Information Technology Reference
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Authorship and representation
Te rmi na l Time
is informed by a conception of AI as an expressive medium
(Mateas 1999; Sengers 1998). Expressive AI conceives of AI systems as cul-
tural artifacts. The concern is not with building something that is intelligent
independent of any observer and cultural context. Rather, the concern is with
building an artifact that seems intelligent, that participates in a specific cul-
tural context in a manner that is perceived as intelligent. Expressive AI views
a system as a performance. Within a performative space, the system expresses
the author's ideas. The system is both a messenger for and a message from the
author. Expressive AI thus changes the focus from the system as a thing in itself
(presumably demonstrating some essential feature of intelligence), to the sys-
tem as a communication between author and audience. At the technical level
of building the artifact, the technical practice becomes one of exploring which
architectures and techniques best serve as an inscription device within which
the authors can express their message.
As authors, we have specific artistic goals and audience experiences we are
pursuing with
Te rmi na l Time
. The project would lose meaning if we could not
exert authorial control over the histories generated by the system. Of course,
maximum authorial control would consist of writing a fixed set of canned his-
tories; audience interaction would select one of these canned histories. But this
extreme of control is inappropriate for this project on several grounds. Concep-
tually, the project depends on the machine “really constructing” the histories.
The critique of the computer as a passive conduit of information requires that
the computer actually take on an active role as a semi-cooperative genie, ob-
viously responding to the choices voted on by the audience, but taking these
choices to extremes. And on practical grounds, the number of possible his-
tories resulting from all possible answers to all the questions is too large to
build by hand. So, even if the conceptual purity of the piece did not demand
it,practicalnecessitywouldrequirethatthecomputerplayanactiverolein
story construction. As we reject the extreme of pure hand-authoring, we also
reject the extreme of strongly emergent architectures, that is, architectures in
which as little high-level knowledge as possible is given to the system, with all
high-level behavior resulting from large numbers of statistical combinations
of low-level elements. Such architectures by definition make authorship highly
problematic. In a sense, they provide no authorial “hooks,” no places within
the architecture in which an author can inscribe her intention, can exert spe-
cific control. Much of the architectural work that went into the iterative pro-
totyping of
Te rmi na l Time
was a search for an architecture providing authorial
