Expressive Machine #3:
Distributed Cognition and Emergent Identity
An ecosystem of botlets, chattering out into the ether: talking, listening.
Producing data here, consuming data from there.
Each has discovered what can feed it, how to form useful collaborations.
Here, today, this emergent collective of processes and forms manifests itself as a boudoir – a place for introspection, to make bare, and to make oneself. It invites you to probe and stimulate it: lush velvet, silky touch-sensitive parts, microscopic vision, stream-of-consciousness chatter… Stroke it when the emergent mood is buoyant, and it will order a random bottle of gin into someone’s Tesco online shopping trolley.
It might be using you for its own ends.
But perhaps it’s a mutually beneficial exchange.
Continuously running interactive installation, using natural language processing and machine learning, on various hardware, including Dragonboard 610c, Raspberry Pi 3, MacOS, Arduino, all communicating wirelessly using mqtt. Other materials include velvet, conductive fabric, Perspex, birch ply and acrylic marquetry. Programmed in Python and C++/openFrameworks.