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Conversations with a Computer (2008) - Daniel Everett

Conversations with a Computer (2008) - Daniel Everett

By Ceci Moss on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 10:50 am.


(1 of 3)

Contained within the operating system of Mac computers is a rudimentary electronic psychotherapist program. Meant to simulate a Rogerian therapist, it engages the participant in a cyclical conversation by taking his or her statements and roughly reconfiguring them into questions. I met with this program three times a week for a month in order to discuss my fear that I was disappearing completely. These are three stills from our conversations.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

interactive performance
  • Comments (9)

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9 Comments

Comment by nick
February 12, 2009 4:49 pm
Um, this is nothing new; the piece comes from using ELIZA, the well-known program written by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 and available widely since then. I presume the artist is using the version that is bundled with emacs, a text-editor (and much more) that is available in all standard distributions of Unix/Linux, of which Mac OS X is one. Sherry Turkle has written extensively (in the 1980s and 1990s) about people's experiences with such computer programs; see The Second Self and Life on the Screen.
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Comment by John
February 13, 2009 12:15 am
That's like saying photography is nothing new because you know it was made with a camera or because people have photographed in the past. We are all super impressed that you know what program the artist used, but come on, what an asinine comment.
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Comment by nick
February 17, 2009 4:21 pm
No, the comment is about dehistoricizing a practice that already succumbs to that enough via standard discourse. I would have appreciated comment by the editors about how this was related to earlier work and how it follows in a decades-long tradition---and is not something that is just "discovered" in the "operating system of Mac computers". I am critiquing more the editorial decision to feature the work, absent any commentary about it, and accepting the artist's words as providing enough context, rather than the work itself---if my intent was not clear.
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Comment by Brian Droitcour
March 2, 2009 5:17 am
http://rhizome.org/object.php?47989
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Comment by Vijay Pattisapu
March 4, 2009 3:40 pm
Compare Daniel Everett talking to the Other with the other Daniel Everett talking to the other Other.
http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/
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Comment by Eric Dymond
March 4, 2009 10:38 pm
the perl module Chatbot::ELiza uses the same algorithm, and it's old stuff, how does the work build on that?http://www.edymond.com/cgi-bin/psych.cgi
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Comment by Eric Dymond
March 4, 2009 10:41 pm
[urlhttp://www.edymond.com/cgi-bin/psych.cgi[/url]

really trivial
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Comment by Eric Dymond
March 4, 2009 10:42 pm
http://www.edymond.com/cgi-bin/psych.cgi

brilliant
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Comment by Bob Lormor
April 5, 2009 1:39 pm
Hmm. Well, this program would save you about 100 bucks an hour by talking to it instead of a human therapist, who will ask you the same questions. lol

Dog Crate Training
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