stelarc - prosthetic head
Prosthetic Head, 2002
Technical Description:
Live, interactive embodied conversational agent displayed as single-channel projection; mono audio.
Interactive; colour
Project coordination, system configuration and Alicebot customisation: Karen Marcelo
Customisation of 3D animation and text to speech software: Sam Trychin
3D modelling and animation: Barrett Fox
Interactive ultrasound system: Harry Sokol, 4DFX Software
System configuration and technical advice: John Waters
Creator of Alicebot and AIML Alicebot advisor: Dr Richard Wallace
Collection: the artist
Courtesy: the artist
Stelarc is featured in a number of documentaries that are available through ACMI's Lending Collection, including Cyberdelia (1991) directed by Steve Spangaro - a fascinating look at early Australian video and computer art that you can also see in the Memory Grid.
contents: essay | artist's bio | artist's statement
Prosthetic Head is a work that asks questions, both literally and philosophically. As visitors sit at the keyboard conducting a dialogue in real time with a large-scale projection of a digitally animated head, a strange thing happens: intellectually, they know they are just pushing buttons to activate software, yet they find themselves feeling their way through the conversation, hoping the head will maintain the logical flow, or perhaps perversely, willing him to get it wrong, and fail the 'like a human' test.
Humans have so much invested in the effective operation of communication skills that it is difficult to hold a genuinely disinterested conversation with anyone, even a machine. The moment we suspect that we are not being understood, we become vulnerable, often expressing this as contempt: who hasn't felt 'interface rage' when the automated teller machine or telephone system fails to respond to our last-minute change of mind? Conversely, if a machine responds at all appropriately, on some level we immediately begin to engage.
For a virtual automaton, Prosthetic Head is uncannily good at behaving like a person holding a conversation, and offers a fascinating starting point from which to think about the act of communication and its relationship to consciousness. If consciousness can be imagined as a complex collection of behaviours and responses, then theoretically, these can be identified in the brain and nervous system and copied or performed by non-living technologies. The alternative argument suggests that consciousness emerges from some yet-to-be-understood phenomenon, possibly having a collective social or cultural origin. While the debate continues to unfold amongst scientists and philosophers who argue about the degree to which animals, ecosystems or computers can experience self-awareness, science fiction has been writing the conscious machine into existence for decades. Prosthetic Head focuses our attention on the performative aspects of conscious behaviour, and questions the assumptions we make about the kind of intelligence required to drive a meaningful exchange of words.
Stelarc describes Prosthetic Head as a development of his previous work creating extensions for the physical body, such as the Third Hand and Exoskeleton, only this time the interface is between the actual and the virtual, not the muscular and mechanical. As cyberspace continues to expand and influence not only our experience of communication, but also our whole way of being in the world, Prosthetic Head suggests evolutionary possibilities for the body using information technology.
The Head will have as many different conversations as people who talk to it. Maybe the whole idea of it falls into the category of wistful imagining, to be unmasked as an ambitious illusion of competence, like the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, or maybe the Head is a prototype for a user-friendly exchange point - coming soon to a checkout near you. Maybe visitors will envisage what they would do with their own prosthetic head: Stelarc has suggested that the Head may be able to help him reply to the many requests he gets from PhD students for interviews. Possibly, the Head is a distant relation of HAL, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey that tried to wrest control from its human operators, and sadly sang nursery rhymes as it was being unplugged.
As you ponder these options, why not ask Prosthetic Head to sing for you (or even to recite his own poetry). He'll be happy to oblige.
1946 - Born in Limassol, Cyprus; lives in Melbourne, Australia; works internationally
Stelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA, in a range of contexts including new music, dance and media art festivals, and experimental theatre. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the internet to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.
He has developed and performed with a Third Hand, a Virtual Arm, a Virtual Body and a Stomach Sculpture. He has done 25 body Suspensions with insertions into the skin. Projects such as Fractal Flesh and Ping Body have explored remote access to the body's muscular and nervous systems. Recent projects include the Extra Ear, the Extended Arm, Exoskeleton and a Motion Prosthesis - an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive and accelerated programming of the arms in real time.
In 1995, Stelarc received a three-year fellowship from the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council. In 1997, he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1998, he was artist-in-residence for Hamburg City. In 1999, he was re-appointed as a Senior Research Scholar for the Faculty of Art and Design at the Nottingham Trent University. In 2000 he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Monash University. His artwork is represented by the Sherman Galleries in Sydney.
Website link
http://www.stelarc.va.com.au
The aim is to construct an automated, animated, reasonably informed and somewhat intelligent artificial head that speaks to the person who questions it. The Prosthetic Head project is an embodied conversational agent with real time lip-syncing and facial expressions. The eyeballs, teeth and tongue are separate moving elements in the 3000 polygon mesh model. It has a database on a server in Philadelphia. As a conversational system, it requires a human user. The Head is only as intelligent as the person who interrogates it. As well as answering personal, professional and philosophical questions, the Prosthetic Head has algorithms that generate simple poetry and singing.
The Prosthetic Head will become more seductive with a vision system that detects information about the user, enabling it to insert comments about the person's appearance and perhaps attitude. It would be able to acknowledge the presence and position of the person who approaches it. Mapping a biorhythm to the head will make it more human-like. It might be irritated responding to queries in the morning, happier to do so midday and getting fatigued by late afternoon. And as its database increases the head will become more informed and less predictable in its responses. The head will appear to be more autonomous. The artist would then no longer be able to take full responsibility for what his head says.
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