A life sized animatronic Stag in Insilico slips, slides and falls depending on the intensity of abuse directed at selected individuals on Twitter. Sentiment and hate speech analysts designed bespoke software to trawl twitter to establish who is the most abused person on the platform. The software then rates the incoming tweets depending on the intensity of the abuse.
A monitor at the back of the artwork displays the live twitter feed and the code engaged in determining the results. This data is fed to the mechanisms which determine the movements of the animatronic Stag.
Animatronics by Adam Keenan.
With special thanks to BHive Technologies who designed and developed AI and machine learning models to collect and analyse the data, leveraging top rated OpenAI-developed engines.
This work is inspired by the historic behavioural experiments of American psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) which explored the idea of random reward. Skinner’s work has been widely referenced in relation to the algorithms which drive interactions on social media, tapping into a subconscious primal side of the brain which is involved in motivated behaviours, thus exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Skinner’s ‘operant conditioning chambers’ demonstrated that random reward created a kind of constant uncertainty that then encouraged a behavioural loop. Skinner’s ghost has persisted into the modern day, a quiet spectre among our statuses, likes, comments, and shares.