Archive for February, 2005



I’ve met an awful lot of female chatbots out there.

ELIZA
JULIA
ALICE
LAUREN

Pygmalion’s shadow stretches over these bots and others, and gender play lives on in the DNA of Turing’s Test’s progeny.
Oh, and not to mention a few notable men:

JOHN
JACK

To be a chatbot (or to perform human conversation) seems to require gendering. But this aspect of the […]

Want & Need

An ASCII Art exhibition is the sum of SMS contributions and more. The thematic thread is prefigured with the following:

Today Want & Need have become confused.
Our desires transform what is wanted into something essential.
Our consumption can no longer be taken for granted. What I want is …what I need….

The operational thread is realised through a […]

Subservient Chicken

If we conceive of text command line art as “you type (words and phrases), it types back” then what if it talks back… or displays photo collages… or plays video clips?
The “Subservient Chicken” web interface is an interesting example of the freedoms and limits that come with wiring an IF or chatbot command line style […]