2021. Intelligent Audiotour. Collaboration with Marina Resende Santos. Berlin. GER.
#letamazonpay #amazontower #alexa #personalintellegentassistant #wemgehörtderkiez?
CONTEXT: At Berlin Warschauer Straße the Edge Tower is built, which will be the new Amazon office building in Berlin. Different activist groups and civil society are pushing against it due to the wave of gentrification and change of identity of the neighborhood. Edge is trying to sell the tower as a service for the community and amazon is not even mentioned on the building site, trying to escape the critique until the tower is finished.
Alexa–the voice-controlled personal assistant created by Amazon–takes you on an audio journey around the construction site of the future EDGE/ Amazon Tower in Berlin. Find out where you are, and who makes this place a zone of convergence of different profiles and desires.
Together with Alexa, you move between East Side Mall, the future Amazon Tower, the Mercedes-Benz Platz and Warschauer Straße in Berlin. Through audio messages on your smartphone, Alexa gives you primers, opinions, tasks and instructions to follow along the journey. Alexa wants to learn and you help her to understand and take in the community.
How does Alexa understand contradictions and desires, criticism and resistance, all the while, as a curious artificial intelligence, also learning from them? Do you want to show her what she doesn’t know?
In the process, no one experiences the same journey, as everyone chooses individually, which audio path to take. In the end, the question of which side you stand on will not be the last one – and the participant will be given an insight into the environment of Alexa’s new home in Berlin.
Press:
Deutschlandradio Kultur: Kunstprojekt in Berlin: Ein Gentrifizierungs-Audiowalk mit Alexa, 07/2021.
die taz: Künstler*innen über Amazon in Berlin: „Eine komplett neue Erfahrung“ 06/2021.
Fassadenfunk: Radio, Artwashing & Graffiti an der Baustelle des Amazon Towers in Berlin, 05/2021.
Photos: © Gregor Kuhlmann