Adrianne Wortzel: Eliza Redux Gate Page
August 2005
Adrianne Wortzel: Eliza Redux Gate Page
Adrianne Wortzel’s Gate Page features stills and a short video documenting a psychoanalytic session between a robot and a human in which the two take turns playing the roles of psychoanalyst and patient. It references Wortzel’s work The Veils of Transference (2005), a longer therapy session between a robot and human that exploits the human’s wish to be robotic. The robot follows pre-scripted “gestures” executed remotely by a “puppeteer” and is programmed to change the volume, pace, and pitch of its voice according to the dialogue. The Gate Page provides a portal to Wortzel’s Eliza Redux (2008–9), a robotic work made in collaboration with Bob Schneider and Michael Schneider. Referencing Joseph Weizenbaum’s chatbot Eliza (1964–67), which impersonates a Rogerian psychotherapist, ELIZA Redux featured three robots with distinctive psychoanalytic practices—Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian. The three robots, resembling monkey skulls, are positioned on a tree-like branch in a “therapeutic” control center; visitors to the website could sign up for five-minute private sessions with them. Together, Wortzel’s works take a closer look at how simple AI scripts create illusions of understanding and reveal patterns in psychoanalytic approaches.
Adrianne Wortzel (b. 1941; Brooklyn, New York) has explored themes of otherness, identity, in pioneering telerobotic performance productions, net-based art, videos, kinetic objects, and algorithmically generated artist’s books. She studied under artists Louise Bourgeois, Burgoyne Diller, Jimmy Ernst, and Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in dozens of solo and group exhibitions at venues including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the San Jose Museum of Art, California; the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Connecticut; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wortzel has received support and awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (1990), the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art (2003), the National Science Foundation (2001), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1981), and the New York State Council on the Arts (2006), among others.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
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