David Cotterrell: The Ostrich Effect

Title:

The Ostrich Effect

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2013

Medium:

Custom IVR Call Centre Software and Hardware

Artist Statement:

The Ostrich Effect is built using commercial automated call-centre servers, customising their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) programs to broadcast and handle telephone campaigns while programming individual call centre systems to dial and trigger each other. The work is a generative installation that explores the recursive loops that might occur in a hypothetical scenario. The computer-based conversation will never be resolved and continuously re-attempted. This installation focuses on the commercial and social power of these systems. Away from potential domestic customers, it instead explores the limited, comic, frustrating and, at times, sinister, permutations of these interactions.