Not I

AMRO Showcase by: Murad Khan, Martin Disley

@afo - basement

Not I is an essay film and multichannel installation that explores the problematics of contemporary vocal profiling technology. It challenges the impulse to apply statistical learning techniques to polymorphous features of human expression for the purpose of speculative reconstruction exhibited in data science.

Building upon the work of scholars across sound studies and vocal studies, Not I troubles the assumptions behind attempts to distill the relationship of voice and identity to a one-to-one mapping.

The film centres on an investigation into, and attack on, Speech2Face, a machine learning model which attempts to generate an image of the face of a speaker based solely on a recording of their voice. We leverage the affective qualities of moving image work to present this investigation as a form of experiential critique, forcing the viewer into an affective scenario that unsettles their existing heuristics used to infer speaker identity from vocal perception.