ON Saturday night, I showed a new work, called Present Perfect Continuous, in Brighton, UK, as part of the White Night Festival. Present Perfect Continuous is a chat engine – it reworks scype, changing everything you have written into present tense. I have been working with Matt Iacobini to program the work. The development of this work has taken over a year or more now. This event was the first time we had tested the work. As I was not there, I chatted to people from Beijing, I am trying to get a sense of how it was recieved. Apparantly the event had 4000 visitors in the one night.
I asked Matt to write his thoughts
– I felt it was a success on many levels, very satisfying. …I had the feeling it was conductive towards people experiencing facets and nuances of shyness at many levels. They weren’t sure what the installation was doing so that made them feel less secure they could speak with me and they didn’t know me or to each other, to the people that had tried it before, and they didn’t know each other much either.
Then there was the chatting and chatting with other people watching what you are typing can put pressure on and generate bashfulness etc.. There were some people that were a bit older or in general with very little experience of technology that had the chance to try chatting for the first time, and I could see on their faces that it was throwing them into some pretty deep thought while coming to terms with the new social realities of digital communication… There was certainly the potential for people realising that when they are in the privacy of their own home chatting away to their friends there is no reason to assume that there aren’t people reading what they are typing.
Then there was the fact of not knowing if they were chatting to a person or a computer… Were they really talking to the person behind them or was it a hoax, or perhaps the subversion went so far that the lines would be burred between chatting with the other person or the machine. There was certainly a dimension of the appropriation of the tool that we will be able to peer into better once we look at the logs and get the data in interviewing tasha and carla. I think this is a hallmark of successful design when people can appropriate it and use it in surprising ways. They were messing around sending weird and wonderful messages to each other, switching places without the other person knowing… There were points in which it wasn’t clear if it was a man or a woman they were speaking to…
I would say that most of the people that we didn’t tell that the computer was making changes didn’t actually know it.
There were various artists and psychologists sociologists linguists etc.. That passed by in the night and I had a chat with and presented the idea, and most of them had a very positive reaction.
There is also a whole lot of stuff we will be able to see looking at the logs, for example if people tend to use the present tense more at the beginning or the end of the chat, and no doubt we will discover many things we didn’t notice.
I had a feeling that the idea was excellent and that it is versatile and has a lot of potential applications. In an art gallery context an artist suggested we could go along with an idea such as having booths to make people feel safer and make the experience be more immersive and anonymous… The factor of doubt and wonder was strong as I saw it in their eyes and is very easy to play on both through the way the layout and installation is made and the way that the people are briefed or not briefed beforehand, this would no doubt have a strong effect on the experience and what people may get from it.
On the other hand there are also many possibilities purely online, and that has a lot of potential for gathering a lot of data.
Let me know when you want to talk, it would make it easier for me if I know what direction we are thinking of so that I know better what questions to ask.
Hope to speak with you soon.
Kind regards,
Matt
