The Forgetting Robot

This year we as the human civilisation have witnessed plenty of breakthroughs in the machine learning technology of artificial intelligence (A.I.) Microsoft’s Xiaoice has published ‘her’ debut anthology in May 2017. Xiaoice is a chatbot who is described as being able to compose poetries based on images. However evident the  consciousness of an A.I. may be displaying, A.I. is still considered less superior than human beings in the way its memory works. What makes us human is the ability to forget – the function of our subconsciousness to elect and omit past information.

The Forgetting Robot is a participatory work that is completed with audience’s acquisition. In this work, the verses written by Xiaoice are reappropriated to create prints, which are buyable by audience in terms of pixel units. Audience is free to decide the amount of pixels they want to acquire (a total of 27,011,071 pixels could be removed). Through the process of taking away scattered portions of pixels, the visual memory of A.I., the acquisition here becomes a symbolic act of making the A.I. forget, completing the last criterion towards human quality.

I used the art fair setting of Art Next 2017 as the platform to experiment this narrative which requires the art of acquisition. I am curious about how this idea can be mediated to the audience in Hong Kong and they will respond to in return, and document the process and interactions.