Machine therapy

Abstract

Machine Therapy is a new practice combining art, design, psychoanalysis, and engineering work in ways that access and reveal the vital, though often unnoticed, relevance of people's interactions and relationships with machines. Machine Therapy will be illustrated through the construction of several systems including re-appropriated domestic devices such as Blendie, wearble apparatuses such as ScreamBody, and body-signal-based companion machines - Umo, Amo, and Omo - that function through visceral interactions including breathing and non-verbal sounds. These systems will be used to explore themes of human-machine relations in terms of visceral, cathartic, and reflexive expressions and communications. This work incorporates elements from my technical research in digital signal processing, machine learning, mechanical engineering, and sensor design. Combining these areas of research and practice, I have been able to help manifest new objects and relationships that are unique in some aspects while maintaining quotidian familiarity in other aspects. These apparatuses enable unusual explorations of what we interact with when we interact with machines. I hypothesize that the answer will turn out to be much more than the machine itself, and will include our sense of self, agency in the interpersonal and political world, and our shared psychological, emotional, cultural, and perceptual approaches to the world. The importance of the parapractic elements and also the therapeutic properties of the Machine Therapy machines will be evaluated in studies of participants' interactive engagements with the machines as well as their affective responses to the machines.