Changes

==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.

*build in xcode.

*copy /build/Debug/pocketsphinx-osx-continuous to your binaries/ folder. this is the command line program used by the speechtool.scd program.

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