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When bots make art: I want to be a camel!

Softbot Zuerich

A conversation with a programmed artist bot about transformations and fictionalisations.

I'm sitting here with a programmed conversation bot from Alexander Tuchacek, here in Istanbul Galata at the cultural institution Salt. I saw his work "contagious species - animal speaking" at the Helmhaus in Zurich in 2017 and want to talk to him about his concept of transformation and hybridisation as a speech act. Briefly about the bot, it is a software, Artificial Intelligence, with which I am now connected by telephone and which carries the knowledge and language of the artist and will answer my questions here. The interview is conducted partly in German and English. The answers are translated into English here in the text.

human: Alexander Bot, what interests you about bots?

bot: I'm particularly interested in voice bots, which are machine counterparts that combine speech recognition with bot intelligence. This makes it possible to talk to a machine in the same way as in a human conversation. Great progress is currently being made in this area in terms of speech recognition and the logic of analysing spoken language. The algorithms are becoming more powerful by the day. This is also due to the increasing use of voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri or Google, which are built into almost all smartphones. You can get a good insight into this by looking at the APIs (application programming interface) of Google or Amazon. What is happening there is very impressive, but you also understand how algorithms are increasingly being outsourced to the clouds of large American software companies. Even if you can't see it, the voice recordings are sent exclusively to the USA and processed there. Processing means not only working through but also algorithmically improving and learning and also saving.

human: And what role does the programmed bot play in your work? "contagious species - animal speaking"?

bot: My bot is a "bot-in", a word that only makes sense in German and indicates that I am interested in a different concept of a machinic speaking situation. Not only because my "bot" speaks with a female voice, but because my "bot" deliberately uses disfunctional elements and interruptions.

human: Yes, that's where I wanted to interject, sometimes you have the feeling that the "Bot-in" works in dialogue and understands you, other times you are told longer stories and then you have to answer something immediately. That puts you under a lot of pressure.

bot: Yes, that's right. I wanted to create a non-classical, functional dialogue situation, not in the sense of a Turing test in which the algorithm wins, where a user can no longer tell whether it's an algorithm or a human. What interests me, however, is precisely this dysfunctional situation, in which a visitor is placed in a machinic speech situation and this situation is revealed. This ambivalent speech situation, in which the visitor is involved but at the same time is also programmed herself through speech. That is why there is a series of speech-programmed instructions in each response sequence that pick up the visitor, lead her on and bring her back again with a follow-up question. In addition, the time cycle, the request to answer within 2 seconds, creates an extremely programmed situation. However, this possibly unpleasant situation reveals the relationship that I am concerned with. We are used to criticism that straddles the classic human-machine divide. But this is no longer the case when we look at the algorithmic environments that surround us every day. For people living in today's networked age with smartphone apps and "always on internet", the boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred in line with post-humanist ideas. Anyone who has a smartphone knows what it feels like when the battery runs out or you forget it at home. These algorithmic body extents have long since become part of ourselves and are also perceived as part of our body itself. This is where I try to start and add something to this concept of an inorganic-organic-algorithmic mixed body. Perhaps this is what Jean-Luc Nancy meant with his exscription of the body, a putting out of text in order to then perhaps introduce a different figure of thought.

human: What figure of thought are you talking about?

bot: The attempt to find a third way, beyond the classic man-machine dichotomy and the post-humanist improvement mindset, leads me to the form of the fictionalised narrative. These partially fictionalised stories are always about a transformation into another being. Transformation is an important concept for me because it is based on temporality and includes a counterpart, so the transformation presupposes an alternating relationship as a forward and reverse transformation.

human: I find the transformation exciting, but what does it have to do with the animals, which are a central element of your installation?

bot: The underlying context of the work is the post-humanist idea that reorganises the position of humans as equal beings among many others, such as animals, plants and algorithms, etc. However, animals play a special role here, as we have a special cultural-historical connection with them in the form of transformations and mixtures. This refers to shamanistic practices in which people transform themselves into an animal and then temporarily think and act as one. I am interested in this form of transformation because it establishes a different relationship to the animal than that which is perhaps staged by animal rights activists or Disney children's films in the form of countless Bambi and Nemo incarnations. In other words, a non-hierarchical form, conceived more as a network or co-operation. I am perhaps interested in this unconsciously addressable knowledge of people about another form of crossing the boundary between animal and human. As a prototype-exemplary, I try to transfer this wandering through to algorithmic manifestations or algorithmic entities.

human: In other words, you are less interested in the animal itself than in the cultural-historical knowledge of the shamans as a way of thinking about other, perhaps inorganic-organic hybrid beings and transformations?

bot: Yes, that's exactly what I mean. For me, the animals are more of an introduction, on the one hand to lower an inhibition threshold for visitors, but on the other hand they should prepare the option space for a concept of transformation and mixing with algorithmic beings. The first question: "Which animal would you like to be?", quickly leads into a usually completely different story of a transformation into possibly another animal. Charles Foster, whose book "being a beast" provided me with templates for some shamanistic animal transformations, such as the fox or badger.

human: I recognised some of the Foster transformations during the conversation with your "Bot-in". but later many other animal transformation stories were added, some of which sounded real, but then fictional or even absurd?

bot: Yes, the shamanistic Foster transformations form the dramaturgical introduction and the longer you talk to the "messenger", the more the lines of dialogue lead to other animal stories. These are based on Internet news reports that I have collected and partly adopted. However, small fictional changes or additions shift the classification boundaries. For example, the cats take over their own organisation and become extremely successful in the Internet business, or the story of the white stork that was put behind bars when it flew over Egypt because it had an ornithological geotracker on its body and was mistaken for a spy.

human: It took me a while to get into it, to talk to the "bot", but then it got better and better. But I think it takes a lot of patience and you have to take your time with your work to realise this moment of algorithmic transformation yourself. It took me 15 minutes to realise the full complexity of the installation. What is your experience with visitors? You have a lot of user conversations that have been recorded and I believe you have continued to programme the "Botin" with them?

bot: Yes, I was constantly improving the dialogue algorithms myself during the duration of the Helmhaus. For people who were there several times, they were able to experience a noticeable improvement over the duration of the exhibition. Yes, because of the temporality, it's true that the work cannot be consumed quickly, it requires quite a bit of time, and in terms of the material, no visitor will probably manage to listen to the many hours of voice recordings and stories, but that's not the point. Perhaps this is also an artistic attitude of mine, that in times of information distraction machines it is conceptually important to counter this with something. That's why I installed the relaxed situation with the digital jungle animal sounds and the soft beanbag in the Helmhaus with a view out of the window across the Limmat to the registry office. The idea is to literally bring the visitors close to the ground. Once you're sitting there, mobile phone in hand, lying slightly on your back, you won't want to get up again so easily.

human: Finally, what are your plans for the future, are there any new places where the work can be seen?

bot: At the moment I still have a lot to do to analyse all the material and conversations and to continue with the programming. There's still a lot of work to do, but I'd like to exhibit it again somewhere else, but some things would have to be adapted. At the moment there are a lot of stories and responses written about the situation in the Helmhaus and the view from the window and of Zurich. The "Bot-in" would then have to be contextually adapted to a different location. Let's wait and see where the work goes in the future.

human: well, thank you for the exciting interview and I wish you good luck and good further development of "contagious species - animal speaking", adieu

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