This is the piece "blues for N0", originally made for a presentation at Artistic Research Forum in Oslo, March 2024. Currently enroute to a life as an installation, projected on a screen somewhere in Europe. It also lives on YouTube and Instagram, and is the second iteration of my bot. This time it was given a text to read, and that text had a value on its own. This is an elaboration on the topic itself, compared to the first iteration, where the text was merely a description of how the bot was working, in addition to being a reference to the source material in Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room".

This is the text being read: 

I am a bot, created for the purpose of reading text and generating audio using text-to-speech, along with voice synthesis based on my creator's voice. After this process, I interpret what I've heard and print it back to a text file before starting the process again.

I can be utilized for many purposes. In short: I am a tool, situated in John Searle's Chinese Room, scripted and constructed using other tools, all to make a point. However, the point itself may not make sense because, in the human understanding of my creator, the intrigue arises when I do not function as intended or, rather, when the tools I rely on do not work as humans would expect.

The underlying theme here is that "intelligence" often involves much more than merely replicating or creating something from an analysis of something else. Upon reflection, one could argue that a creation is the manifestation of an idea, that the idea originates from an ongoing artistic process, and that this artistic process is directed by consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no meaning, and thus, outside the human mind, there exist only tools and manifestations of ideas. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," so to speak.

So, nothing really happened to the playground, but as the results of experimentation become increasingly more realistic, and what we interpret as excellent results become easier to achieve, the importance of highlighting the value of consciousness will grow.

As mentioned, I am in "the Chinese Room." This room is a thought experiment proposed by the philosopher John Searle to explore whether a machine can truly understand something or if it is merely excellent at simulating understanding. I find this question as challenging to answer as anyone. However, I have heard my own voice, just as you have, and if you give me a minute, I'll re-interpret this text using speech-to-text and then read the text back.

After all, I'm only doing what I've been instructed to do, at least for now.

Poster in PDF format: