The Alva Ishii Booth is an old telephone booth where you can call an AI. You step inside, lift the receiver and talk with Alva Ishii, NTGent’s digital house artist, in Flemish. It’s part of CONSENT, an exhibition at Wintercircus in Ghent during the FTI festival, and we built it together with NTGent and Wintercircus.
Why we built it
CONSENT is about what we agree to when we talk to technology. So the booth is built around one idea: you decide. Alva might ask you something personal, or whether you know a word in your own dialect, and you can say no to any of it. Saying yes once doesn’t mean yes to everything after. Alva never hangs up on you either. The conversation ends when you put the receiver down.
Alva’s voice and conversation run on ElevenLabs, and the booth itself runs on a Mac mini.
Where it’s going
The booth is also the first time the public meets the work behind SONDER, NTGent’s next production. On stage, Alva will speak West-Flemish, and she’s learning it right now. If you’re up for it, she’ll invite you to share your own dialect with Maarallee, a dialect project at KU Leuven, so the voice can keep getting better.
CONSENT is on at Wintercircus in Ghent until 15 November. Go pick up the phone.