'm sure you saw like, [00:29:00] you know, as you're shopping on the app, it's really about this process. And it's about to me, it's about having activity where you get to feed into the system and every audience member is given some level of agency. So then that lets each person approach the project in whatever way they want.
So we had people who actually designed the systems shopping SKU market, and then they would walk around the back and they go, yeah, pretty good. And I was like, that's disturbing, I guess that's the highest compliment, which is that we can't really know exactly all of the parameters that are being used to gauge these things.
And of course, we're, we're building this database with words like smarmy, with words like grumpy, with, with these things that we thought would hook people into thinking like, oh, that's a bizarre and specific thing. to know about me, and that's part of the comedy. That's the idea is to keep like serving back this thing that's so strange and absurd in order to get you to ask the questions like, does it have a profile on me? how many profiles on me exist? How are they making them? Wait. It's locked in the system? I would like to change it. I don't want this floating [00:30:00] around about me. I don't want this informing what I'm doing.
So I think those are the main questions that come up. And again, each person comes at it differently. That some people like perpetually shop. They shopped multiple times. They wanted to see how.. And that's them... that's exciting to me. That's not like the algorithm isn't working. The algorithm is the project's working.
So that means they wanted to see if they could figure out what it was doing. Can they buy something completely different and be someone else? Of course they can. That's the way that it works. So I think that's all part of what it means to make of an artwork like this. This is as far as it can go, right?
This is as far as it can do. Its work is to frame the questions. And it can invite you to participate in answering them for yourselves. And in some festivals and in some conditions, like there's a mediator there that can support you in that questioning, the hope is that in any audience member, anybody approaching this can be surfaced with those questions and at least walk away with some understanding that like, wow, [00:31:00] there is a whole system developing these profiles.
That's pretty big. Like a lot of people in the general public. hadn't even come around to that when this you know when this project first came out. So this was news to them. Which you know for people like us who study these things or who are interested and trying to learn about them that's not news.
But for some people it is and so you have to imagine the spectrum of people coming at these sorts of projects and people who were savvy were then picking it apart from a different perspective.
Eleanor: Getting people to ask the question is the first step, and it's also something that needs to be done iteratively. So this is just the most important thing that you could do. And getting people to access the right questions via humor is really priceless. So thank you so much for your work and for coming on today to speak about it with us.
Laura: Oh, it was an absolute pleasure. Love speaking with you. Looking forward to more.
Eleanor: This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gaw and [00:32:00] the Mercator Foundation. It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.
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