Erica Scourti (1980, Athens) is an Athens-born, London-based artist focusing on video art and, increasingly, on Internet-centered artwork. Her work gradually transformed from traditional video works suitable for a gallery or film festival to more interactive and mediated pieces that have found not only their ideal distribution method but their very DNA online, mining both the nature of the Internet and how it commodifies and mediates our lives. Her work has been exhibited throughout the world, especially in Europe. She is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in Goldsmiths’ (University of London) Art Department and is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Central St Martins, London.
Exit Scripts
video and sound installation, 2021
Accessible via makeshift walls of privacy film, collages, fabrics, and color-changing lights, Exit Scripts is a video installation featuring a central projection that scrolls through automatic transcriptions of voice memos, which the artist spoke into her phone over a period of 18 months. Stemming from an experimental approach to self-therapy and from a critical awareness of the use of voice recordings in surveillance, the transcriptions are ordered according to arousal, as detected by a custom-designed algorithm that scours for “emotional valence” (indicated by tone and intensity of voice). The lights surrounding the projection respond to mood categories across a spectrum from “negative” to “positive”. Another layer of code modulates the volume of the voice in the video’s soundtrack, in proportion to the “intensity” of mood detected. Exit Scripts draws on diaristic traditions, while disrupting the confessional intimacy associated with autobiography and live narration. The piece also questions whether even the most sophisticated technologies could ever analyze a person in an objectively measurable way, and asks where the line between diagnostic tools, self-monitoring and surveillance lies.