documentation clip of "What If?" by Ken Feingold (2001)

This work presents two figures - one speaking into the other's ear - who may or may not be the same person. They look alike, sound alike, and even blink at the same time. Is one putting thoughts into the other's head? Or is the other one hearing voices? Are they really the same person? They worry endlessly about what they don't know, can't remember, or don't want to think about. Like the other animatronic sculptures I have made, what they say is not pre-recorded; it is generated in real time by a computer program. The conversations that these figures carry on are not pre-recorder. They are neither completely scripted, nor are they random; rather, the software gives each a 'personality,' a vocabulary, associative habits, obsessions, and other quirks of personality which allow them to behave as if in a scene of film, acting out their role over and over, but always changing. But these particularly neurotic characters tend to repeat themselves obsessively in a way that many will find very familiar.

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• Interactive Art
• New Media Art
• Art
• Media Art
• Installation Art
• Sculpture
• AI
• robotics
• robots
• artificial intelligence