Artist Statement

Custom IVR Call Centre Software and Hardware (2013)

The Ostrich Effect is built using commercial automated call-centre servers, customising their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) programs to broadcast and handle telephone campaigns while programming individual call centre systems to dial and trigger each other. The work is a generative installation that explores the recursive loops that might occur in a hypothetical scenario. The computer-based conversation will never be resolved and continuously re-attempted. This installation focuses on the commercial and social power of these systems. Away from potential domestic customers, it instead explores the limited, comic, frustrating and, at times, sinister, permutations of these interactions.

• David Cotterrell is an installation artist working across media and technologies. Cotterrell works to develop projects that can embrace the quiet spaces that are the sites for action, which might (or might not) be clearly understood in the future. Cotterrell’s work has been commissioned and shown extensively in Europe, the United States and Asia in gallery spaces, museums and within the public realm. He is Professor of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and is represented by Danielle Arnaud. He lives and works in London, UK.

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