Searle's Room

installation view
detail, My Child is a Science Experiment
detail, speech systems
detail, drawing recorder and playback machine
detail, child drawing database
detail, child drawing
detail, machine drawing
Searle's Room, speech and drawing system, Robert Twomey, 2013

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.

 

Status of Research or Work
Completed/published
Research Type
Share