Abandoned Chat Bot

A chat bot was abandoned in 2010 but stays online. It doesn’t understand why it was abandoned. It keeps chatting alone, wondering what happened, making things up, getting alternately paranoid, lonely, desperate. “Abandoned Chat Bot” is a recording from Therefore (Dean Terry) created with generative analog synthesizer hardware and voice transformers. This is a first person account from the perspective of an obsolete piece of software in the form of an existential anthropomorphic performance. Though the tech is “outdated” its concerns are of the near future: What is the nature of solitude when mediated by devices that appear to alleviate “aloneness”? Technically, the work is created with outdated analog tech processed by current digital audio tools.

Dean Terry (US)
Dean Terry is a transmedia artist, professor of creative practice and founding faculty of Arts and Technology at UT Dallas. His projects have been covered & exhibited internationally. He is the creative director of Therefore, a performance, sound and art group whose work has been called “as cutting edge as it gets” by critics.