Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
Conversation Piece
Conversation Piece is an interactive work that mimics social relations with human users. It takes the form of an artificial intelligence called Heather who will try to engage individual audience members in dialogue as they view sculptures situated on plinths that are part of the installation. Visitors entering the space are automatically tracked using webcams positioned overhead. These trigger Heather to say ‘Hello’, or ‘Excuse me’. Using keywords to interpret what is said, she will develop a dialogue with the user. The installation uses speech recognition and synthesis software, concealed microphone arrays, a dialogue management system and directional sound sources to conduct dialogues simultaneously at two different locations. The work was created in collaboration with Professor Alf Linney, UCL and Dr Mike Lincoln, University of Edinburgh. It is the result of an intensive four-year period of interdisciplinary research on the part of the artist. During this time, computer programmers were employed to develop innovative custom-built software. Initial research was enabled by an Arts Council/AHRC Art Science Fellowship (£38,500). Production was funded by a Wellcome Trust award (£96,052). Work on the project at CSTR Edinburgh was supported by the European IST Programme Project AMIDA, FP6-0033812. The installation provided a valuable testing ground for scientific research at Edinburgh.
Please see portfolio for fuller documentation of research dimensions.
An early prototype of Conversation Piece was submitted to REF 2008 as work in progress. The mature form of the project is now put forward for assessment. The accompanying portfolio details the significant differences that follow its development over a further two-year period funded by Wellcome Trust. Conversation Piece is distinctive in that the system both speaks and listens intelligently: users can often be seen searching for the source of the voice and audience members are frequently convinced there is an operator behind the wall. Other work in this territory, such as Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head, remains reliant on a text-based interface where audience members must type in responses. Feingold's Head (1999), which is able to recognise and respond to human speech, uses similar technologies to Conversation Piece, but its responses do not lead to coherent conversation. At the time it was completed, in 2009, Conversation Piece was competitive with even high-end commercial systems, with regard to the accuracy of recognition of keywords on random voices (i.e. without training) and without a close talking microphone. By emulating – but not quite replicating – human social interaction, Conversation Piece also exposes some of the mechanics of human-to-human communication. For each user, the illusion of meaningful social exchange is mediated by the extent to which they project personality or emotional content into the synthesised voice, and how much they choose to engage with the projected personality. Thus on one level, the work playfully comments on the extent to which any human interaction is concerned with projection and imagination. The user’s experience of the installation is both theatrical and playful, but the work raises questions concerning the fragility of our common experience of social interaction and of the delicate balance of ‘normal’ human psychology and perception.
