Dialogues with Devices

Dialogues with Devices is an exhibition that examines our evolving relationship with technology. The
artists’ collaborative work draws upon ideas of theatre, rehearsal, scene-building, scale and labour to
create a conversation between their individual practices, and opening a wider discourse around the
technological imaginary.

This experimental inquiry centres on the relations between ourselves as human entities and more-
than-human digital technologies, which are increasingly encroaching into arenas once considered to
be exclusively human; now shared, contested, reconfigured and surveilled.

Robert Good is an artist based in Cambridge whose work explores the impact of technology on our
lives and the migration of knowledge from analogue to digital.
Tower No.1 is a first experimental structure, built in response to Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem All
Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace in which he envisages a future '... cybernetic ecology/
where we are free of our labors/ and joined back to nature... and all watched over/ by machines of
loving grace'. Brautigan's poem implies, but does not specify, how we will be 'all watched over', and
Tower No.1 provides a point of reflection to consider the dynamic between ourselves and the
technological environment in which we now live.

Paul Laidler’s work is grounded in the belief that originality often lies dormant within copies and
reproductive endeavour, waiting to be unlocked through the act of remaking. He sees remakes and
derivatives not as mere repetitions or inferior artefacts, but as opportunities to reveal new insights and layers of meaning.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick's speculative fiction, especially Pay for the Printer (1956), Laidler engages
with generative AI to create visual reinterpretations that reflect humanity’s evolving reliance on
technology in the creative process, intention and machine output. His visual series To Live Is to Be
Haunted exemplifies this, embracing themes of uncertainty, revisitation, and the traces left by both
human and machine-generated decisions. In this series, Ladler positions AI not merely as a tool, but
as a collaborator that actively participates in shaping creative outcomes.

Laura Rosser is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University. Her print-based practice draws
on expanded understandings of error to reimagine our relationships with technologies and systems.
Working with her collection of dot matrix printers, printed ephemera and low-tech systems, she
creates installations that are concerned with ideas of obsolescence, and resist linear narratives of
technological innovation and progress. In this body of work error is rethought as exhibiting relational
agency—entangled within networks of humans and more-than-human matter and thought. Drawing on Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI (2021), Rosser’s Potemkin’s Curtain of AI reminds us that error is
embedded in wider infrastructures of computation that gesture to the extractive, exploitative and
unstable foundations of digital systems.

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