Voicing conflict: art project contributed to the Aqua Granda collective memory exhibition

This artistic project aims to help build up a collective memory of the Acqua Granda by sounding out in the streets the plethora of partisan online voices, from different sources, in different languages, as actual spoken words. The project thereby starts from a collection of online discussion data - comments, tweets, posts on reddit, etc. - that were mined and analysed using tools from the ODYCCEUS/Penelope ecosystem. Statements on topics that cross debate spheres - such as places in the city, or more abstract concepts such as ‘value’ or ‘heritage’ - will be brought together into an audiostream, where the viewpoints from each of the involved parties are read in a different voice (or language) by means of text-to-speech and automatic translation technologies. Visitors of the exhibition can thus use their smartphones to pan around and mix the different, often conflicting streams of discourse presented at a specific location in the city, and actually experience the antagonistic voices that would otherwise remain locked away in a textual archive marked by technical and linguistic barriers.