Artist Statement

CRITICAL INTERACTION DESIGN

The machines of Machine Therapy have wisdom and empathic opportunities resident in their grumbling, roaring, squeaky membranes. Make a sound, scream or sing with the machines and uncover your deep forgotten fears, joys, and desires!

The on board Machine Therapist will facilitate Live action psychotherapy sessions between people and machines. Among the machines available for one-to-one sessions is a blender whose motor is controlled by the growling of the person using it. The people participating may empathize, vocalize or move in any way with these machines. They can try to understand them or perhaps come into harmonic resonance with the machines, and thus come to find in themselves a recognition of energies not otherwise accessed or consciously acknowledged.

Long before implants, splicing, and cyborgs, people and machines have lived as companion species, co-evolving. It is evident that machines are not neutral parties, and there are important elements of machines that we did not consciously directly design into them: the sounds they make, the vibrations, the movements and gestures. Machines influence our self-conception, expression, social perception, and perception of responsibility or action. By accessing and vitalizing the interplay of people and machines through psychotherapeutic techniques, a social awareness is brought out, and individuals are invited to reinvent their own existence and their relationships with the machines sharing their space. web.media.mit.edu/~monster/blendie
web.media.mit.edu/~monster/machinetherapy/

• Kelly Dobson (US) combines socially critical art practice, engineering, neurobiology and psychotherapy as a researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. She is developing a new method of personal, societal, and psychoanalytical engagement termed Machine Therapy.

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