Kyung Yun Choi and Hiroshi Ishii. 2023. The Stranger -........ -.-..- -. –...-. In Companion Publication of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 74–76. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563703.3596648

Abstract

This interactive art installation creates a strange feeling as if you are speaking to yourself in a soliloquy while having the presence of an invisible entity that might be you or not. The automated typewriter recognizes your speech and translates it into Morse code, excluding the words ’I’ and ’you’ and those letters. It creates a new perception of distance and captures the moment of losing authority over your own thoughts. Even if you see the typewriter transcribing what you just said with Morse code, the resulting sentences composed of dots, dashes, ’I’, and ’You’ on the paper seem to respond to your speech with a completely new and seemingly encrypted meaning, as if they are talking back to you. This can result in the loss of the speaker’s original intention and can also represent the ephemeral aspect of either inner or outer voice.