The Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine is a surreal exploration of language and our strange relationship with talking to machines, from customer service bots to “intelligent assistants”. It combines projection and robotics to explore the crossover between the virtual and the physical. Viewers’ spoken words are converted into text and launched into the virtual world. They accumulate there, sometimes kicked by a robotic foot and sometimes sucked back out into the world as sound.
The sound and wordplay installation by maker Neil Mendoza was featured with “over 650 interactive exhibits exploring perception, art, and science” at an After Dark event at San Francisco’s Exploratorium in January, 2019.
Previously from Mendoza: Rock Band.
Plus: Karl Sims’ Evolved Virtual Creatures, Poet on the Shore, mechanical singing bird box automata of the 1700s, and Will Computers Ever Hear Like People Do?
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