Create sound sculptures from discarded Amazon Echo devices, to tell new stories about the relationships between humans and AI

In this workshop from sound artist and researcher Wesley Goatley, you will create sound sculptures from discarded Amazon Echo devices to tell new stories about the relationships between humans and AI.

You’ll first be introduced to the Amazon Echo as a critical object; one that reflects the hopes, dreams, and exploitations of AI tech companies while being a totem for discussions around extractive capitalism, critical futures, and civilisation-scale myth-making.

Wesley will then introduce the basic principles behind his own work of re-purposing broken and discarded Amazon Echoes with new Alexa speech and audio. You’ll have a practical introduction to sound editing and composing for the Echo, as well as how to generate custom Alexa voices to create compositions of both music and speech for the Echo. You will have the opportunity to upload these new compositions directly to hacked Amazon Echo devices which will be provided.