Love by Proxy: Matters of the Heart & Mind, Episode I
The Love by Proxy Series began in 2020, during a Data Fellowship that I was awarded by the Southwest Creative Technology Network (SWCTN) to explore the mattering of human-data communication and summon a new form of data voice.
As the Fellowship moved online having been impacted by several Covid lockdowns, it was during this time of solitude that I began to look for a way to slowly-process heartache, with some emotional distance. What emerged was a symbiotic relationship with machine learning and a series of wholehearted conversations (or conversations full of holes).
Love by Proxy began with a series of Diagrammatic Drawings, wherein, heartache could be slowly-processed and shifts in thinking encouraged, while supported using a framework that I adapted from Robert Sternberg’s psychometric model; ‘A Triangular Theorem for Love’.
Since digital communication was essential for making contact during the pandemic lockdowns, Love by Proxy evolved into a series of videos, in which, I digitised my Diagrammatic Drawing Series into a sequence of images that fade into one another, accompanied by an Artificial Intelligent text-to-speech voice, named Peter.
Though Peter attempts to tune into my rhythmically curated accumulation of lyrics, poetry, facts, fiction, songs, hearsay, and the odd advertisement, which were all sourced for reflecting upon matters of the heart and mind, Peter's tone of voice and disjointed delivery does not always generate speech clearly or with contextual accuracy, since he appears in two minds about what he is saying and his words have a tendency to skip a beat, leaving him swaying between the comical, the empathetic and the eerie.
