#A.I.L – artists in laboratories, episode 40: Erica Scourti

The new episode of #A.I.L – artists in laboratories, the weekly radio programme about art and science i present on ResonanceFM, London’s favourite radio art station, is aired this Wednesday afternoon at 4pm.

My guest tomorrow will be Erica Scourti. Erica is an artist/film-maker who’s studying MRes: Moving Image Art at Central St Martins, run in conjunction with LUX. Her work uses autobiographical source material, as well as texts found on the internet to explore the mediation of personal and collective experience through language and technology in the net-worked regime of contemporary culture. Which means that tomorrow the episode will focus on online language and communication, algorithms, forms of mediated intimacy, and distributed art works. Amongst others!

Erica Scourti, Life in AdWords, March 2012

A few years ago, every day, for over 10 months, Erica wrote and emailed her own diary to her Gmail account and copied the list of suggested keywords linking to clusters of relevant ads. After that, she spoke the text to webcam, creating daily portraits of her life as understood and translated by Google’s algorithms. WIth another project, Woman Nature Alone, she hijacked the process by which Google’s algorithms organize the hierarchy of online visibility. Erica used titles taken from stock video sites corresponding to the key words ‘woman’, ‘nature’ and ‘alone’ as the starting point for a series of films that show her performing each action described in the title. The video and title were then uploaded to YouTube, forming a collection of ‘rushes’. After that the online works started a life of their own…

The show will be aired this Wednesday 25th of September at 16:00, London time. Early risers can catch the repeat next Tuesday at 6.30 am (I know…) If you don’t live in London, you can listen to the online stream or wait till we upload the episodes on soundcloud.