Eavesdropping — Jackson Kerbs Design Portfolio

SPECULATIVE PRODUCT / 2020
From sonics studio.

A walk through a city produces organic hums and chirps, metallic bangs and twists, barks, sneers, and charm. When one takes a closer look at this sound an opportunity arises to filter disturbances and focus the intake to a personalized oscillation of curiosity.

When one catches themselves listening in to a private conversation broadcast into the public, what implications come with eavesdropping? Where do standards of privacy enter the public square?

The proximity of enclosed transit will eventually present the listener with another’s private details. A phone call to home, the closing of a business deal, hopeless sobs of someone with nowhere to go.

The vulnerability of these sounds display motivations and hopes of people unable to cull their grief into a socially accepted public display. What if these displays were extracted as data.

Spatial visualization of train ride. Frequencies are display radially using MaxMSP

The vulnerability of these sounds display motivations and hopes of people unable to cull their grief into a socially accepted public display. What if these displays were collected and leveraged as intel?

The system listens in on the plaza, train station, or public park and conveys the citizens’ conversations to the those in power. Disguised as noise canceling headphones, the inverse tones are recorded, analyzed and archived in the monitoring room.

Socially Listening is explored here by further diagramming an opportunity for audio recording in a consumer product. The information and knowledge power acquired is not unsimilar to that of our personal assistants and smart speakers. Would one willingly broadcast their environment for the comfort of silence?

Athanasius Kircher - Statua citofonica.

“the statue will be able to speak continuously, uttering in either a human or animal voice: it will laugh or sneer; it will seem to really cry or moan; sometimes with great astonishment it will strongly blow. If the opening of the spiral-shaped tube is located in correspondence to an open public space, all human words pronounced, focused in the conduit, would be replayed through the mouth of the statue: if it is a dogs bark, the statue will bark, if someone sings, the statue will answer with singing and so on.”

Proc. Mtgs. Acoust.4, 015002 (2008); doi: 10.1121/1.2992053

Anatomy of an AI system : Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. - Novi Sad :Share foundation, 2018 (Novi Sad : Magyar Szo)

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A walk through a city produces organic hums and chirps, metallic bangs and twists, barks, sneers, and charm. When one takes a closer look at this sound an opportunity arises to filter disturbances and focus the intake to a personalized oscillation of curiosity.

The vulnerability of these sounds display motivations and hopes of people unable to cull their grief into a socially accepted public display. What if these displays were collected and leveraged as intel?

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