But after a while, I began to enjoy the personalities they developed when they were ‘broken’,

not working as they were ‘supposed to’. One would only go in circles. Another would confuse
left and right, front and back. Gearboxes began to strip, making noises and making some
movements impossible. Another, though it could move properly, had lost its voice, but was
instead, due to a crossing of wires, able to project its voice into one of the other puppets, which
then had a split personality when occupied by two of the unwitting visitors. As they devolved
further and further, their pathos was hilarious, perfect, like a Becket play. It was in the
breakdown of the technology that these puppets began to differentiate themselves, rebel
against demands made on them, find a form of irrationality and unpredictability, and resist
attempts at interacting with them and it seemed to me that in a really successful piece,
whether its working or not is not very important.
...
Head (1999-2000) approached both the questions of creating ‘real interaction’ and this
fascinating dysfunctionality. Utilizing speech recognition, pseudo artificial intelligence, and
synthesised speech, it presents to its audience a lifelike animatronic human head with which
one can have conversations, or something like conversations... It not only has hearing problems
due to the still primitive nature of continuous speech recognition, but also the artificial
intelligence aspect of the work was written in such a way as to create a ‘personality’ for Head
which is insane, and almost completely incapable of paying attention to a subject matter. It
does, from time to time, give quite direct and relevant responses; often enough to make it seem
that it really is possible to have a conversation. Here, as I had done in where I can see my house
from here so we are, participants are drawn into spoken interaction.