Artificial Stupidity: decoding, protests, and the pandemic

Abstract

This paper presents an art and technology experimental project entitled Artificial Stupidity. The project aims to explore alternative ways of understanding the global pandemic scenario of covid-19 established in 2020, and the digital technologies as the main mediators of this period. The work uses sound to propose a reflection about the protests that occurred in Southeast Brazil, São Paulo, between April and June of 2020, known as janelaços. The sounds of the protests were recorded and automatically transcribed into text by an artificial intelligence application present in many smartphone models. This action reveals what type of decoding these devices make out of the troubled social scenario they are mediating.