A lament for what we give over to the bots. A mourning poem for the late capitalist hell that makes even the worst of us valuable. A cringe tour of the digital graveyard we make day by day. A sweet little drown in the doom scroll. A comedic monologue starring you and only you. All you need to hand over is your handle. All you will leave with is the OMG echo.
(Weiland, Bush, Lim and Mikho. Scrape Elegy. 2022. Science Gallery, Melbourne.)
Scrape Elegy is a mourning poem for the facets of ourselves that we share on social media. The work is a large physical installation with an algorithm that consensually scrapes visitors’ Instagram captions and synthesizes the text into audio. The installation is a large, circular, non-functioning pink public toilet — a small escape from the gallery, where visitors have a private experience. While sitting on the toilet, a speaker plays a six-minute audio journey, with human and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated voices reading predetermined captions interspersed with the visitor’s own Instagram captions. The toilet, with its multiplicity, becomes cognitive. It is intimate; the toilet reads back your own online life, but this is created specifically for the visitor to experience their own data in a familiar, private setting. Yet the work is a performance, and the visitor is the main character and core contributor. As Michel Maffesoli wrote in The Ethics of Aesthetics, in 1991, the world of postmodern art is built on the banal, in which all experiences can be considered art (Maffesoli 1991: 8).
Scrape Elegy was shown as part of the Science Gallery’s 2022 exhibition ‘SWARM’ in Melbourne, Australia. The collaborative team comprises Willoh Weiland, Gabby Bush, Misha Mikho, and Monica Lim, with Lauren Steller (design), Sullivan Patten (voice), and Will Loft (fabrication). The work was run out of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE), in collaboration with the Science Gallery at the University of Melbourne.
In its call for submissions, the Science Gallery posed the question ‘What does it mean to belong to a swarm?’ For the proposal, the team focused on the idea of a digital swarm — the data we create ourselves, looking specifically at social media. We posed the research question:
'How can we use art to reframe social media as a lens through which to experience our own digital swarm?'
To explore the research question, we played with the aesthetics of banality and everyday participation and performance, using visitors as key players in the research enquiry. The creative-led research resulted in the creation of a work that not only focused on our own experience of social media, but also used an installation to demonstrate our research and the collective experience of a swarm.
In this article, we will discuss the exploration of this question within an arts-based practice methodology, using the creation of Scrape Elegy as our fieldwork. The research draws on the cross-disciplinary study of art, sound, and the field of AI ethics. Scrape Elegy is a subversive commentary on one’s social media presence; it invokes the aesthetics of the everyday by blurring the line between life and art (Yuriko 2021). What we post on social media can be many things — daily updates, life events, pictures of food, documentation of travels, jobs, and ways to connect with our communities. With the many lenses and experiences we can have on social media, it has become, for many, part of the banal and everyday, but it can be reframed by or transformed into artistic experience. Scrape Elegy aims to conduct a reimagining of our social media presence, a new look at our swarm and its role in our lives.