Artists Statement

Collaborating with: Arts & Creativity Lab

Appropriate Response is a generative audio installation that creates an ongoing, dynamic conversation between three modified television sets. Using sound clips harvested from local broadcast media, the televisions will act as individuals engaged in an evolving topical debate. Each individual will share a basic set of rules on how to proceed and a ‘cultural database’ from which to derive responses while also developing a ‘personality’ that will guide specific choices. The sound-archive that the installation draws from will evolve over the course of the exhibition, allowing new information to be gathered and old information to be ‘forgotten’.

Inspired by the proliferation of media in our information-saturated world, the artwork comments on a cut-and-paste ethic that has arisen in contemporary discourse.  It often seems a ‘logic of selection’ is employed in which the juxtaposition of existing information fragments has become an accepted form of constructing an argument, without the need for synthesis or a cumulative rationale.  Can it be appropriate to simply appropriate a response? zachpoff.com/artwork/appropriate-response

• Zach Poff & N.B. Aldrich (USA) have been collaborating for the past five years creating audio, video, performance and installation work primarily in the areas of media and New Media. Their work has been shown at such venues as Artists Space, Art Interactive, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Bates College Museum of Art, the Polli Talu Arts Center.  zachpoff.com  nbaldrich.com

The artists would like to thank Dr. Li Haizhou from the I²R, Human Language Technology Department and Joseph Moore