The Light Lab has fabricated a new interactive art installation called ‘City Speaks’ by the artist Michael Pinsky. Set in the Hull Tidal Barrier, the installation was commissioned as part of the ‘Look Up’ art programme for Hull 2017 City of Culture.
Hull 2017 interviewed artist Pinsky on the process and meaning behind the installation – read in full here.
“The City Speaks works by using state-of-the-art Google speech-to-text technology. Your speech is picked up by a microphone inside a plinth on Humber Dock Street, which faces the tidal barrier at the opposite end of Humber Street. In almost in real time, your recording gets sent to a cloud with ‘masses of computer power’, then a combination of word recognition and grammar prediction allows your words to be projected onto the barrier.”
All photography by Thomas Arran
