The Algorithmic Stranger

From Social Media to Strangers

I have been talking to strangers for a long time.

But before my art project Triptych Dialogue started talking to strangers face-to-face, I was talking to people through a screen.

I was making a 365 day art experiment exploring political polarization using Instagram.

This project, Views from the Cave was partly an experiment with social media. I was interested in what happens when an image or an idea enters a place where we don't really know who is going to see it, or why it is going to appear in front of them.

The algorithm has its own way of deciding what becomes visible and I was shaddow banned regularly by Meta.

I found that interesting.

What do we see?

What don't we see?

And how much of what we think we are choosing is actually being chosen for us?

I didn't know where those questions were going.

So I kept making things.

Then I started making videos.

YouTube changed the experience again. I could speak. People could hear my voice. I could make a video, put it out there, and see what happened.

But eventually I wanted to get away from the screen, I had seen how divisive that ecosystem could be as well as manipulative. I documented these experiences and found that I need to face real people face to face.

I wanted to find people.

Not followers.

Not viewers.

People.

From the Screen to Face-to-Face Conversation

I had spent much of my life traveling the world, fascinated by nature and its many expressions. Art venues were on the journeys. I knew they were mostly distinct environments. Distinct from all the rest. Their experience concealed, compartimentalised.

I started thinking about all the people who would probably never walk into these art spaces.

What if I brought the artwork to them instead? The "rest" is a vast environment to explore.

What if I put something in a public place and simply waited to see what happened?

And what if I asked them about something that had become increasingly difficult for people to talk about?

Politics.

That became another experiment.

I began approaching strangers.

People I had never met.

People whose political beliefs I didn't know.

People I couldn't reduce to a profile or a photograph.

I asked them three political questions.

The questions stayed the same.

The people didn't.

That became the core of my long standing art project Triptych Dialogue.

I wasn't trying to prove a political point.

I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. Although in retrospect I think I was.

Curious I was.

What would people say?

What would I hear?

What would happen if I simply gave someone the opportunity to talk?

And what would happen to me if I actually listened?

I didn't know.

That's why I was doing it.

What happens When You Talk with a Stranger?

There is something strange about approaching a stranger.

You don't know what is going to happen.

You don't know what they believe.

You don't know what they have experienced.

You don't know whether they will stop.

And you certainly don't know what they are going to say.

That uncertainty is part of what attracted me to it.

I think artists are supposed to be comfortable with not knowing.

At least I am.

I make something because I want to find something out.

Sometimes the artwork is the question.

Sometimes the artwork is the experiment.

Sometimes I don't know what the artwork is until somebody else encounters it.

That was happening with Triptych Dialogue.

The people I approached weren't just subjects.

They were becoming part of the work.

They answered the questions.

They gave me their words.

Eventually they gave me one word that could stand for their answers.

A Word-Title.

Their word became part of the artwork.

So I began to wonder:

Who was actually making the art?

Was it me?

Was it them?

Was it the conversation?

Maybe it was all three.

The Six Sense and the Triptych Dialogue Experiment

There were eventually hundreds of conversations.

The installation phase that became the core of the project included 324 attributed interviews.

There was a structure hiding inside those conversations.

Six explorations of six senses.

Sight.

Hearing.

Touch.

Smell.

Taste.

And then something that interested me even more:

the mind.

The sixth sense.

I encountered the idea in Buddhist thought—the mind as a faculty that encounters thoughts, memories, ideas and perceptions.

I liked that.

Not because I suddenly became an expert in Buddhism.

I didn't.

It simply gave me another way to think about what I was doing.

We see something.

We hear something.

We experience something.

And then the mind gets involved.

It interprets.

It remembers.

It connects things.

It gives things meaning.

Two people can experience the same thing and somehow come away with two completely different realities.

I've wondered about that a lot.

Maybe that is where the real difficulty begins.

Not with what we see.

But with what we do with what we see.

The Algorithmic Stranger

And then came another stranger.

An algorithmic stranger.

AI.

I find that rather funny.

I have spent years making an art project about people talking to one another.

And now I am talking to a machine.

It has never met me.

It wasn't there when I approached someone an art installation in a National Park.

It didn't see the person's face.

It didn't hear the hesitation before they answered.

It didn't experience the silence afterward.

It wasn't surprised.

But it has encountered a lot of my words.

Podcast transcripts.

Interviews.

Videos.

Writing.

Website material.

Descriptions of my artwork.

Things I've said publicly over the years.

Fragments of my voice scattered across the internet.

I have also started using AI to help me write these articles.

That sentence still feels strange to me.

I made a point of keeping Triptych Dialogue separate from AI. The project was about people. Face-to-face encounters. Real voices. Real pauses. Real uncertainty.

And now I am asking a machine to help me make sense of what I have spent years making.

Not to invent the experience.

The experience already happened.

Not to give me a voice.

I already have one.

I am giving it my words and asking it to help me find connections between them.

The podcasts.

The interviews.

The videos.

The notebooks.

The artwork.

The things I've written and said over the years.

In a way, I am doing with AI something very similar to what I did with the strangers.

I am giving it questions.

And then I am listening to what comes back.

Which creates a strange new problem.

If I am using a machine to help me write about an experiment in human listening, who is listening to whom?

That makes me also wonder.

Can an algorithm know your voice without knowing you?

What is lost when human experience becomes data?

What happens when AI becomes part of the art?

I don't know.

Maybe that's the interesting part.

The Difference Between an Algorithm and a Stranger

The algorithmic stranger is very different from the human stranger.

The algorithm knows things about me because I have left traces of myself behind.

The human stranger knows nothing about me.

At least at first.

And yet the human stranger can surprise me in a way an algorithm cannot.

I can ask a person a question and have absolutely no idea what is coming next.

That's what I like about strangers.

They haven't been selected for me.

They haven't been filtered because they agree with me.

They haven't been reduced to a collection of things I already know.

They're just there.

A person.

In front of me.

And I have to listen.

Why I Started Triptych Dialogue

I don't think I started Triptych Dialogue because I had figured anything out.

I think I started it because I hadn't.

I was interested in the cocoon we live in.

The point of view we carry around with us.

The things we see over and over again.

The people we listen to because they sound like us.

The people we don't listen to because they don't.

I wondered what would happen if I stepped outside of that.

So I did.

I walked up to strangers.

I asked questions.

I listened.

Then I made art from what happened.

And I kept wondering.

Maybe that's all that art really is.

You don't begin with the answer.

You begin with something you can't stop wondering about.

From Algorithms Back to Human Connection

The Algorithmic Stranger is just another part of that journey.

Instagram.

YouTube.

People.

Podcasts.

AI.

Different ways of speaking.

Different ways of listening.

Different ways of being separated from one another.

And different possibilities for connection.

But the more I experiment with screens and algorithms and machines, the more interested I become in something remarkably low-tech.

A person standing in front of another person.

A question.

A pause.

An answer.

And the possibility that neither person knows what is going to happen next.

Maybe that's enough.

Maybe we don't need to agree.

Maybe we don't even need to understand everything.

Maybe we could start by becoming curious.

I don't know.

I'm still experimenting.

But I keep coming back to the same question:

What might happen if we stopped talking about strangers and started talking with them?