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Glitch Art Flip-Flops And Hitting On Drunken Chatbots

Glitch artist Daniel Temkin’s show will feature Drunk Eliza, a chatbot who gradually deteriorates into incoherent slurring.

Here’s a question: how drunk and desperate would you have to be to hit on a drunk chatbot? Tipsy? Merry drunk? Paralytic drunk? Crying and fighting at the same time drunk? It’s something to think about and perhaps even do, if you attend glitch artist Daniel Temkin’s upcoming show at the Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn.

Temkin will be exhibiting his drunken chatbot along with showcasing his glitch art prints in his show “98.1034 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”. In the show Temkin’s programming language Entropy, which “addresses the compulsive side of programming” and decays things over time, is used to manipulate the 1960s chatbot therapist ELIZA to create Drunk Eliza—a chatbot that starts off pretty composed, but like all good people out getting drunk with the best intentions, she starts to slur her words until finally, inevitably, it’s all nonsense.

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Temkin put Drunk Eliza online so the upstanding denizens of the internet could converse with her and, naturally, they tried to hit on her. She’ll be at the exhibition so people can, presumably, get drunk and go speak with some software that can understand them and try and get lucky. For Temkin it’s about how human and machines interact in an less than perfect way “I’m interested in the thought space of people and machines and how they infect each other: computers, unable to regulate themselves, left to run in a frenzy—mimicking our own drunken, chaotic reaction to compulsive logic.”

As well as tanked-up software, the show will also feature Temkin’s Glitchometry prints, created by sonifying black squares and circles and importing them into an audio editor and transforming them with sound effects. They will be displayed on lightboxes to give them added ethereality. Other work at the show includes Chromatic Infestation, which is software that preens itself representing its source code as bacterial culture-like circles, Dither Studies created by misuing Photoshop which he’s printed on flip-flops (above), and Internet Directory created using DNS. “I created a directory of all the URLs beginning with the word ‘serious.’ It has 450 pages—an overwhelming list of poorly selected domain names.”

Check out some of his images below.

Glitchometry

Glitchometry

Glitchometry

Glitchometry

Drunk Eliza

Chromatic Infestation

Dither Studies

98.1034 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, October 5th to October 28th 2012, Devotion Gallery, 54 Maujer St, Brooklyn, NY 11206

@stewart23rd