I Love Alaska was a rather chilling experience. The content of the work notwithstanding, the atmosphere that the work was able to create was rather impressive. Everything about the direction was bleak, so even when the content of the user’s searches was somewhat comical, the lack of any inflection in the narrator’s voice with the barren landscapes in the background made it difficult to find humor. In fact, I would argue that while the content of the user’s searches may have been preserved, the character that the directors of I Love Alaska was not the same one that input the searches.
By using the combination of a monotone, robotic female voice with bleak, depressing landscapes of Alaska, the directors created this persona of a detached, emotionless women who has an affair without much actual remorse. Had the voice acting been done by a real person, the character that was created through these searches would have felt much more alive, and some of the searches seemed to have a spark of life. But on the other hand, the cold computerized voice asking “Why can’t I sleep since I had a hysterectomy?” captures the crushing solitude of the user better than any real voice actor could.