Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine

The Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine is a surreal exploration of language and our strange relationship with talking to machines. We talk to these devices, from customer service bots to “intelligent assistants”, as if they were our friends ignoring the trail of data that we leave behind.

The piece combines projection and robotics to blur the line between the physical and the digital. Viewers speak into the hanging horn. Their words are then converted into text and launched into the virtual world. They accumulate there, sometimes kicked by a robotic foot and sometimes sucked back out into the world as sound through the horn on the floor.

The piece was awarded a jury selection at the 20th Japanese Media Arts Festival.