Paper #5 - [TEI 2015] What Things Dream Of

This paper [1] details an installation wherein various object appear to "dream" when not being interacted with, and appear to "see" the user when they are. As shown in the paper, this is achieved using touch sensors, conductive thread and paint, small webcams, Arduino and Processing, and video projection. Noting the list of references, this project builds on a series of ideas around personifying and anthropomorphising otherwise inanimate objects and pieces of technology. The paper also uses the idea of dreams as a catalogue of our experiences, and thus in this case the dreams of objects being a catalogue of their use through their "eyes," so to speak. However, what interests me the most is the anthropomorphisation of the objects. Two of the previous projects referenced in the paper do similar things with this, creating objects that react in lively, playful, and personality-filled ways, or at least ways that suggest personality or where personality or intelligence can be filled in by the viewer:

Royal Opera House: Audience. from Random International on Vimeo.

Pinokio from Adam Ben-Dror on Vimeo.

Both projects are intentionally ambiguous to a casual viewer - is what you're seeing merely a complex tangle of code, or is there genuine curiosity and intelligence in the way it moves to follow you, or to grab you're attention, or to turn itself back on? It seems that humans are eager to personify the things around them, to put a face to things, to ascribe intelligence, especially when it comes to technology. This was something I dealt with in a project last semester, in which, with the help of Katie Rose Pipkin, I explored the idea of people as very willing to fill in the blanks and perceive intelligence or person-hood where, arguably, none exists:



The central idea of all these projects is fascinating to me, as it brings to mind a question - if genuine artificial intelligence ever developed, would we be able to recognise it? There exists the idea of the Turing test, in which a third party observes a human subject and a computer interacting through a simple text messaging system. If the human subject believes the computer to be another human, the computer has passed the Turing test. Our problem nowadays is that there are computers that could easily pass the Turing test, that learn how to reply to us algorithmically, without what we would call actual intelligence. These projects seem to question what our parameters for intelligence or personality are, and how useful they are (if at all).


[1] Min-Ji Ku, Bo-Kyeong Kim, and Younghui Kim. 2015. What Things Dream Of. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 403-404. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2677199.2690870