Page 256 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Perceptions of Self 239

Figure 29.1. Talk Nice display

Talk Nice exhibits social understanding by eliciting and responding to a self-
consciousness in the viewer about their speech, their bodily dynamics, and
their own mechanisms of understanding. But Van der Zaag says that she is not
interested in virtuality (and therefore, one could assume, the autonomy of her
agent), or how human relations have been changed by it. Rather, she describes
her work as directed toward the changing nature of emotionality in language
and strategies for eliciting audience attention to such issues. The technological
setup is just a facilitator for an investigation of evolving language exchange
among people. Yet this begs the question as to why she would use an artificial,
interactive setup to focus on language. It builds into the work an implication
that mimicry through the pervasiveness of electronic media plays an important
part in transformations of language, specifically the "upism" that the participant
is to learn. Although the key practice phrase for learning how to speak this way
is the now broadly familiar, "I’m a Canadian, eh?" with its upward lilt on that
last word, my sense is that the popular use of this mode of speech spread via
TV from the Valley Girls of California in the eighties. Van der Zaag naturalizes
these kinds of subtle changes in usage, by setting up her software agent as an
extension of human exchange rather than foregrounding ideas about autonomy
or emergence. After all, SAY only hears how you say it, not what you say.
But more to the point, whatever the entanglement here between the partici-
pant, the agent, and the social history of language, and whether we consider the
Talk Nice system from an IA or artwork point of view, the agent nonetheless
has a lot of authority. It is perhaps even more authoritarian than if it tried to