Just Choose One

My fiancé says she hates this project. She hated it when I was taking forever to come up with the idea, and then she really hated it when I created the final outcome. We’re really into a modern, clean, aesthetic in my house and we try really hard to cultivate an environment where everything makes sense. We’re into Helvetica and despise that esoteric stuff.

But I went for it.

I haven’t felt this stuck on a project in years. I’m not sure what was happening for me, but I had tons of different ideas, some might say even good ideas (not me though), but none of them felt right. I felt like I was like a pinball machine, going back and forth between completely unrelated ideas. One idea was creating an app that would tell you what your feelings are when you don’t know. Another idea was creating clothing tags that revealed the sustainability score, sort of like the “nutritional facts” label on a food product. Then there was this whole tangent of ideas about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. But I saw that John Oliver already did my idea. Dang.

Then it hit me.

Maybe the project could be about the process of being stuck. Over the last few weeks, I had a number of conversations with my fiancé that sort of all landed in the same place. So I decided to record one of them and play with it.

The central question I was experimenting with was, “What does AI mean to me?”. My earliest memory with AI is SmarterChild, the AOL messenger chatbot. I mean, who hasn’t had a relationship with SmarterChild? She was a lot of my generations first robot friend, before we got new friends like Alexa and Siri.

The central method I was experimenting with was, “Whatever comes out, becomes a part of the form.” For example, if I made a typo or if the voice to text software I used made a mistake, I went with it. “Can of worms” became a “can of forms” and “good” became “god.” For me, this was really breaking down the usual process and rules that I follow when creating. It felt like I was making something “bad”, but I have to admit, it was also really fun. I felt more free and it took a lot of the pressure off that I usually feel. I tend to work under intense control and restraint, where everything I do has a reason and must be sensical. This was the opposite.

I think the final project captures the feeling of dystopia and absurdity that I was trying to evoke and is ultimately representative of the original inspiration for the project, Rick and Morty. I don’t think my usual modern aesthetic would have encapsulated the humor and nonsensical absurdity that is AI and the feeling I was trying to portray.