An emotional dialogue with artificial intelligence. The medium is broadly positioned, and many players from a wide range of aspirations add content to a partly uniform mass of pictures; now a new protagonist has appeared at the interface between visuals and words. This is similar to the basic model for understanding we use when we look at something: trying to recognise forms and structures and then naming them.

The project is based on that interface. It deals with the cliché and with the way images from this visual range correspond with our experience. The starting point is a set of simple fakes, staged by classic means — a fake sunset rebuilt with everyday objects, for example. In a second step these motifs are read and described by a machine. Is it able to follow a merely emotionally driven perception? Will it behave the same way, or will it be able to read the set-up dialectically, decode the fake and still understand the emotional assertion?

Finally the whole project was translated into a paper machine based on the simple technique of turning pages. “Can it get emotional?” the artist asks; the machine replies that while it can convincingly mimic feeling or respond in appropriate ways, it does not actually experience anything, and it remains a functional, non-sentient process.