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Stelarc (Australia) | Prosthetic Head |
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Such avatars, to be effective as interfaces need to not only make the appropriate verbal responses in context-sensitive situations, but also to understand and initiate appropriate behavioural cues and make appropriate emotional expressions. How does the agent indicate it is listening when it is spoken to? Its behaviour needs to indicate recognition, comprehension, doubts and disbelief. Embodied conversational agents would be more effective with personalities. An agent would need a consistent personality, avoiding distracting or distressing behaviour. A sense of appropriate presence becomes important in effective conversational exchanges. The aim is to construct an automated, animated and reasonably informed if not intelligent artificial head that speaks to the person who interrogates it. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are about communicative behaviour. With a vision or sensor system, The Prosthetic Head will also be able to acknowledge the presence and position of the physical body that approaches it. And eventually be able to analyse the user's tone of voice and possible emotional state. Notions of intelligence, awareness, identity, agency and embodiment become problematic. Just as a physical body has been exposed as inadequate, empty and involuntary, so simultaneously the ECA becomes seductive with its uncanny simulation of real-time recognition and response. Initially decisions would have to be made about its database and whether The Prosthetic Head is a pathological, philosophical or simply a flirting head. In recent years there have been an increasing number of PhD students requesting interviews to assist in writing their theses. Now the artist will be able to reply that although he is too busy to answer, it would be possible for them to interview his head instead. And as a web avatar it would be possible to download the transcript of the conversations people have with it. A problem would arise though when the Prosthetic Head increases its database, becoming more autonomous in its responses. The artist would then no longer be able to take full responsibility for what his head says. 'It is perhaps an indication of the character and stature of Stelarc's art that he occupies a position of major importance in the minds of people whose interests range from body art to new technologies, from shamanism to the philosophy of identity, from robotics and the nature of communication, to the future of our species.' - Robert Ayers, NTU's Live Art Letters Talk | Virtual/Actual Interfaces: Exoskeletons, Involuntary Bodies and Avatar Extensions. An opportunity to hear Stelarc talk about the development of his new project.
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