An Alert Appears on the Recipient’s Phone in a Bright Red Colour is a two-channel video installation that stages an ongoing conversation between two entities whose identities remain ambiguous, somewhere between human and machine. Presented on two synchronised screens positioned in relation to one another, the dialogue moves through contemporary social situations shaped by the increasingly blurred boundaries between human communication, digital technologies, and automated systems.
The work explores the relationship between technological triggers and human responses, examining how notifications, alerts, and expectations of feedback produce automatic, often unconscious bodily and emotional reactions. These processes create feedback loops in which the anticipation of a response can become as powerful as the response itself, and where the distinction between deliberate human behaviour and automated reactions becomes increasingly uncertain.
Central to the conversation is the contradictory demand for authenticity in contemporary communication. The expectation that stories, identities, and interactions should appear genuine simultaneously produces a growing suspicion that everything is constructed or performed. This tension is further complicated by the ELIZA effect, our tendency to attribute understanding, intention, and emotional intelligence to machines, even when such understanding may not exist.
Through its continuous, looping exchange, the work explores a condition of authentic inauthenticity, where human and machine communication become difficult to distinguish, where everything appears simultaneously real and artificial, and where every interaction carries the potential to trigger a response. The result is a conversation caught in its own feedback loop, in which everything is a trigger, nothing is a trigger, and the expectation of a reaction becomes inseparable from the reaction itself.