Newly Forgotten Technologies: Place Echoes

..In Newly Forgotten Technologies: Place Echoes, five sound sculptures are installed atdifferent points across the LUGA sites in Luxembourg. These sculptures are formedfrom mounds of dirt scattered with discarded ‘smart’ technologies such as brokensmartphones and iPads, simulating a tiny outcropping of e-waste landscape juttingout of the city. Each mound is topped with a hacked Amazon Echo smart speaker,featuring a reprogrammed Alexa voice assistant.Each speaker’s Alexa voice assistant tells stories to the passers-by; the stories areworks of speculative fiction that ‘reveal the invisible’ behind the monolithic surface ofthe Amazon Echo – from AI content moderators in Kenya, to assembly plant workersin Taiwan, silicon miners in Brazil, and Amazon distribution center workers in Ireland,the stories expose the hidden parts of the lifespan of these devices and theirparticular relationships to global systems of extraction, consumption, and waste, andthe myths of AI that weave between them. Each hacked Echo reads dozens of thesestories across the day, each one a work of speculative fiction about the past, present,and future of our civilisation’s relationship between technology and the planet.