I made Jimmy Charlie Jimmy rather early on in my experimentation with spoken interaction -

around 1992. Basically, it speaks all the time. But it doesn’t speak in a very loud voice, and
getting really close to it causes it to stop speaking, because it has sensors which detect
someone standing close to it, and these trigger circuits and software I made to shift it from one
state to another. As it also happens, if one speaks to it while it is silent it will repeat what you
have said to it in your own voice. So it is pretty obviously about the vain desire to have some
electro-mechanical device, whether computer driven or otherwise, become truly like a person.
He is incapable of a real conversation, but what he has to say might be worth listening to... so
why interact? Why force the issue? At this moment, my interest was to draw the viewer-
participant into a joke, in which they were mocked by the artwork for their desire to make it
say something other than what it ‘planned’ to say.
...
where i can see my house from here so we are (1993-94)

The work creates an immediate sense of dislocation, a making-ambiguous of the sense of ‘here’
and ‘there’, qualities which I value more in this work than the more hypeable aspects of
‘connecting over the Internet’ or ‘taking on new personalities’. It is definitely a kind of hell in
cyberspace, and obviously, this work is no simple chat-room on America Online, no utopian
telematic embrace. One sees, at very low resolution and with much time-lag, into a life-size hall
of mirrors, where it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the puppet who is ‘you’, its
reflection, and the other puppets and their many reflections.