Concept, Content and the Convict Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola, Teemu Korpilahti Jaakko Pesonen, Abhigyan Singh University of Art and Design Helsinki (TaiK) Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki, Finland mika.tuomola@taik.fi, teemu@tmukoo.net, jaakko.pesonen@kolumbus.fi, abhigyan.singh@gmail.com Robert Villa, P. Punitha Yue Feng, Joemon M Jose University of Glasgow Sir Alwyn Williams Building Glasgow, Scotland villar@dcs.gla.ac.uk, punitha@dcs.gla.ac.uk, yuefeng@dcs.gla.ac.uk, jj@dcs.gla.ac.uk ABSTRACT This paper describes the concepts behind and implementation of the multimedia art work Alan01 / AlanOnline, which wakes up the 1952 criminally convicted Alan Turing as a piece of code within the art work - thus fulfilling Turing's own vision of preserving human consciousness in a computer. The work's context is described within the development of associative storytelling structures built up by interactive user feedback via an image and video retrieval system. The input to the retrieval system is generated by Alan01 / AlanOnline via their respective sketch interfaces, the output of the retrieval system being fed back to Alan01 / AlanOnline for further processing and presentation to the user within the context of the overall artistic experience. This paper, in addition to presenting the productions and image retrieval system, also presents the installation and online production user reception and some of the issues and observations made during the development of the systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Arts, fine and performing; H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Search process General Terms Design, Human Factors Keywords Alan Turing, Art installation, Online production, Image retrieval 1. INTRODUCTION: THE CONVICT “The difference between man and machine is not how they operate but how they are treated.” [30] Alan Turing (1912-1954), a World War II code-breaker considered one of the fathers of modern computing, made a significant and provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. As a person he was “an ordinary English homosexual atheist mathematician” [13]. For his wartime achievements he was awarded the OBE, Officer of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. In 1952, Turing was convicted of “acts of gross indecency” after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo hormone therapy to achieve temporary chemical castration. The therapy caused Turing’s body to develop female forms, and the conviction resulted in his security clearance being revoked. He died after eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. The death was ruled a suicide. Not surprisingly, several pieces of drama have been inspired by Turing’s life, including Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore [41] and Turing by Miko Jaakkola [14]. The internationally awarded Breaking the Code starred Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway theatres at the end of 80s, while Jacobi’s performance was immortalised by the 1996 BBC production of the play [40]. Jaakkola’s Turing was originally performed by the Helsinki based Circus Maximus in 2000. It had a rebirth recently, when Opera Skaala turned the script into the critically acclaimed multimedia opera Turing Machine [35]. Both plays depict Alan Turing as a man who wished to beat death by coding human consciousness. Such an interpretation is supported by the significant biographical facts of Turing’s life. At the age of 18 he lost Christopher, his best friend and love – and due to that event, also his faith in religion and life beyond death. Man was needed to invent the eternal life to save loved ones. The theme is carried on in Alan01 / AlanOnline, in which engagers will be able to meet a fictional Alan in dialogue, interactively, as if his consciousness had indeed been carried on by a machine’s code. This time the story is experienced by an associational structure suitable to computers, and in describing behaviours of human consciousness: “...the narrative is formed by a series of moments which are linked by common elements and do not rely on chronology or episodic relationships to produce their meaning or effect” [26]. The structural choice also reflects the ACM Multimedia 2009 art exhibition theme of “disophrenia” and the fragmentation and timelessness of consciousness that is transferred into digital representation [2]. Due to the work’s interactive nature, the “negotiated narrative” [32] between the authored system and its users, spatial installation design and relatively large database of available media material, it also discusses with Janet Murray’s notions of narrative in digital environments as procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopaedic [21]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MM’09, October 19–24, 2009, Beijing, China. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-608-3/09/10...$10.00. 1063