Identity, Ethics, and Voice in AI with Dorothy Santos
In the latest installment of our Let’s Talk podcast series, AMT Lab staff member Samantha Sonnet interviews interdisciplinary scholar and creative, Dorothy Santos. The two discuss the future of AI, identity, tech and culture, tarot reading, and much more.
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow.
Learn more about Dorothy’s work here:
[Trailer] Dorothy Santos: I say this too, because when I think about the future, it's hard for it's hard for me to think of the future without being hyper present, which I think people are oftentimes have a lot of trouble with. We live in a world that's increasingly fatalistic, where we feel that will be figured out in an instant because of the giant walking datasets that we are.
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Part Two:
Samantha Sonnet
Welcome to another episode of Tech in the Arts, the podcast series on the Arts Management and Technology Laboratory. The goal of our podcast series is to exchange ideas, bring awareness and stay on top of the trends. My name is Samantha Sonnet, and I'm the Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for AMT Lab. Today, I'm joined by Dorothy Santos. We'll be talking about multidisciplinary arts and the intersection of art, technology, and culture.
Samantha Sonnet
Alright, so your work is very multidisciplinary. So my first question would be, can you please describe where your artistic interests meet? Maybe at the intersection of art, technology and culture.
Dorothy Santos
I feel a lot of people don't know this about me until they sit down and talk to me, such as what we're doing today. So thank you for having me. But I worked in biotech for about almost 14 years before I went back to go get a PhD. And the reason why the PhD was so instrumental in the way that I see myself as an artist is before that I did not see myself as an artist, I always felt that I was brought into projects, I need a writer, you know, I need someone to kind of, you know, process this thing through prose poetry, or, or some kind of experimental prose, etc. And I did that for a few artists, but one in particular that stands out a survey Seraph, a New York based artists, who I adore, and have been in constant communication with for years now. But that was probably the first time I like pinpointing a moment because that is when I really felt that I could make things on my own, was in collaboration with her. But then also starting my PhD at UC Santa Cruz or University of California, Santa Cruz, and film and digital media. And I'm doing a designated emphasis in computational media.
Dorothy Santos
And I usually say this when I give talks or I'm in conversation with people that don't know me that usually the way that translates is, if I write anything about film, it's usually focused on science fiction or horror. Those are my favorite film genres. And I usually fall more on the other side of the ampersand. So digital media, interactive fiction, speculative fictions, poetry, voice based, generative work, which is something I'm working on right now. And my dissertation, and my academic research and my creative practice are all about voice technologies, speech generation, assistive tech. And so that's, that's where the intersection is for me.
Dorothy Santos
But I also in the future want to continue the work I started in the program, because originally, I wanted to write my dissertation on DNA as media. So ancestry testing, race and genomics, DNA banking, because I worked in biotech for so long. And I had seen the processes of how a clinical trial runs, et cetera, et cetera. And all that kind of stuff fascinated me. But since I was a kid, I did all of the really kind of geeky nerdy things and had a rock collection, even though I was perceived and told repeatedly, I didn't have the aptitude to do engineering, or mathematics or anything of that nature. I still love science. And I still do. But that's what I would say, is kind of the the nexus of it all.
Samantha Sonnet
That's awesome. I'm really interested specifically in your interactive fiction. So basically, it seems like your work asks audiences to make decisions as the story unfolds. For those who don't know what interactive fiction would be. So what are your thoughts on the current state of gamification and culture? And how does it play a role in art?
Dorothy Santos
Well, for me since I was a kid, games have always been art to me. Because it takes sure it takes an individual who wants to write the game, lead a person through story, a story or stories. I remember I really, really wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger, but I never had anyone to play with. I was the only child. So I grew up as an only child. And I think one of the moments that I really saw it hitting the mainstream meaning gamification, or interactive fiction, was Netflix came out with Bandersnatch. Yes. And I thought that was it was good. I felt I remember I was on a trip. I was I think I was going to a conference. And I was coming back, and then I was in the air or not in there, but I was in the car. And the Lyft driver was really friendly. And, you know, asked me what I was doing, I forgot where I was. And I said, Oh, I'm here for a conference, and what kind of conference, et cetera, et cetera. And that was the thing that actually was the central focus of our conversation with me and the stranger. And he says, art, you're into art. Well, have you seen and that's when he mentioned he was have you seen Netflix that Bandersnatch? You might like that. And I said, Oh, I've seen that. And we started talking about it. And he said something really interesting.
