3.9.1 The most important addition to the excitement around emerging multi-user spaces were the online "chatter bots" that were frequently part of the MUD space. The mother of chatterbots is ELIZA. Murray describes the historical moment in 1966, when ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor in computer science at MIT, as equivalent to what Lumiere did for the motion picture camera. ELIZA, unfortunately named after the Pygmalion story, was an experiment in natural language processing. "She" is able to respond to typed-in words with printed words. To Murray, Weizenbaum stands as łthe earliest, and still perhaps the premier, literary artist in the computer medium because he so successfully applied procedural thinking to the behaviour of a psychotherapist in a clinical interview." (1995, Murray, pg. .68) A few years after the appearance of ELIZA, computer games that are predecessors to MUDs and MOOs started emerging in labs. Both ELIZA and Zork were programmed in LISP (List Processing Language), developed in the 1950's at MIT by John McCarthy for use in artificial intelligence research. This introduced dynamism and immediacy in the work process of the programmer in relation to the machine that opened the realm of possibilities for reconsidering the way we work with computers.

3.9.2 Since Joseph Weizenbaum's invention of ELIZA, many have been inspired to create their own versions of an online "bot." Bot is short for "robot," coined by Michael Maudlin from Carnegie Mellon University, whose own version of the bot is Julia. Ignoring the fact that on the Web "she" is represented as a cute cartoon of a maid robot, Julia is one of the most successful online computer-based characters. Julia's representation as an actual female on a MUD was so believable that one person spent thirteen days trying to seduce her into going with him to a private room to have virtual sex.(Murray, pg. 216) Julia lives in TinyMUD, acting like a character: she answers questions, sings songs, plays hearts, and is helpful in orienting new users by giving them the layout of the MUD. She is a prototypical online agent that has inspired much work and study around possibilities of this kind of collaboration with the machine on the net.

3.9.3 Julia is a "chatterbot". She was devised strictly to communicate with humans, before the World Wide Web came to be as widely used as it is now. With the explosion of the Web, we are seeing more types of bots emerge, most significantly "shopbots" and "knowbots." Shopbots are programs that shop around the Web on your behalf and locate the best price for a product you're looking for. Knowbots are programs that collect knowledge for their users by automatically visiting Internet sites and gathering information that meets certain specified criteria. There are also bots such as "OpenSesame" that observe a user's patterns in navigating a Web site and customize the site for that user.

3.9.4 Most development of online agents has moved into the realm of elaborate search engines that act as "servants," who book flights, make hotel reservations, and so on, which I will elaborate on in chapter 8. MUDs and MOOs have given birth to an entire new genre of mostly young people who are comfortable with code and computers and frequently hack the system just for fun. Two women, Amy Bruckman and Elizabeth M. Reid, both of whom wrote doctoral theses on the subject, made MUDs and MOOs a legitimate topic of academic research.

3.9.5 There have been surprisingly few artists who have attempted to create pieces utilising MUDs; David Blair, however, is one major exception.[9] MUDs and MOOs have generally captivated young hackers along with literary and educational sectors and continues to flourish in these circles. Perhaps this is primarily because these spaces still function most effectively when primarily text based and require physical presence in real time. This poses many limitations for artists who are still interested in working in a community that is bound to the existing art world structures and institutions. Further, to really manipulate the code and play with the architecture requires not only knowledge of programming but access to equipment that is not so easy for those not connected to academic institutions to access.

3.9.6 The promise for new conceptualists working in this sphere of exploration lies in the development of software agents and automated tasks that require creative ability, critical thinking, and collaborative situations. Perhaps an entire new generation of artists who grew up with a mouse in their hands from the time they were toddlers will come up with some interesting artistic solutions. CyberPunks are the first generation of this new youth culture that are worth considering when looking into telematic (sub)culture. [top]

Notes:

9. David Blair's Wax Web is one of the very few examples of an art piece that usees film databasing in relation to MOO space. Go to: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/ [back]

[top]