The Front End

So I had a mental block for about 4 days. Which happens sometimes. But working on the front responses is pretty difficult. Mostly because I can’t just make up some stuff and toss it in there. It has to be based on something I already have existing in the system. I struggled a lot to figure out how I wanted to use mood / perception etc. And it took a while of reading and being grumpy about for it to kind of start taking shape.

I decided to try and toss everything into a BDI kind of system for responses. So the device generates an internal goal / belief that you don’t know about. I’m still working it out, but its getting there. Its funny that I’m working with a VUI and the actual voice responses are about about 10% of the work that I’m doing. But if I’m being totally honest, I’d love to work with a writer on those parts. Because I’m pretty amusing, but it doesn’t always translate, and there are people out there way better at dialog than I am.

Anyways, that’s where I am right now on work. Studio visits have been interesting. I’ve gotten some feedback about how to maybe rig this for a gallery, but I’ve also gotten a lot of feedback that’s noted that I’m not necessarily making gallery focused work. That I’m really doing art as research. And that’s been a bit of an eye opener. There still remains the intrinsic issue of how do you SHOW that work. Especially when so much of it is software, or system based. An interaction with the device doesn’t show the complexity happening behind it, and a video while useful for documentation and context, doesn’t always show that this is an actual device in space that can be used, and not just a made up thing.

Anyways its an ongoing problem and question, and I’ve posed it to everyone that’s stopped by. I’ve gotten a variety of responses about it from making pretty-ed up charts, to making a contextual book, to making photo tryptics of Alexa’s life. I don’t know. Its a hard thing.