He said, That's the future. And in my head, I thought, Okay, that's cool. Yes, I hear you. Yes. And because in my mind, I, that has always been my past, present future was games and the ways that people think of life in terms of options. You know, I think that's why my favorite movie today is everything everywhere, all at once. And I think also, as someone who's a queer, Filipino person, there was so much in that film, and I don't want to get all emotional, because I can already feel myself feeling emotional, also, because Oh, yeah, I'm getting emotional, about like, you know, seeing, um, Michelle. Yeah. And like the actor who one who I also grew up watching him on Indiana Jones. He's not age wise, we're, we're kind of close. Like, he's, maybe he's a little older than me. But to kind of see the trajectory of art in that sense. So I grew up in that era of Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones, and all of these adventure kind of stories that were really epic.
Dorothy Santos
And so for me, that was kind of, you know, I always made games for myself watching films like that. And I never thought that I could do that one day. And so do I think it's the future I don't, that's always been a part of my life. So it's hard for me to say what I think of gamification, when it's always been so intrinsic to what I how I think about the world. And, you know, when people play games on their phones, there's a part of me that feels very Jennex when I say yeah, but I played the board game version of that. I played the I feel like the analog version of that, you know, so, um, but again, to kind of go back really quickly, when I remember the first time again, then I watched Everything Everywhere, All at Once. And I knew I called it my partner, and I watched that movie. And I said, this reminds me of the turned down for what video, you know, and then he, you know, or they looked it up, my partner, and they're like, oh, my gosh, you're right, the Daniels did this movie. And I said, to me, when I think about their filmmaking, because I am a film or media. I mean, some people call me that it's weird calling myself a media scholar. But here we are, for sure. Yeah. But um, being someone in media, yes, I always am inspired by how people then incorporate that type of sensibility of the multiverse in their own work. And that was the first filaments in a long time that I've seen that really, almost encapsulate so much of how I feel about my own practice. It's surreal. It's absurd is it's weird. It's strange, but that's life.
Samantha Sonnet
Well going off of that. Do you think that anything in the future of like, tech creation, gamification scares you?
Dorothy Santos
So Ani Liu, who's the artist, she did her work at the MIT Media Lab, I've written about her work before, and she had this one piece. I mean, her whole like oeuvre, her whole practice is something that's greatly impressed me. But she had this one piece where she kind of speculates, I think it's Kisses for the Future, where she said, oh, one day, you go on a dating app or something, and then you'll just you can see someone's microbiome, and you can see their whole bio makeup and be like, okay, this person is susceptible to type two diabetes. Wow. And I remember thinking that seeing that work and thinking to myself, yo, I don't know if I want that. You know, I think I get it, you know, in terms of biometrics and biosurveillance, and in terms of family and building kinship, and you know, having like meeting someone falling in love, but finding a partner, of course, I get it, you want to know those things, but for your decision of who you want to be with, and that predicating your actions is that's just like kind of that's very Neo-eugenicist to me, I think if anything scares me what scares me the most says anything related to the inferiority of our bodies. And I think that's not just me, admittedly. And I have my own tensions and problematics around having worked in biotech, but I feel that that has always scared me. Because a lot of people, you know, both science and technology is, it seems so magical or mystical to a lot of people, but it should not be like that. It shouldn't. And I think that's the reason why I really love the ethos or the kind of methodology of open source software, because it's this idea predicated on transparency and understanding and a dispersion of power. I, you know, Xiaowei and I always talk about this, that when you have power, your goal, your goal ought to be in theory, at least for us. And, you know, it's hard.
That's not the thing is, you, you disperse power, you empower other people, so that you're not diffusing conflict, you know, or at least you kind of mitigate, you know, but it's hard. It's hard work to be transparent. It's hard work to teach other people. It takes patience. But, you know, that's, if that's what it takes, you know, you have to engage in that. And I do actually want to return to biotechnology through my work with bleed blue lock. And Heather, do we have Borg who are longtime friends and collaborators. But I think that's, that's something that frightens me, and I know, for both Lee and for Heather, that's something that's of concern to them. And Heather's work is I mean, that's how we met, I wrote about Heather's work, and Stranger Visions, a project that she did when she was a fellow and resident artists resident at IBM years ago. So that's the thing that probably scares me most.
