Inspired by several texts on the interactions between humans and machines—such as Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self” or Luciano Floridi’s “The Onlife Manifesto”—Irma Marco’s work asks a naïve but complex question: “Are Smart Machines Alive?” She initiates a dialogue between the virtual assistants Cortana (Microsoft) and Siri (Apple) by inserting questions raised by these texts, and by playing with the misunderstandings and failed translations that occur as the programs aim to process and reply to the data they receive.

Marco stages this exchange using a deliberately cheap and low-fi aesthetic that is reminiscent of late night TV fortune tellers, and which playfully contradicts the sleek design of the devices and the promised flawless performance of the software. As the piece runs, the dialogue progressively turns into a cacophony as the synthetic voices deliver increasingly incoherent sentences, incorrectly interpreted by a speech-to-text software. Text fills the screen and then turns into an indecipherable string of letters and symbols, which is actually IZZZJ, a coded language invented by the artist. Marco carries out this experiment in order to underscore the flaws and limitations of a technology that has made us question what it is to be human.