“The project is inspired by a series of experiments that are happening at MIT, in which they realized that by using high-speed video to record the surfaces of objects, they could recover the sound that those objects were hearing—the sound of the speech hitting this bag could be recovered from the surface of the bag itself. The best sound-recording objects they found are potato chip packets because their surfaces are both impressionable and non-absorbent, so they leave traces of the vibrations attached to them. In the context of the fair, I think it’s interesting because, unlike auctions, where the prices are spoken aloud, the fair has other conventions of speech: how you speak about prices, and how things are negotiated are much more subtle, much less audible. So I like the idea that these chips packets almost become like a rumor that spreads throughout the fair, that there are these objects that are listening to people.”