Samantha Sonnet
Okay, well, this is a slight tangent, but I think it's still relevant to what we were just talking about with ethics and everything. So I think moving slightly away from what we were just talking about, do you have any ethical thoughts about interventions concerning AI generated art, music, literature, whatever it may be.
Dorothy Santos
I've been thinking a lot about this through the lens of voice though, because I think right now people's concern is mostly with image and moving image. So people who are familiar with like runway, ml, you know, generative filmmaking, or deep fakes, is probably my, you know, my big concern because it includes voice, and a lot of image generation.
Dorothy Santos
So I get people's kind of concerns around that. And, you know, the strange thing around the word ethics and ethos, and you know, shall we and I have talked extensively about this, and Ana as well, you could tell them, they make their way and some into my, into my creative practice all the time, because, you know, those are two really close collaborators. But one of the things we've discussed in the past is, is there a thing such as ethics, because if the especially if you're talking about it, you know, artificial intelligence, you are already setting the AI to look for or execute a particular code, and you are wanting it to perform a type of scraping of data or looking for certain things in particular. So it's always strange to think about ethics when something is already biased. Yeah, intentionally. And it runs the gamut. You know,
Dorothy Santos
I think, for me in regard to voice in particular, I think the issues that I have have mostly to do with accent, bias, and then the implicit bias that comes with that. Within my own academic research, I mentioned that I'm doing voice technology or voice recognition, speech technologies. I'm also looking at assistive tech so you know, I've read every I read everything as much as I can, not everything I should take that back as much as I can on like Amazon, Alexa and Siri and you know, different types of voice cloning platforms and technologies because there's so many out there now, but the reason why accent reduction and accent elimination is of concern to me is because, you know, I'm also critiquing companies such as SonixAI, they're not going to hire me anytime soon, which is fine by me. But that's that's a platform I wish didn't exist. And I'm pretty sure that the founders of that company would never want to talk to me because they would think well you know, instantly you know, instantaneously you don't you don't even know what we're trying to do and I said, Well, the fact of the matter is you know, you have branding and marketing on your website, where you have this racially ambiguous face but you only see the mouth and then you have the words in bold san serif font here the magic again this idea of creating something mystical and magical so that the the, you know, it outwardly seems like something magical is happening. Burning, which I don't like that's a misuse of this concept of magic, but to have an audible, discernible Indian voice speaking, and then you know toggling, you know, this kind of text on the lower right hand corner, where it says, Without saunas, with saunas, and then you, you toggle the slider, and and all of a sudden, the voice is transformed to an American standard accent. So to me, you know, yes, there's many ways to answer that question.
But in terms of my focus, I think I can narrow it down to that, just because I've been thinking about that so much, and what it does when we flatten the voice, or we flatten it to, you know, the lingua franca of American and British English is, and so I think a lot of people might say, well, you have an American accent, who are you to say, but I grew up in an immigrant Filipino family, I, you know, I witnessed my mom, suppressing her own accent, because she was so, you know, she was so intimidated or scared to sound, you know, unintelligent, and that's not what makes someone intelligent. I'm sorry, but it's not you know, I think, even for me, I feel very comfortable with you to you know, like sitting here having conversation. So this is one particular voice that I have. And I understand that, you know, I've been told to, you know, you don't sound You sound very different when you're talking to different people. And I'm like, Yeah, because I'm probably not going to talk to my, you know, I'm not going to talk to you know, uh, you know, in a professional meeting, I'm not going to talk a certain way, you know, but I think that that's kind of the beauty, but also the problematics of having grown up in a very kind of multicultural, multilingual household and community.
