tag: 2007

When the gradually rotating paintbrush strokes the apple's dehydrating, rubbery skin a copper switch is activated, expelling intriguing and unnerving real- life, pre-recorded human 'slurps'.
Equipment Used: Apple, motor, paintbrush, speakers, copper filings, copper wire, glue, metal, wood.

Dimensions: 400mm x 300mm x 200mm.

NooSpeak aims to enhance Web search with human-like interaction, in order to provide users with a more natural and entertaining experience. It merges an existing widely used service (Google Search) with artificial intelligence technology (a pattern knowledge-base written in AIML and its parser) to create a chatting interface to the search engine.
The project starts from the assumption that search is highly computer-centred, forcing people to formulate their questions in an unnatural form, and produces a poor and frustrating experience. The goal of the project is therefore to build an interaction system that facilitates users by adopting their natural language, yet preserves the efficiency of the search engine in finding information on the Web. The first prototype of such a system uses a chatterbot to pre-process human inputs, passing the chatterbot responses to the search engine, from which results it extracts one to be delivered to the user. Search results are then presented inside an interface that borrows from instant messaging software conventions, so that user has a constant overview of her chatting/searching history. The chatterbot role is a diagnostic one, helping users to clarify and refine their search, possibly correcting spelling mistakes.
In order to ease user’s task, the prototype offers real-time suggestions based on popular searches relevant to what user is typing.
It also displays two weighted lists (chat clouds) of semantically related words and synonyms, one gathering data from all users inputs and the other built upon the corpus of Google responses. Chat clouds’ function is to enrich user’s vocabulary, aiding her to find new solutions and build relationships between topics.
A further stage of the project aims to allow users to customize the service: by creating an account, they would be able to actively teach the chatterbot about their preferences, and to see the system improving its performances by analysing their individual data.

an audio narrative featuring the voices of a location. This may be followed with a map.

The perception of a “functioning” human being is controlled by the senses – all of them at once. Separating these senses with technical tools allows one to focus on one sense separately. If we split the senses by technical device we split the body –transforming sensory information into data, projected onto a screen and made accessible in a new way.

A human is transformed into a tool - blindfolded in front of an empty canvas. Another human tries to use this tool to paint. The human tool has a camera attached to his head – the controller is limited by the information given through this device. The human tool gets instructions from the controller via headphones. – with this limited amount of perception and communication the controller tries to create a painting and the tool reacts according to the command.

Further explanation and a video that shows how it works can be found on

Interactivity has become ambient. Individual people are no longer isolated resulting from the scaling up of networks and the scaling down of the apparatus for transmission and reception. Various communication devices always carried are continuously emitting and receiving information. This continuous data flow is both invisible and often, by the majority of people, unknown. Today’s hand-held devices can be seen as extensions of the human body allow ubiquitous, inescapable network interconnectivity.

The ‘Sonification of You’ aims to make this data flow ‘visible’ to those people carrying the active devices. Our equipment will passively scan the various radio spectrum frequencies used by mobile phone devices, Bluetooth, WiFi networks, and others used by mobile devices, within a given space. The data information then represented by assigned audio sounds that will indicate activity, distance, and strength of signals.

Drawing on methods for monitoring large computer networks, the result is to create a background ‘sound’ for a room that is representational of the people, and their devices, present.

The invisible become audible and therefore visible. Allowing individuals to become aware of their constant connectivity.