In the recent Spike Jonze film “Her,” a lonely man buys a futuristic Siri-style computer program designed to interact fluently with humans. The program’s female voice speaks intimately to its owner through an earpiece, while also organizing his e-mails and keeping track of his appointments, until eventually he falls in love with it. Watching it happen is unsettling because of how well the program works on our human protagonist—how powerfully this computerized, disembodied simulation of a woman affects him.
The piece of software at the heart of “Her” only exists within a work of science fiction, of course—one set in a comfortably vague point in the future. While today’s smartphones and computers do “talk” to their users, they do so without the emotionally potent and slightly unpredictable qualities that might make a machine feel human.
But in certain quarters, automated beings with that exact set of qualities have already started to emerge. For the past few years, tiny computer programs have been telling jokes, writing poems, complaining, commenting on the news, and awkwardly flirting—on the Web and through the medium of Twitter, where their messages live side by side with those composed by the carbon-based life-forms who take daily delight in their antics.
One of the most prolific makers of these little programs—or bots, as they’re known—is 30-year-old Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer who lives in Somerville and works at a technology company called Bocoup, while devoting himself to the veritable petting zoo of autonomous digital creatures he has invented in his free time.
Chances are you haven’t heard of Kazemi. But over the past two years, he has emerged as one of the most closely watched and pioneering figures at the intersection of technology, cultural commentary, and what feels to many like a new kind of Web-native art. (...)
Kazemi’s dozens of projects have won him admirers among a range of people so wide it suggests the world doesn’t quite have a category for him yet. His work is tracked by video game designers, comedians, philosophers, and fellow bot-makers; an English literature professor named Leonardo Flores has written about the output of his bots in an online journal devoted to electronic poetry. Web designer Andrew Simone, who follows Kazemi’s work, calls him “a deeply subversive, bot-making John Cage.”
Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.
By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi’s bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they’re more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation—ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free.
The piece of software at the heart of “Her” only exists within a work of science fiction, of course—one set in a comfortably vague point in the future. While today’s smartphones and computers do “talk” to their users, they do so without the emotionally potent and slightly unpredictable qualities that might make a machine feel human.But in certain quarters, automated beings with that exact set of qualities have already started to emerge. For the past few years, tiny computer programs have been telling jokes, writing poems, complaining, commenting on the news, and awkwardly flirting—on the Web and through the medium of Twitter, where their messages live side by side with those composed by the carbon-based life-forms who take daily delight in their antics.
One of the most prolific makers of these little programs—or bots, as they’re known—is 30-year-old Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer who lives in Somerville and works at a technology company called Bocoup, while devoting himself to the veritable petting zoo of autonomous digital creatures he has invented in his free time.
Chances are you haven’t heard of Kazemi. But over the past two years, he has emerged as one of the most closely watched and pioneering figures at the intersection of technology, cultural commentary, and what feels to many like a new kind of Web-native art. (...)
Kazemi’s dozens of projects have won him admirers among a range of people so wide it suggests the world doesn’t quite have a category for him yet. His work is tracked by video game designers, comedians, philosophers, and fellow bot-makers; an English literature professor named Leonardo Flores has written about the output of his bots in an online journal devoted to electronic poetry. Web designer Andrew Simone, who follows Kazemi’s work, calls him “a deeply subversive, bot-making John Cage.”
Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.
By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi’s bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they’re more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation—ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free.
by Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe | Read more:
Image: Lane Turner
