Logging Off
"Logging Off" is an interactive installation, that through the medium of a chatbot confronts the audience with their own mortality, encouraging conversation and acceptance of our death anxieties.The death of the chatbot is a powerful metaphor for our own, and the long timer that appears following encourages us to reflect on our inevitable, yet often repressed feelings and concerns. The mid-2000s desktop aesthetic aims to create a sense of familiarity and comfort throughout the experience.
This work, was further extended to be used in either English or German, supporting multiple keyboard language inputs, this allowed for a more user friendly experience when this piece was exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival (2022) Welcome to Planet B; Linz, Austria.
Logging Off, exhibited both at the London College of Communication (2023)
The work starts by collecting data from the audience member, mimicked as a ‘msn’ style chat room, once collected an estimated death date is calculated and saved. The first stage of the work is a chatbot with ‘5 minutes to live’, within this time the audience member is invited and encouraged to ask and question the impending death; how the bot feels, worries, concerns. It is important to note that the chatbot is not identified as AI to the participant as this is only a technical detail and is meant to feel indistinguishable to a human. When the bot dies a custom momento’-mori’ is printed adoring a custom epitaph based on the conversation. After this death, a new bot appears and a timer based on the participants' earlier inputs appears underneath the profile image (linking the participants face to the timer). Within this long countdown a new bot interrogates the audience member with the same questions or context surrounding death that were previously expressed by the particiapnt - this aims to reveal the participants' own death anxieties back at themselves, giving room for contemplation on their own concerns.