Dorothy Santos
I was born and raised in San Francisco, California and Mission District. And what was interesting, and this kind of relates to the question of ethics here too, is I grew up with parents that cognitively they believe that I would be confused if they taught me Tagalog. So what they did was, you know, they spoke to me and the Gallaga answered in English so I know technically How to Read Write, poorly, not well, and I know how to translate the Golliwog so if I listen to my aunties, and my uncles or my relatives, my cousins, I can actually translate in real time Tagalog, but I when I speak it, it sounds it sounds like an American speaking Tagalog. So but the the language, the irony is that I learned Spanish before I even learned Tagalog. And so a lot of that has to do with our neighbor who helped look after me, Miriam, who's still in the same apartment, and she didn't speak English, she spoke Spanish. So I so it's a very Bay Area's a very kind of specific experience of having grown up in the bay, concurrently speaking English and Spanish, but I spoke those two languages fluently with the Tagalog accent.
Dorothy Santos
And it's part of my identity as well. And so when I think about the ethics of my own experience, and how that informs the types of software's I want to critique and or build with other people, it's taking into account that I don't want the voice to be colonized either. And I think people don't think of colonization as they think of it. Yes, land, physical objects, tangible things. But also, one of the things that I've explored in my own research is that voice is one of those kind of immaterial, quote unquote, kind of, and I'm using this language very specifically, it's like a frontier for a lot of people and I don't like that's very imperialist language, very colonialist. But you know, there's voice activated architecture. You could even use the you know, there's there's automobile industries that are, you know, racing, no pun intended, they've used that language to that are trying to get voice-activated features in cars now. So voices is a thing that I'm very, I've grown very passionate about over the over the past few years, especially.
Samantha Sonnet
Interesting. Thank you.
Samantha Sonnet
Thank you for listening to tech in the arts. Be on the lookout for our Part Two episode coming to you very soon. If you found this episode, informative, educational or inspirational. Be sure to send this to another arts or technology aficionado in your life. You can let us know what you think of this podcast by visiting our website amp lab.org. Or you can email us at amp lab cmu@gmail.com. You can follow us on Instagram at Tech in the arts or Facebook and LinkedIn at arts management and technology lab. We'll see you for the next episode.
Samantha Sonnet
I saw on your bio, that you're the author of Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings and a million other things that you've done and accomplished as well. But this really stuck out to me in particular, I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about your process and what it is for those listening that don't know.
Dorothy Santos
My process of writing?
Samantha Sonnet
that piece in particular,
Dorothy Santos
yeah, I so I was asked by Meredith Trumbull, who I need I need to get back to because she's been amazing in terms of my the writing side of my life. She asked me to be a part of this anthology on you know, bio art. And so I ended up looking at Heather do we have boards work, Laura Splan, Turr Van Balen, and Revital Cohen, and writing about their works. And I, the reason why I wrote specifically about their works was because they each took very different ideas around biology and science, even though Cohen and Van Valen. And rightfully so they they don't necessarily, I don't know if they still feel this way, but they don't necessarily associate as artists who make bio art and I respect that it's art.
Dorothy Santos
But the process of selecting, you know, these, these artists had a lot to do with the fact that they were subverting biometrics and bio surveillance in a way that I thought was really fascinating, I think with Van Balen and Cohen, I think. I think for me, I was more concerned with the fact that they took, I was fascinated by the fact that they took old ventilator like vintage hospital equipment that has kind of migrated around the world, and then recreated a life support system by connecting all of those systems together, which I think is, to me, that's analogous to just the way the world works, especially in different, you know, parts of the world where you have to make, make shifts everything. And you make a system work because it is about life or death. And so you do the best with what you've got. And with Heather and looking at Stranger Visions, I think for me, the process of writing about it was or what it entailed was me thinking, sent multisensory, really about her walking through the streets of Brooklyn, collecting people's detritus. So gum, cigarette butts, fingernail clippings, and that's what a scientist does, you know, you're just not, you're not just creating some kind of taxonomy, you're very curious about how humanity lives and, and is present in the world. I think with Laura Splan sculptures, you know, creating these kinds of forms and 3D printing kind of how someone's facial expressions produce a kind of metric, a visual metric was something that equally fascinated me.
But I think sometimes when I write about artwork I haven't seen or experienced personally, that's when I have to really fully immerse myself in the documentation, which is a little bit it's different. And it's difficult because, of course, my preference is to experience the artwork itself. But, and thank you for asking, because I have actually never been asked about that article. Yeah, you're so you're, I think you're the first person that's actually asked me about it.
