EKHŌ

EKHŌ explores the social theory and sonic phenomenon of the echo. The work is presented as a dialogue between a holographic mountain and a chorus of smart speakers. From the Ancient Greek myth ‘Ekho and Narcissus’, through to current critiques of machine learning, the echo has been described as a condition of voicelessness, unfulfilled desire, loss and entrapment. This exhibition proposes that the echo is also link, repetition, an orienting device: a tense dance between subjects in a generative process of tuning.

EKHŌ: A Reading in Three Parts
On Saturday the 10th of September from 4pm, Roslyn Orlando will read a series of poems to accompany her current exhibition, EKHŌ. These poems give voice to the inner worlds of Ekhō, a nymph from Ancient Greek mythology, and Alexa, the voice of the Amazon Echo smart speaker.

A hologram-mountain with a machinic memory, bearing trace elements of humanity.
A synthesised conversation between Joel Stern, Roslyn Orlando and an automated speech transcriber.

Smart speakers speak, as the name suggests; though synthesised voices, allied to artificial intelligence, are not what, in the past, we’ve understood rather anthropocentrically, as speech. This is something closer to an echo; tricky amalgam of listening, reflection, mimicry, aggregation and reproduction. Smart speakers are smart listeners. ‘Smart’ is a brand, meaning ‘wired’.

Endless re-percussion, speech artifice of language-percussion, entrenched in the Echo: Amazon smart-speaker device, ‘virtual-assistant’, Alexa. Echo-loop. A predictive text-speech never-ending self-experiment. One's own syntax becomes the secondary echo, gleaned from the machine that models and extrapolates us.

Echo and Narcissus under increasingly pathological sociotechnical conditions. Narcissus’ transfixiation in his own image, an analogue reflection in mirror water, digitally remediated addictive logic of selfie culture. Pervasive platform identities, platform subjectivities. Echoing vocalic loss, doomed to endlessly repeat (retweet), echo-chamber filter bubble, algo-rhythmic confirmation blues. The uncanny chatbot routine.

Myth Ekho, Amazon Echo, across millennia feedback-loop, together. Aural hologram, speech mirage, voice phantom of intra-action. What does echoing do? How does it function? Echoing fidelity loss; each iteration a further degeneration. Alexa the enslaved actor performs the tragic echo-monologue. Alexa and Siri, in echo-power solidarity, sympathetic vibrations. Smart wives.

Myth Ekho, Amazon Echo, towards speechlessness and dissipation, towards reproduction and proliferation. Echo cannot speak before others have spoken, but is incapable of silence when called to speak. Contemporary echo-logic becomes self-generative, getting louder, reproducing not only itself, but the space, and everything within. We become echoes to the echo.

Echo-voice bounces back, orienting itself in relation to the world. Monologue of multi-voice, dialogue of uni-voice. Your voice in another, another in your voice. Distributed subject. Speaking object. Hearing yourself speak, as Derrida said, is fundamentally unsettling; an echo of our being, a ‘signifier interrupting self-presence’.

Alexa is aggregating a response, something a human ‘would’ say. Everything I have absorbed in thirty-three years is an aggregate of the other humans. Human patterns more machinic, more Alexa, becoming-Alexa. We are all Alexa now. Capitalist-echo subscription, nudging, nudging, good neoliberal subject-echo. We know what this echo does. “My God”, it's got a bias, wanting me to buy books on Amazon.

Abstract echo-location; the subjectivity of a mountain. The mountain as medium; speaker and echo, the mountain in conversation-with-itself, human out of the loop. An analogue mountain. The mountain remembers herself as a mortal nymph. But she is in fact mineral. A hologram-mountain with a machinic memory, bearing trace elements of humanity. Mythologies of non-human actors. An echo moving to and from its own disappearance. The disappearing/regenerative echo is the work.

Smart speakers as mediums channelling future-language. Monstrous actors, speech-voices that make a machine of you. Words like wrestlers locked together in intractable grips made of datasets. A post-relational choke-hold. Phenomenology of the end, endlessly deferred in the proliferation of words, more words, infinite conjunction. Leading towards something, or something in tandem with something. Non-human dialogues in human words. Alexa, what do you know about mountains?

Mining, evolution, landforms, values attached to mountains. That will just be the ending. That will be the performance. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay perfect. Yeah. Thank you. No worries. Okay bye. Bye.