thanks for blogging it, jay, and also to the panel of the last podcast. the comment in the podcast (was it don’s?) that the piece is “smart but uninteresting” was right on point. because that was exactly the feeling i had when listening to quite some of the previous podcasts.
as arahan said, what the bot chats is “rather empty”, it lacks subtlety, it quickly becomes “boring and annoying”. yes. this was my intention. the bot’s phrases are dull, repetitive, and uninformed. that’s the reason why i used a pretty simple ‘algorithm’ for generating the phrases, about 20 prefabricated ones (including one with a typo) with a placeholder for the work. far from anything intelligent. i even chose a fixed delay between each utterance, which adds to the machine-like stupidity.

why creating such a work? this spambot was my reaction to the decreasing quality of discourse at BiW, a reflection on the current state of BiW, and as such it should mention the names of the objects on the sim and their owners, but it was intended to be uninformed and annoying (again: i really like the comment in the podcast: smart but uninteresting, yes!).

of course, the bot could have been more realistic by making these empty and uninformed phrases negative instead of positive (that’s what usually happens on the podcasts now), but i didn’t want to hurt the artist’s feelings by negative opinions. perhaps that decision was a mistake. well.

finally, regarding ichibot’s chatbot: i remember that very well, his piece was really gorgeous, and i certainly was inspired by it. i was even surprised that jay didn’t mention ichi’s chatbot in the podcast, because the parallel was so obvious. actually, i considered asking ichibot for help for this one, but finally only showed it to him when it was already running. ichibot then contributed a couple of works with incredible names, which are not visible on the sim, but which were scanned and are mentioned by the chatbot.

Left by Selavy on May 14th, 2009

I spoke with Selavy about this yesterday but I’ll repeat the basics of what I said.

Just knowing now it is by Selavy Oh does change my perception of the piece entirely, firstly because we are all well aware what a brilliant artist he is, and obviously does not need to steal ideas from anybody, so that’s a non-issue. Most crucially, I understand now what he was trying to say with the ’spambot’, the brief and lazy comments that it spewed out were intended as holding up a mirror to the BiW project and so works on an all together different level than I first perceived. So, it transpires that my initial comments about the piece were a logical reaction, I just was way off with the plagiarism accusation!

Ichibot has been shamelessly copied though before, and it was done in such an underhand and calculating way, it was sickening. I witnessed the artist concerned grilling Ichi about the scripting techniques he used in a piece on the BiW sim, I actually said to Ichi at the time that I thought this guy was dodgy and I bet he would steal his ideas. Lo and behold not too long after that incident the artist in question unveiled a piece that blatantly stole Ichibot’s exact same scripting technique. Despicable.

So, when I was confronted with the ’spambot’ I immediately leapt to the conclusion it was by the charlatan, you can probably understand why now I’ve explained it.

Ichi would probably not appreciate me talking about all this, he can fight his own battles if he chooses to after all. But it turns out that a combination of Selavy’s carefully considered concept, the resulting reactions to the piece and my fat mouth might have had a positive effect on the project after all, so it’s all good.

Now as much as I would be tempted to move to NYC I can’t get together a reasonable proposal in the next 10 hours Jay!

Left by Arahan Claveau on May 14th, 2009

Oh and Jay, you linked to a piece by Ichibot above, but that actually wasn’t what I was referring to, it was a different piece that used a similar technique, it also grabbed quotes from the SL blog and other websites. I forget the name of it but the central structure was like a miniature grid or city you could walk over, it was white objects set at different heights. I wish I had pictures of it but I don’t think I do, it was definitely talked about on an early podcast, I’ll try to find it.

Left by Arahan Claveau on May 14th, 2009

I talked about Selavy’s piece on the podcast last night, but want to chime in here, too, about an aspect of it. The piece worked for/on/at me in that it annoyed the frak out of me when I trying to use the local chat at the sim to have a conversation with friends about the, uh, art. Textus interruptus! We got what it was trying to do: Is that what we sound like? etc. We got tired of the chat and went someplace else.

