Entertainment does not come for free …

Thanks to advances in technology, a restricted number of digital artists, in the line of a long-lasting tradition that goes from the Prometheus of the Greek mythology to the most recent Hollywood movie ’Robot and Frank’, focused their creativity on the many possible ways of evoking agency into the inanimate: the computer/robot. By evoking agency, the aim is therefore to enhance the perceived parity and mutuality of the conversation between humans and computers. Yet, a truly convincing non-human agent enabling a peer-to-peer conversation is no-more than a dream, shared and offered by the artist to an audience. Following a functional approach, it appears that the real agents are only the humans. In contrast, freed from any ’intelligentsia’, the computer becomes an enslaved entertainment/facilitator tool for the agents’ needs. This view, in line with current human-centered views in HCI, is explained here in terms of human-computer-human (HCH) interactions. In light of these considerations, I am speculating that the perception of a computer’s agency could be evoked with a different approach. This approach reverses the roles of each element constituting the system: thus, making the human a tool for the communication between non-human agents. In my work titled Entertainment does not come for free… I attempt to provide the dream of agency to the non-humans (i.e. the computers) by creating a speculative computer-human-computer interaction.

Technical Details:Developed in Objective-C and openFrameworks.