I Am Not Done Yet: Can technology heal solitude?
24 hours inSIDE A LIFE RULED BY algorithms
During the first lockdown, I experienced solitude like never before. I was alone, and my only companions were algorithms: Instagram stories, tweets and YouTube videos, weight-loss apps and workout programmes with virtual assistants. Digital technology ended up shaping my day-to-day routine: setting good habits; eating healthy and training; providing suggestions for my “free time”. My day was structured as a continuum of scheduled actions.
I found this helpful at first. The absence of my friends and colleagues was eased by their virtual presence on Zoom, MSTeams, Facebook, and other social networks. Plus, everything I needed was online: food, books, movies, videos. I didn’t have a reason to leave the house.
But the fact that I was only able to access these relationships in their mediated form eventually made me uneasy. I realised that everything I did was either filtered, accompanied or decided by an algorithm — even which friend I would reach out to that day would depend on which profile popped up first on my socials. I felt more and more dehumanised, almost as if I were slowly turning into a digital cyborg. Was I able to work out without an app telling me what to do? On my own, I lacked the motivation. What if I did not take my medicines as scheduled on my health-tracker? What am I without an app? What am I without a phone? Do I exist?
To respond to this stress, I developed “You Are Not Done Yet”, with the help of the sound designer Alessio Festuccia and the funding from The Box Arts Center (Plymouth).
In between paradoxes of conscious AI, voice synthesis and listening theory, as well as political issues of control and capitalist consumerism, I wrote a brief monologue for synthetic voice, presented in a video format. The lines were taken from YouTube videos, Amazon offers, YouTube and Spotify adverts, and social media posts that I’ve come across during the lockdown.
“You Are Not Done Yet” mixes a silent human figure following a synthetic voice. The voice represents all the algorithmic voices and inputs that have been haunting me during the lockdown, a voice that enhances the feeling of an overwhelming abundance of networked actions, compared to the constant feeling of lack of time and need of control that I was experiencing.
With this project, I wanted to address solitude and mental health in the context of the technological advancements and bombardment of digital algorithms we are subjected to on a daily basis.
With technology, I tried to heal my solitude and un-see the bad news, cancel the fears, and distract myself from thinking about the state of uncertainty which the pandemic brought upon us. Eventually, it only worsened them. The video tries to explore this feeling, the idea of being alone and overwhelmed by the algorithmic presence of your virtual self and your planned existence, stretching the feeling of ‘not being done yet’, that you need always something to focus on or work on in order to exist. What if you do not want to?
