The Giver of Names explores how the computer translates visual stimuli into language and lets the audience playfully engage with the computer.
This work endows the computer with a resemblance to artificial intelligence in which the computer interprets objects placed by the viewer on a pedestal in front of a video camera. On the video screen above the pedestal, the viewer watches how the computer analyses the colours, textures and outlines of the objects it sees, and then hears how the computer names what it sees by drawing upon an associative databank of language. On the computer screen, the ways in which it uses the associative database are represented as clusters of words retrieved from its memory bank. The result is a flow of grammatically correct, nonsen-sical and often endearing interpretations of objects, an idiosyncratic concrete poetry forged from the viewer's choice of objects and the computer's assembly of words.
As an artificial perceptual system that not only sees but describes, The Giver of Names corresponds to our own internal value system of what makes us social beings through language. Yet at the same time, it mimics rather than embodies how we achieve meaning through naming, lacking the secondary processes of the unconscious dreams, desire and fantasy that shape the complexity of language. In the industrial and military applications of cybernetics, the ethos of artificial intelligence programmers is to mask the gap between human and machine. As an artist, Rokeby is committed to critically questioning this gap, revealing through the computer's linguistic sophistication the differences between deductive logic and our cultural and subjective framework for meaning. In the process, he cautions us against accepting the authority of computers to interpret the world for us.
[LESS]The Giver of Names explores how the computer translates visual stimuli into language and lets the audience playfully engage with the computer.
This work endows the computer with a resemblance to artificial intelligence in which the computer interprets objects placed by the viewer on a pedestal in front of a video camera. On the video screen above the pedestal, the viewer watches how the computer analyses the colours, textures and outlines of the objects it sees, and then hears how the computer names what it sees by drawing upon an associative databank of language. On the computer screen, the ways in which it uses the associative database are represented as clusters of words retrieved from its memory bank. The result is a flow of grammatically correct, nonsen-sical and often endearing interpretations of objects, an idiosyncratic concrete poetry forged from the viewer's choice of objects and the computer's assembly of words.
As an artificial perceptual system that not only sees but describes, The Giver of Names corresponds to our own internal value system of what makes us social beings through language. Yet at the same time, it mimics rather than embodies how we achieve meaning through naming, lacking the secondary processes of the unconscious dreams, desire and fantasy that shape the complexity of language. In the industrial and military applications of cybernetics, the ethos of artificial intelligence programmers is to mask the gap between human and machine. As an artist, Rokeby is committed to critically questioning this gap, revealing through the computer's linguistic sophistication the differences between deductive logic and our cultural and subjective framework for meaning. In the process, he cautions us against accepting the authority of computers to interpret the world for us.
