SEckert-LookingOutwards-02

Imposters is a short play by Mark Chrisler about pioneering computer scientist and codebreaker, Alan Turing. Turing helped develop the first computers and an empirical test (the Turing Test) for artificial intelligence and other minds. He was also a homosexual and was imprisoned, interrogated, and chemically castrated by his government. He later committed suicide.

The play which consists of a strange, tense, and uncanny interrogation was written utilizing two chatterboxes ( simple conversation robots from the 1970s) to create the dialogue. The play itself is repetitive and the dialogue is often rudimentary with frequent non-sequiturs, but also can be eerily meaningful, even ominous.

Having seen the play live it is a strange event to fully describe. You begin to lose any sense of identity in either character, there’s also a feeling of growing unease throughout, even when the dialogue repeats and shifts in humorous ways. My understanding of the chatterboxes is that, similar to AIM chat bots, they were programs to understand a limited amount of inputs and have prepared responses to simulate conversation. One of the machines was programed to always reply with a question when it didn’t recognize an input, the other was programed to shift the conversation to a topic to which it could respond.