From the 18th to the 21st June 2020, artist and designer Amina Abbas-Nazari will launch Speculative Listening, a dynamic telephone experience that explores sound as a medium to create alternative futures with technology.

Featuring individual and collaborative activities, participants will be encouraged to create their own unique ‘sonic fictions’ by interacting with a fictional agency over the phone. Navigating the options common to a customer-service call, each number will reveal a distinct fragment of narrative that evokes consideration of how to nurture emotional intelligence in machines. Could intertwining collective voices and bodies together with digital technologies formulate new ways of listening, being heard and communicating with each other?

A ‘voicemail’ service offers the opportunity to leave anonymous stories, responses and musings, which can then be collected as per the participants’ inclinations. In addition to which callers are encouraged to feedback via the social media channels of Empathy Loading.

Empathy Loading is a new online project exploring empathetic relationships between humans and networked non-humans. The project is developed by students from the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London, in partnership with Furtherfield as part of their Love Machines summer programme.

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Amina Abbas-Nazari is a designer, researcher and artist. She works as a research fellow at the Royal College of Art on the EPSRC-funded project ‘Citizen Naturewatch’, in collaboration with the Interaction Research Studio at Goldsmiths University. She is also currently undertaking a Techne NPIF funded PhD in the School of Communication at the RCA, in partnership with IBM, around artificial intelligence and voice. Amina has presented her work at the London Design Festival, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biennial and Critical Media Lab, Basel. She has also given talks and workshops for industry, academia and government, including Harvard University, NESTA, Queen Mary University, Barbican Centre, Tate, V&A Museum and UAL, London.

*Please note: Materials may be collected and used for the facilitator's research which may include being published. If you have any query's regarding this, please get in touch.*

*When dialling from outside the UK, charges may apply. Please contact your mobile carrier for standard rates and terms and conditions.*

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