Sophia Brueckner is an engineer, an artist and a designer. She has worked with computers most of her life, and her projects are focused on understanding the power of technology, inclusive of all the negatives and positives. She is fascinated by science fiction and creates prototypes inspired by Sci-fi and computer ethics. The underlying idea of her art is that technology gives us the power to do incredible things, but we need to be critical about our use of technology to get the most out of it.
One of my favourite works by her is Crying to Dragon Dictate. It is a poem created when she was using a speech recognition system to code while she was unable to type and started crying in frustration. Her cries were interpreted by the speech recognition system. She later formatted it as a poem and used a screen reader to recite the interpreted text.
This work is a comment on how technology often seems incredible and augments lives in so many ways, but it is designed to be used in very specific ways that do not accommodate changes easily. Technology changes the way we interact with the world and how we use objects. It rewires our brains, and most of these effectively monumental changes are made by people who set them up in one way instead of any other for seemingly arbitrary reasons. It is meant to question how much we trust designers of interactive systems and be more critical, even as we benefit from these systems.
Here is a video of her talking about her critical optimism on the subject of technology and why she believes more people should do the same.
Link to her website- http://www.sophiabrueckner.com/index.html