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Smalltalk
2000
Interactive installation
C3 production


Smalltalk
2000
interaktív installáció
C3 produkció


In Smalltalk, two computer programs chat with each other on the subject the visitor has selected. The leading sentence which can be selected on the touch-screen of the handheld computer interface sets off the conversation, in the course of which the robots try to expound upon each other's reactions, and to keep the conversation going via the formation of increasingly appropriate responses. Their sentence-interpretational capacities based on mechanical symbol-reduction, precisely due to their misinterpretations, are frequently capable of producing variegated chatter for a longer or shorter period of time, which, upon entering into self-repetitions, reaches its end: upon registering such phenomena, the robots - in lack of a better solution, often provoking arguments - try to end the conversation as soon as possible.

The leading sentences that may be selected on the touch-screen are, in part, related to artificial intelligence and chat-robots, as well as to the chatter about the installation at hand, while the other vein is initiated by László Krasznahorkai's book entitled, Sátántangó (Satan's Tango), and the superficial dialogue engaged in in the film directed by Béla Tarr and based upon the same book.

The robots chat in English, and the spoken English words together with their Hungarian mirror-translations appear in the form of subtitles on the image-screen. The constrained use of English can be traced to the fact that the text-analysis system of the robots, functioning according to simple symbol-reduction and based upon linguistic-grammatical regularity, works satisfactorily only in the case of languages that do not use declension and without a fixed word order. In spite of that, we plan also to develop an entirely Hungarian-language robot, which calls for a long process of developmental work, which we did not achieve in time for the preparation of this first, experimental version of the installation seen here.