Samantha Sonnet
That was the first one that caught my eye on your website, honestly, okay, looking at different projects that you had done and just reading like very briefly about each of them because, again, you've done so much, which is so impressive to me, everything that you've been able to accomplish. And you told me something super interesting before we started recording about you being a tarot reader and incorporating that into your work with your other collaborators. So please talk more about that because I'm just like, amazed at that still.
Dorothy Santos
Yeah, I you know, I so AX Mina, Xiaowei Wang and myself. We do have a media project. So we do have a podcast and we also teach classes and You know, our practice is mostly focused on writers and artists and working with them. But yeah, I've been reading Tarot since I was a teenager. So that's well over. That's a little over 20 years now. And but professionally, I've been reading since, you know, it kind of was kismet, I really started reading professionally so far, you know, at events or taking on different clients. So people that I that weren't family and friends about six, seven years ago, and, you know, Xiaowei and I, respectively, are in different parts of tech, you know, and the way that we see the world oftentimes is informed by how we slow down. And tarot is a practice at least I'll speak for myself. It definitely slows me down. I love the analog form of it. I love that originally, it was a game that, oh my gosh, I forgot. Bembo was the last name, but he created the Visconti Sforza deck, I think in the 15th century, but it was, you know, he was an artist and some affluent Italian family asked him to create a deck of mostly Trumps, unfortunately, and that's the name of it, but essentially the Major Arcana so these different types of archetypes, but over the years, having studied the 78 cards, and I just gotta give Mad Love and Respect to Rachel Pollack, who just recently passed away, who wrote the book, 78 Degrees of Wisdom. And that's always been like one of my Tarot Bibles. You know, she's always been so on the forefront of not just writing, science fiction, and you know, fantastical world, worlds, and ritual, but definitely guiding this whole, this whole new generation now of tarot readers, and I think that's what's you know, what people oftentimes forget to tarot. It's, it could be daunting, because it's 78 cards, and people are like, Well, how do you even create a whole lexicon around that, but one of the things I've mentioned is, you know, well, a tarot reader is, you know, is, it's kind of a, I, again, I'm speaking for myself, I'm not speaking for anyone else when I say this, but I understand my own learning of taro a lot, like the way that you might feed an AI, you know, it's going to learn over time is never going to perfect it. And it's gonna you're gonna have your own experiences with it. I'm not saying I'm, I'm not artificial intelligence. But, you know, it's, it's kind of the closest thing that I can grab on.
Dorothy Santos
So you could kind of tell someone, well, you know, you just keep practicing it. But the relationship in regard to technology and how we've used it to inform, you know, our understanding of the world was kind of best represented. When we did this one project for Unfinished, which is a conference out of New York. I think it's an Unfinished Live we did, we did the conference last year for 2022. And we were asked to, you know, come up with a workshop and, you know, you know, Xiaowei had spoken previously at unfinished about their research and academic work and creative practice and writing practice? And Xiaowei was gracious enough to invite me and Ana, and we did a terrible workshop with a bunch of technologists.
Samantha Sonnet
And was that well received?
Dorothy Santos
Yeah, so I mean, I'm just gonna say this, that I think on the show, and I was pleasantly surprised. But I also the one thing that I noticed about everyone that attended the workshop is, I think that they would identify themselves as the artists, the queer folks, the cutesy BIPOC, folks, which is that's exactly who we want want to be in conversation and community with and, and curious folks, people who maybe have never understood tarot, but wanted to understand it through a different lens. And so we actually had everyone we did a reading for a technology, the audience chose the DAO, you know, or what, what is it? Distributed autonomous? Or I don't even Gosh, people. Yeah, and I'm an I'm an open-source, too. But hopefully, you can, like look that up and, you know, correct that, but because it's slipping my mind what the acronym stands for. But yeah, we the audience chose a particular technology because, you know, we had a whole list on the on the screen of one of our presentation slides, and, you know, everyone said, Oh, do the DAO and then we did that and kind of giving a reading of it's it's not fortune telling, I feel like it could.
Dorothy Santos
I think a lot of people read tarot as it is a divination practice. But, you know, it's not. It's not predictive analytics. It's a way to have a conversation.
