Abstract
In please wait with me, Stuart Andrews collaborates with scientists Ian Gibson and Chris Newell on an installation based around a retro-telephone connected to a simulated international call centre. The voices and sounds experienced by participants are generated in real time using a mixture of speech synthesizers and midi sensors within the telephone. The project responds to Mashiro Mori’s notion of the ‘uncanny valley’ in which participant satisfaction of anthropomorphic beings collapses when the anthropomorphism is excessively literal. By unsettling the drive to anthropomorphism and to realism, the project reveals new opportunities for meaning and experience. Two versions of the ‘conversation’ alternate, which tests participant reactions to specific treatments of a synthetic voice. Data is gathered, both the duration of participant’s engagement with these treatments but also the participant’s spoken responses: thoughts and ideas that are told only to a synthetic voice. The project creates an environment in which to question perceptions of technology, the assumptions of call centre culture and the (de)stabilisation of place and individual identity.