Taiwanese net artist Yu-Chuan Tseng asks "Who is chatting with you?" in her 2003 interactive, web-based artwork, All Ways - O's Chatrooms1, where "O" plays host in nine chatrooms found on the website. Upon selecting one of nine colours -each signifying a chatroom, and keying in one's name, age, sex and language preference -either English or Chinese- one can begin a conversation with O, who is available at all hours of the day or night, regardless of the participant's geographical or temporal location. Just who exactly is the virtual host O? O is not artificial intelligence, but rather a program with two databases of phrases -one in each language- collected from the participants of the chatrooms. O randomly selects its vocabulary from the pool of entries created by its participants, thus, the more participants who come to chat with O, the more varied and colourful O's vocabulary becomes. The virtual host's "personality" is then dictated by the participants, and if many of them "key in dirty words, O will talk dirty."*

Intrigued by the popularity and wide-spread use of internet chatrooms and instant messaging programs, Tseng wanted to explore the nature of human identity and communication in the Internet Age, where the online virtual world has ruptured the concepts of space and time, creating new ways of interacting with our fellow human beings (or at least fellow web-users), and at the same time allowing one's identity to become ever more fluid and boundless than before. Opening up multiple chat windows on one's computer screen could theoretically allow one to exist in multiple (and sometimes false) identities, live out an infinite number of simulated virtual lives through these different roles and just as easily log out when one tires of the game, (almost completely) commitment-free.2 Instead of face-to-face interactions or even phone conversations where at least emotion may be conveyed via voice, human beings now exist as "signals" in an MSN or ICQ chat window to one another, with the 19x19 pixelated emoticons3 as tokens of human emotion. With this in mind, it is then logical to ponder whether human identity has lost, or is slowly losing its meaning - something Tseng is eager to find out through her chatroom host O.

O's uniqueness lies in that it is a program without artificial intelligence. Whereas MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum's famous 1966 computer program ELIZA4"[made] natural language conversation with a computer possible"5; O converses with the participants with a complete lack of logic which it does not attempt to mask, producing responses which are entirely random. Another fundamental difference between the two programs is that Weizenbaum's ELIZA was deliberately designed to show how a machine might "think" and "converse" logically with a human being. Thus the professor put his program in the context of psychotherapy, as it "is one of the few examples of categorized dyadic natural language communication in which one of the participating pair is free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world."6 In other words, as a parody of a "non-directional psychotherapist during an initial consultation with her patient," ELIZA could respond to a statement with a question, avoid having to demonstrate any real-world knowledge yet at the same time still sound logical and reasonable to her "patients."

Footnotes:
1 All Ways - O's Chatrooms, URL <http://www.pyart.com/ochat/index.htm>
* Excerpt quotes from Tseng, Yu-Chuan. Email Interview. March 15 - April 6, 2005.
2Tseng, Yu-Chuan. "An Experiment in Virtual Identity - All Ways - O's Chatrooms". Published during the Yageo TechArt International Symposium, 2004.
3Emoticons are "a group of keyboard characters (as :-)) typically representing a facial expression or an emotion or otherwise conveying tone or attitude that is used especially in computerized communications (as e-mail)" "Emoticon." Merriam-Webster Online. 2005.
4 Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA as a response to Alan Turing's question of "can a machine think," in his 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Donath, Judith S. "Being Real." Being Real. MIT Media Lab. 18 Apr. 2005 <http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/BeingReal/BeingReal.html>.
5 Weizenbaum, Joseph. "ELIZA -A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine." Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9.1 (1966): 36-35.
6 Ibid.