Searle's Room

This project reimagines John Searle’s Chinese Room as a surreal encounter between a synthetic child voice and a robotic drawing machine. Within the installation, computational processes create continuous cycles of translation between computer speech and machine writing, each system trying to communicate with the other. I trade the logic of Searle’s lookup tables and symbolic manipulations for the emotional affect of a child trying to be understood. Treating children’s speech and writing as proto-languages—evocative but not-quite-intelligible—I explore liminal modes of prelinguistic communication. With absent hands and absent bodies, my Room conjures a poetics of loss.