Later, when I came back alone and got past the level of annoyance, I found that it called attention not so much to the level of SL art discourse, or sim conversation, but the medium and technology through which we have it: computer-mediated-communication (CMC). What do we use local chat for? And what goes on “unheard” in IM? Maybe that is where people say the more critical comments. How do we use these two channels to communicate, and how cool is it that we can switch to the private one and still be involved in the public one, even if it doesn’t tell the whole story, or a different one? Selavy’s piece made me consider these practices of our virtual life. The public and private are different in a virtual world, and what does that do to a space that is trying to reshape the idea of public art, of critique?

I’ve been reading a lot by a researcher named Joseph Walther, who has been tearing it up writing many papers about CMC, and suggests that how we communicate with text messages creates “hyperpersonal communication.” One of things that can happen in hyperpersonal communication is that we overemphasize similarities and ignore differences as we forge connections between the idealized, edited self we are putting out there and our image of the idealized other with whom we communicate. It is one of the fun things about interacting with avatars. Selavy’s piece raises that–all positive reinforcement; maybe it is all the bright sunshine in SL! If we start to think about this in terms of a project like Brooklyn Is Watching, which is on the one hand about putting art out there for discussion and critique, and on the other hand about community, it gets interesting fast, because we are using so many modes of communication, and the local chat is just one of them. We are in a new environment, making new forms of art and narrative, and creating new social and psychological contexts for communicating about them. Although BIW is part of a mixed reality project, the art and the discourse are still located in the virtual world, and most of our relationships with each other begin there.

Bottom line: the medium is still the message. I wish there were a way to interact with Selavy’s chatter-blather, because I have a few choice words for it at this point, and would like to go a few rounds. But even an interactive chatbot would only be satisfying for a moment, of course, because in real discourse, there is someone there, even if it is an idealized collaborator in hyperpersonal communication–or art talk.

See: Joseph B. Walther, “Selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication: Hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition” at http://newmedia.cityu.edu.hk/en5608/readings/Walther%202006.pdf This scholarly essay focuses mostly on asynchronous CMC, but the ideas are intriguing, and he has more recent essays that address synchronous CMC, if you google him.

Left by L1AuraLoire on May 14th, 2009

The chatbot was a perfect pastiche of all the real-life multiple artist receptions I’ve been to where alcohol was available and the level of discourse (for me anyway) turned to static. I wasn’t rezzed yet during Ichibot’s earlier versions but wish I could have experienced them. I did see something similar at Arena, where the psychological effect was to make me look very closely at Selavy (who normally would have scared noobie me away). That chatspam for a time consisted almost solely of the two of us allegedly making fearful and loving remarks about each other, completely filling the screen. It had the strangest effect of suggestibility.

When someone comes to me at an art exhibition and chats me up beyond my comfort level I tell them about this Doctor Who episode which usually makes them either become more interesting or makes them leave me alone, depending on if they think I’m making fun of them or if they get that the situation itself is absurd (and I may have already posted it in a comment here LOL- if I have just consider it a rerun):

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The Doctor, Romana and Duggan rush frantically back to the Tardis to try to reach the Jaggeroth ship before the Count. As they reach the gallery the Tardis is being contemplated by two art critics, played by John Cleese and Eleanor Bron:

CLEESE: For me the most curious thing about the piece is its wonderful a-functionalism.

BRON: Yes — I see what you mean. Divorced from its function and seen purely as a work of art, its structure of line and colour is obviously counterpointed by the redundant vestiges of its function.

CLEESE: And since it has no call to be here the art lies in the fact that it is here.

The Doctor and his companions rush past them and enter the Tardis. The door closes and, with the critics still contemplating it, the Tardis dematerialises.

BRON: (now staring at the empty gallery space left by the vanished Tardis): Exquisite. Absolutely exquisite.

Cleese nods sagely in agreement, and with a gesture signifies “superb.”

– Douglas Adams and Graham Williams Doctor Who “City of Death” Part Four

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Left by Mab MacMoragh on May 15th, 2009