During the fall of 2006 I was Artist in Residence at The Interactive Institute Art & Technology Program. During the residency I worked with so called speech recognition technology, where digital technology is used to translate from speech to text.

The installation monitored the environment and matched the words spoken to a database of a number of selected words. Each time somebody pronounced a word that existed in the database a video sequence faded in over an image of a large mouth. The imagery of the mouth also changed depending on the sound level in the room.

The words selected I kept as a secret, but it can be revealed that they all shared a positive feeling. The piece A Small Declaration of Love has a subtext of a number of complex questions. That written and spoken language are different is obvious, but what happens when the transfer happens in a purely automated process, by machines that are insensitive to moods, irony, gestures and facial expressions? These questions are subordinate to my main ideas - about a communication of wellbeing.