20 Feb Video Portrait

I worked with Tong Wu on the video portrait assignment. We created a room-sized installation called “Meeting the Machine in the Middle”. The name of the project is inspired by an interview with Brian Christian, in which he says:

Oxford philosopher John Lucas says that if the Turing test is passed, it will not be “because machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least, are so wooden.” We’ve substituted the phone call for face-to-face interaction, and then we substituted the email for the phone, and then we substituted the text message for the email, and then we substituted emojis for these text exchanges. We’re steadily moving lower and lower down the totem pole of bandwidth, in terms of the way we interact with each other. That is not a world in which the Turing Test is going to hold up for very long. That to me is the irony here, that we’re sort of meeting the machines in the middle.

Below is an image of the rules we set up before shooting the video for the installation.