Sunday, August 11, 2019 from 7-11pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by NonCoreProjector in our Vitrine screening series. verbolect is an extended conversation between the chatbot Cleverbot and itself, continuously, for a month. The emotional content of the words spoken are translated into an animated projection that evolves with the emergent mental state of the bot. Cleverbot is possibly the most human chatbot ever created, and Rollo Carpenter—its creator—is a leader in linguistic artificial intelligence. He and it have been featured on the podcast Radiolab and discussed in Brian Christian’s book The Most Human Human. Carpenter invented Cleverbot over twenty years ago and taught it to speak as one would a human child: one word at a time. Cleverbot’s responses are not pre-programmed, but are derived from its memory of past conversations—it learns exclusively from human input, and when someone speaks to it, Cleverbot responds to those words by finding how a human being previously responded to those same words. Since launching on the web in 1997, the number of conversations it has had is immense. “Cleverbot is in a sense a conversational Wikipedia, using the thoughts of millions of people from the past. It’s always AI that decides what to say, not users themselves, and the number of interactions from which replies derive number approximately 400 million. That’s, however, a tiny fraction of the approximately 10 billion things that have ever been said to it.” (Carpenter)

NonCoreProjector’s video will be on view in Vitrine on Sunday, August 11, 2019 from 7-11pm. Vitrine is an ongoing screening series of videos projected on our storefront window and viewed from the sidewalk. The series welcomes unwitting passersby to stop, discover, and enjoy the work of an international selection of new media artists. Please note the gallery is closed during screening times.

NonCoreProjector is a collective of artists and technologists experimenting with physical, conceptual and net-based data systems along with human/AI relations. We bring an absurdist sensibility to technology, playing with free online resources such as Web APIs, streaming/broadcasting services, newsfeeds, and chatbots to probe our relationship to everyday digital ecosystems. We leave our artworks open to the unpredictable, entropic flow of open online databases, misused technology, user comments, and glitches. In doing so, we are interested in exploring the psychology of self-talk, durational isolation, belief systems, and the complex, systematic thinking needed to induce and interpret spoken language. Group’s members currently include: Rollo Carpenter- the British born Artificial Intelligence scientist and creator of Cleverbot and Jabberwacky. Both are AI systems / programs developed to hold conversations with humans. Jack Colton - an interdisciplinary artist and writer with an interest in new media. Elias Jarzombek - a creative technologist and electronic musician who makes art with code. He is especially interested in developing new ways of making and interacting with music. John O’Connor - a visual artist who makes labor intensive, hand drawn, text-based works with colored pencil on paper.