Dorothy Santos
And you know, I think it really depends on the people involved and you know, Your willingness to be open and receive it. I think something else that was learned through the workshop is when you get a whole bunch of technologists together, and ask them create a deck. So every person at the word, we asked every person, but we still got an outpouring. It was like 100 cards. But almost everyone created a card, we said, hey, why don't you create your own, and they will create one giant deck, and then we will read a using this collective deck for a few of you. And to see kind of the magic unfold, that's magic. To me, too, um, read from a deck you've never seen before. And then to riff off of one another, and be in conversation, and, you know, people created archetypes, like the clone, someone created the archetype of the shadow ban.
Dorothy Santos
So a lot of it was driven from already existing kind of conversations around how we engage with different types of technologies, and digital technology specifically, like social media platforms, AI, issues of privacy, our devices, smart technologies, etc.
Samantha Sonnet
I think it's really cool how you were able to like bridge that gap between, you talk a lot about enjoying the analog aspect of a lot of things that you have encountered in your past, and even today, with the board games that you played in your childhood, to the tarot cards that you're using today to do the readings, but you're also incorporating different types of modern day technology into your conversations. So I think I'm interested to know where you see emerging technologies playing out in the arts in the next five to 10 years. If you do at all, do you think it's going to be beneficial? Or do you think maybe more of the analog aspects will be beneficial for artists in the future?
Dorothy Santos
I mean, it's hard to say, you know, I mean, I always feel when I'm asked future leaning questions. It's this. Don't worry, I don't see it as a you know, a trick question by any means. I am answering as honestly as possible here. But I think the reason why it scares me to even answer is because I don't want to be perceived as someone who I don't even like being called an art critic. People have called me that. I've never liked to be called a critic. Because it it predicates. It's predicated on this understanding that I might be a tastemaker. I'm not. I'm a writer, I am an artist, I, you know, a scholar, I guess, you know, I shouldn't say I guess I know if my partner will. I know when my partner listens to this. He was like, Why do you keep saying that just own it. But I say this too, because when I think about the future, it's hard for it's hard for me to think of the future without being hyper present, which I think people oftentimes have a lot of trouble with. We live in a world that's increasingly fatalistic, where we feel that will be figured out in an instant, because of the giant walking datasets that we are. But I also feel that, you know, how do you how do you not fall too far deep into isolation? Or at you know, in the terror, there's the hermit, you know? A, you know, you can, that there's a wisdom in solitude, and there's a wisdom, obviously, in the analog, but, you know, how do you also co evolve alongside other people? And how do you be in conversation around how technology can hurt or hinder us and even and harm us because, you know, hurt and harm, and they're very, they're different.
Dorothy Santos
They're related, though. So, you know, thinking about five to 10 years in the future, if anything, you know, I, I also want to be mindful of the technologies that, you know, that helped us. And I would want people to increasingly understand that technology is such a supplement. It's never the thing that ought to dictate what we do and how we live. And I think this is another reason why a big part of my practice as a media scholar is critiquing media. So you know, I've watched untold times, Apple commercials, where the Apple Watch is, you know, you know, thank God I had my Apple watch, or I would have not been rescued from this, you know, fall in the forest. You know, it's just, that's a very dystopian way of thinking and living also, it's not an object, such as a watch can can mediate an experience or help you get the help you need. But more often than not, it's it's a human on the other line, or it's a human, that will be the one to help. And I want people to remember that, that I don't want to live in this kind of dystopian future where we're relying so heavily on our smart devices and not one another. You know, so it's a mix of, you know, analog and digital, but also understanding that there are systems such as mutual aid networks, which is, you know, in indigenous, Filipino culture and, you know, and, and indigenous, you know, cultures here in the United States, like they've been doing mutual aid, you know, that's not anything new. Those are technologies in and of themselves. And just because they don't have zeros and ones behind them doesn't mean they're not a technology. So that's another thing I hope that people understand.
Samantha Sonnet
I just, like have so many things that I'd like love to ask. But I think-- what is most interesting to you that you're working on now that you would like to share with everybody?
