“I’m taking part in this installation but nobody asked me if I wanted to”
Quotation is taken from the conversation with self-learning chatbot new haven ‘new haven’ is an interactive multimedia installation based on a self-learning chatbot, conceived as a site of human and non-human encounter within an exhibition space.
Data from each dialogue between the chatbot and exhibition visitors is anonymously collected and used to increase the AI’s database, which results in the gradual transfiguration of the chatbot.
Acting as a creator and unpaid laborer, a human partner in conversation voluntarily improves the database and shapes future dialogues, constantly sliding between anonymity and exposure. There is no certainty in regards to the potential use of each and single phrase fed to a chatbot, what leads to unexpected results and collision of meanings. Confronted by human perception, seemingly absurd sequences of questions and answers are often becoming of poetic value, revealing the weak promise of glimmering (non)sense, and accentuating the mechanisms which shape the production of sense in general.
