Do Humans Dream of Empathy Boxes?
At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a new exhibit entitled “Talk to Me” focuses on the way humans interact with technology, either in communicating with each other or speaking with the objects themselves. If that sounds like a pretty broad subject, it is. Everyone will definitely find something intriguing among the 200 or so individual projects, and while I won’t go through a checklist of them all, I’ll tell you about a few that I like, and why.
I’m slightly obsessed with the future. That’s why I spent most of my time investigating projects like “Augmented (hyper) Reality: Augmented City 3D.” This project is a stereoscopic video, showing a theoretical near future where status updates, email, news, and more are all projected around us a la Minority Report, enabling us to read, select, touch, and interact with everything virtually in the air right in front of us.
Coooooooool...
Another theoretical, futuristic project called “Happylife,” consists of installed sensors that would read the biometrics of, say, individuals in a household and display them on the wall using a series of colored dials. I like aspects of this for comforting our closest human beings, but I also see how this could turn our society into one of those dystopian “everyone must be happy at all times” worlds.
DNA is the new MTG.
While many of the projects are theoretical or strictly idealistic, there are also quite a few tangible projects that have me fired up. “Helix” is a card game (still in prototype phase), wherein each person submits a bit of their DNA and is in turn given a unique 50-card deck based on their actual genetic information. They then play against another player, pitting their actual genetic traits against each other. The game claims to reward strategy and decision making while limiting players to their genetic reality.
There’s also a super cool “SMSlingshot,” which is an actual wooden slingshot with a cell phone built into the handle. A video demonstration from Germany shows people on the street entering their SMS messages, taking aim at a large public billboard, and “shooting” a splattered digital message that instantly appears appears on the billboard. It’s interesting to imagine the possibilities of this as an app where users can leave their mark on countless public surfaces around a city like legal graffiti.
You don't have to spray it to say it.
If you’re looking to leave a more humble mark, there’s “Broken White,” a line of ceramic dinnerware where the clay is designed to slowly and stylishly crack underneath the finish the more it is used. The idea behind this is that most ceramics are designed to be flawless and when cracked, they are easily discarded; but if the ceramic is designed to crack over time, then instead of “flaws,” a set of dishes might develop “character” the more they’re decorated with imperfections (just like humans).
Don't be fooled. Robots don't feel emotions.
One of the maybe simplest and most fascinating exhibits might be “Tweenbot”, which simply consists of a tiny cardboard robot with a smiling face constantly spinning wheels and a flag that asks people to point it towards a specific destination. In the context of human-object relations, it was interesting to watch people help it along (one guy even talked to it, explaining that the street is a dangerous place for a tiny robot to be), but I would have liked to see the results of the robot having an angry face, a picture of a politician’s face, or even no face at all.
My favorite part of “Talk to Me” is that it got me to think about the way we interact with things that inherently can’t interact back. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it now. Guess I’d better hop on the exhibition’s site and practice my finger-to-keyboard interfacing before it becomes old-fashioned.
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