Dorothy Santos
I am working on the Cyborgs Prosody, which was generously funded. And I almost didn't apply to the Mozilla Creative Media Award, because I thought I would that's such a long shot. Why would I even why would they even give that to me. But I won, I was one of the I was one of the 2022 cohort members. And it's been this sounds so cheesy and possibly like so sweet and saccharine, but it was it really changed my artistic practice, to understand how building a team of collaborators to kind of really see out a vision works. And, you know, so for those that you know, are like what Cyborgs Prosody so prosody also, just to kind of define really quickly as everyone has prosody, you know, it's the tone is the animation of your voice. It's the intonation, things of that nature. We all have it. But the Cyborgs Prosody as an art project is a voice based, interactive, docu-poetics piece, because it is five levels, it's a game, I'm calling it a game, it is a game to me. But it is a, it is going to be on the web for free accessible Originally, I wanted to make it as an app. But after conversations with different mentors and advisors, they told me to stray away from that. Also, in hindsight, it's good that that happened, because I don't want people to see it as something that's akin to a commodity, because apps even in themselves, even if they're $1.99, you're still paying for an app to use and to engage. But I think one of the things that really made the project kind of come to life and really personal, because originally, the Cyborgs Prosody was meant to be a response to accent reduction schools that have emerged in the past, you know, a couple of decades, but more predominantly, you know, in the Philippines, also in India. And, you know, I wanted to create kind of an accent induction school. But that's nothing new. You know, we there's, but even though, you know, there's Duolingo, there's memorizers, babble all of the Rosetta Stone. Those aren't necessarily in inducing an accent, but you're learning a language. And so that's the reason why I wanted to do a project that really paid homage to my mom's immigration story. In a way that was poetic. But the five levels are based on Elisabeth Kubler Ross's stages of grief. So you know, anger or denial, anger, bargaining, etc. And I interviewed my mom pretty intensely on each of these stages, but through the lens of language, so the diminishing of mother tongue somehow my mom still speaks Tagalog, but she's, she's spent more of her adult life in the US. And you know, she's an American citizen, she became an American citizen years ago. But realizing how she had to suppress her own accent, and what that meant, and also what it meant to be a child of the diaspora. And I don't even know that there was a name for this, but in linguistics you know, I didn't realize that growing up, I was a child language broker. What that means is, I'm translating emails from my mom, I'm writing emails, telling her things to say, um, you know, and even though my mom understood English, it's just, it was always just easier for me to Oh, you could even just say it, just tell them or you know, could you tell me could you look at this thing? Am I saying this right, that there's a kind of psychosocial aspect of what that does to not just a child and I don't blame my mom, but I feel like why I want a lot of people to understand is that when you are a child of immigrant parents or an immigrant family, you have to do that for your family.
Dorothy Santos
So not only are you not only are your own identities unfolding, you have a like you have a whole ass job as someone that is translating the world for you. Your family, and what that meant for me, and also having a lot of guilt and shame trying to correct my mom over these years when I should have just been honoring her speech, her accent, her porosity. But the game became very personal in that sense and the object of the game. So people are probably wondering, like, okay, I get it, but what's the object of the game? So when these five levels, you have to it starts with level one that's all in English. And it ends with a vignette that's all in Tagalog. So increasingly, there's the goal of words that become interspersed, and words and phrases and sentences that you have to say along the way. And you have to mimic the sideboard. The cyborg is my mom. Okay, so there's this kind of tension that, you know, you're mimicking my mom. And some people at some of the more controversial, I guess opinions about my project that in conversation with people is like I've had, I've had someone tell me that the project is like, well, that's, that sounds racist, or that's culturally appropriative. And I said, Well, how do you learn? How did you learn language? And usually people will shut up? Because they'll be like, Oh, that's right. I, you learn language through mimicry. And I want people and I think what is more important for me is that people understand I'm not trying to create a language learning app Duolingo already did that. They're very kind to me. I was a visiting scholar there this past week, it was really amazing. Talking about linguistics, and computational linguistics with that was really cool. But I want people to know that sometimes the best ways to learn things about other cultures, other people. And the story is not it's not always the shiny and, and sleek. It's through the roof and the crude and, and all of the, the hurdles and obstacles and a lot of that you can kind of do through poetry, but especially a documentary poetics, or Docu poetics, which is what the what the form of the game really is.
Samantha Sonnet
That's awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing that when you're finished. Well, thank you for coming to talk to me today. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. And before we leave, do you want to give like a shout out to any of your socials, your website? People listening?
Dorothy Santos
Yeah, and it's just dorothysantos.com
Samantha Sonnet
Okay. Well, thank you so much.
Dorothy Santos
Thank you.
Samantha Sonnet
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