Echo

Guillaume Faure · a mirror for talking to yourself · 2022 – 2025 · IRCAM Paris, NYU New York, Santa Mònica Barcelona, Incheon Art Platform

Our role Artificial intelligence, real-time voice analysis.

“A mirror for talking to yourself.”

In a small black booth, you sit facing your reflection and talk to it. After a few seconds, the reflection answers with your own words, recontextualised by artificial intelligence. The conversation keeps a harmonious, often enigmatic tone, and everyone is free to interpret it and lead it wherever they like.

Guillaume Faure starts from Lacan’s mirror stage and from Winnicott, for whom the mother’s face is the child’s first mirror. The mirror is a Pepper’s ghost: a camera hidden behind an angled pane films the visitor, and a concealed screen reflects their image back into the glass.

With Joan Sandoval, Cyril Laurier developed the machine’s intelligence. It listens to the music of the voice rather than the meaning of the words: it analyses eleven dimensions of timbre and intonation in real time and keeps the “score” of everything that has been said. When the visitor falls silent, it replays the past phrase that best continues their melody, playing with repetition, inversion, dissonance or tension. Echo answers in any language, and shares its engine with ALEA.

First shown at the IRCAM Forums in Paris in 2022, the work has travelled to New York, Laval, Grenoble, Lleida, Barcelona and Incheon. The exhibition L’altre costat, at Santa Mònica, welcomed more than 5,000 visitors in its first month.

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Echo, Guillaume Faure · a mirror for talking to yourself
Echo, Guillaume Faure · a mirror for talking to yourself
Echo, Guillaume Faure · a mirror for talking to yourself
Echo, Guillaume Faure · a mirror for talking to yourself

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