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→Proposal - Solipsist
I have been working with voice recognition technologies and Mel Bochner's text 'Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism', developing a device for performance and exchange between human and computer. The device consists of a microphone, speech recognition system, software, and a receipt printer. The format of the conversation is an dialog between human voice and printed receipts in text--the system transcribes (and validates) what it hears in terms of the words it knows. As is characteristic of voice recognition, face recognition, and other kinds of machine perception that operate within explicitly defined or statistically trained spaces of "perception", this is a solipsistic system, "denying the existence of anything outside the confines of its own mind" (Bochner, 1967). This character of the solipsist is one Mel Bochner evoked to describe the autonomy and denial of external reference in minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, but which I find particularly appropriate to describe current "smart" technologies--ultimately the agency of the system still comes down to whatever agency the programmers have embedded in it, a sort of ventriloquism. This idea of a closed, narrowly parameterized space of perception in the machine is an interesting model for (and contrast to) issues of language, vocabulary, and free expression in humans--an exploration I intend to pursue through this project.
There are multiple challenges in developing this piece as a performance/installation. The first and most pragmatic concrete is the to get a baseline speech recognition system working. I have implemented this in the fall using the Sphinx-4 speech recognition library in Processing and Java. I have also acquired a receipt printer, ribbon, and paper, and can control its printing behavior through a serial interface. Details are in the [[#Code | Code]] section. This is the "proof of concept".
The development of roles for two characters in this piece--the system and the participant--is necessary to create the kind of encounter I have in mind. On the one hand, I would like this project to investigate the strengths and limitations of the speech recognition technology through viewer interaction, and on the other hand I would like to create a psychological investigation which highlights our human propensity to project psychology onto inanimate things and to attribute intention to them. Explicit attention in constructing the roles of both performers (human and machine) and in framing the situation will tease out some of the interesting ideas in both of these domains.
