Chatbot Knigge lädt zum Salon, eine Veranstaltung von islandrabe 2023

As part of the Ecologies of Care exhibition, Islandrabe invites you to a chatbot salon to explore the standards and criteria of successful interpersonal communication and relationships.
Course of the event: As an introduction to the salon, Chatbot Knigge will be presented. Information will be provided on the history of the software, the basis of its content and the intentions pursued. Afterwards, the visitors are invited to enter into direct dialogue with Knigge themselves. After this experience, cultural-scientific insights into the relationship between man and machine will lead into an open discussion based on Knigge, which will provide space for a joint exchange of impressions and the answering of questions.
Communication is the basic condition for people to find common ground, and it is through it that caring and being cared for becomes possible.
"What is between people?" is a question that media artist and cultural scientist Richard Schwarz has been asking himself for several years, and under the label islandrabe he organises workshops and discussion groups in public spaces as well as in schools and companies to approach the topic step by step. At the same time, he is researching what our communication is like when we put more and more technology between us. Since 2022, he has programmed Knigge, a chatbot, which he has filled with the results of the workshops and with which you can now chat about talking. In this way, you can collect ideas of successful communication for yourself in an exchange with the machine.
During the conversation, Knigge always discloses his mechanical identity and makes it a topic of discussion, so that he makes himself recognisable as a machine conversation partner. This creates irritations in the course of the conversation, through which the basic conditions of interpersonal communication, just like the role of emotions and the capacity for empathy, or the interaction between fulfilled or unfulfilled expectations in the exchange with the other, only become recognisable and clear. Ultimately, our human need to be perceived and understood, and also to perceive and understand the other person, is put to the test.
This chatbot Knigge, programmed by Richard Schwarz, is based on the same functionality as ELIZA, the first artificial intelligence programme developed in 1966 that pretended to speak and interact with humans. The bot's name, on the other hand, comes from the writer Adolph Freiherr von Knigge (1752-1796), whose work dealt with concepts of interaction with people. In the exhibition Ecologies of Care, Richard Schwarz has installed a setting in which communication between exhibition visitors and the machine is actively enabled via two smartphones. The conversations that take place in the course of the exhibition in turn flow into the chatbot's script and serve as a basis for constantly developing the chatbot and "teaching" it to create ever more "coherent" dialogues about interpersonal relationships and the influence of technology.
Through this growing collective participation in Chatbot Knigge, the machine's ability to engage in dialogue continues to grow and each dialogue itself becomes part of the overall artwork.
islandrabe.com