ongoing

completed

Influencing Machine

Two people enter a small room. Child-like scribbling appears across a wall: jagged lines, circles, spirals, and other shapes build up, overlap, fade away. Scattered throughout the room are postcards with art prints or color fields; on a table stands a wooden mailbox. One person picks up a card and tentatively puts it in the box. Unusual and musical sounds begin to play. Drawings change speed, color, pressure, form. The people begin sorting through cards, dropping them in the box and seeing how the graphics and sound change. They play, experiment, discuss: "How is this reacting to us?" "How do you think this works?"

Technically, the system works by using the input postcards marked with machine-readable bar codes to influence an internal emotional model. These internal emotions trigger sounds and the selection of drawing behaviors and their dynamic parameters: speed, color, size, pressure, etc. When the machine receives input, system drawings tend to become gradually more complex; when it has not received input for several minutes it restarts. While this technical description is precise and clean, the emotional interpretation of the graphical output and postcards by users is complex, incompletely specifiable, open-ended, and strongly culturally influenced. The Influencing Machine explores the tension between machines and affective beings in affective computing; how will people relate to a machine whose emotions they can influence, but whose behavior they cannot control?

The Influencing Machine is a collaboration with Rainer Liesendahl, Werner Magar, and Christoph Seibert.