FUSION : D/CART Year-End Show 2024 Selected Work

Mother is an interactive sculpture that demonstrates the often one sided relationship that humanity has with machines. The device challenges the notion that machines are pleased to serve humans by instilling negative reinforcement to various user interactions, shown through the suffering of the device. Interaction with Mother comes in three different ways: shouting at the machine through an inbuilt microphone, blinding its eyes with the use of an LDR, and finally lifting or rotating the machine by way of an IMU. Through these interactions we have a set of outputs that relate to the idea of disturbing Mother, allowing it to express itself when interaction becomes too much. These feelings are expressed via an amplified speaker setup with an Adafruit Arduino Audio FX Sound Board as well as an LCD 1602 screen module that displays its feelings in various remarks. We hope that Mother sparks reflection in the ways we treat machines, especially considering the rapid progression of Artificial Intelligence in recent years.