ALIZA. Screen recording of one visit, uncut, at real speed, 27 September 2026. The lines typed to the 1966 program are the artist's own, from her conversation of 22 July 2026.
ALIZA
A reading room of conversations with ELIZA, the first chatbot, written in 1966. The work follows the Hebrew poet David Avidan, who published his own sessions with a computer psychiatrist in 1974.draft
ALIZA runs Joseph Weizenbaum's original DOCTOR script, written at MIT in 1966: the program that made people confide in a machine they knew was empty. Its model is David Avidan, the Hebrew poet who in 1974 published My Electronic Psychiatrist, a book of his conversations with a computer.
The work sets three kinds of conversation side by side. The artist talked to the 1966 program herself. A bot prompted to speak as Avidan, not a recording of the man, talked to ELIZA, to a present-day AI and to itself. Fifteen conversations are kept, printed unedited in a reading room, each labelled with who was speaking to whom. Visitors can also open the door and speak to the original program.
A Hebrew version was built and then set aside, because its replies came from Avidan's book rather than from the 1966 program. The work keeps to what the machine actually said. What it records is less the program than the people in front of it, and what they chose to tell something they knew could not listen.
Made with Claude Code.