For Tseng's examination of human identity in virtual space, however, O's credibility and logic are not relevant, as she is not interested in creating a machine which seemingly possesses the ability to think and reason. What Tseng intends to do is to provoke the participants into questioning the identity of their chatroom host, and thus the fragmented, unnatural and non-sequential nature of O's speech is perfectly appropriate. Interestingly, when perusing over the transcripts7, one finds that participants chatting with both ELIZA and O are willing to suspend their sense of disbelief in order to carry on a somewhat logical conversation. This is especially true in O's case where "people will try to make the dialogue logical even if O may give an absurd response."* Analysing the chat transcripts - which are available on the website as documents to "prove O's existence"* - one notices that when initially faced with O, many participants are at first doubtful, sometimes asking O straight out whether it is "a computer or a person" or calling it "crazy," but that in fact most participants want to believe or make believe that O is real - thus even when O's responses seem illogical, the participant will intentionally adjust his choice of vocabulary, or even shift the topic of conversation, in order to maintain some kind of "logic" in the process so that the chat may continue on.

As evident in the transcripts from O's Chatrooms, most of its participants are willing to suspend their sense of disbelief while chatting with O; while others who are fully aware that they are speaking with a computer program carry on, partly to pervert or to undermine the vocabulary database, purposely injecting their own sensibilities into O in an attempt to change its "personality", and partly just out of curiosity of what O might say next. And there are still others who, after initial doubt, actually mistakenly come to believe that they are chatting with a real person.

In other words, in the current Internet Age, we as citizens of this cyber society have grown accustomed to and accept that the text which appears in our chat window is generated by and linked to an actual person sitting somewhere in front of a computer screen, somewhere in the world. If people can learn to suspend their sense of disbelief to get used to virtual chatting partners, and then to a program pretending to be a chatting partner, then eventually, with sufficient "training" and getting used to, we, as users of this technology, will learn to accept artificial intelligence (as well as other forms of new technology). Although Tseng is not necessarily making this argument nor advocating the use of artificial intelligence, the nature of O's Chatrooms provokes links to artificial intelligence, especially since it somewhat references Weizenbaum's ELIZA.

Aside from the possible link to the debate of artificial intelligence, O's Chatrooms illustrates something else that is rather provoking and intriguing: the ability and willingness of the human mind to adjust its thinking to accommodate something that is not even artificial intelligence or anything close to possessing logic or thought, all for the sake of convincing the mind that it is carrying on a rational and coherent conversation. The mind's willingness to shift and bend its perceptions shows that it is already so well-trained that in the end, it does not really matter whether it is talking to man or machine - as members of an online virtual world, we are more concerned with how to construct a virtual reality that fits within the parameters of what the human mind believes to be logical and real, that the identity of our chat partner becomes only secondary at best. In the end, just as O's chat partners tried to manipulate O -and are in turn also manipulated by O - the identity of the nameless and faceless chat partner which one encounters in cyber space becomes less significant than one's desire to create and stabilize one's own virtual reality. The answer to the question "who is chatting with you" becomes secondary to this virtual world which we the denizens of the internet individually arrange and scheme for ourselves.

A native of Taiwan, Yu-Chuan Tseng received her undergraduate degree at the National Taiwan Normal University before going to the U.S. to pursue a Master's degree in Studio Art at the New York University. Classically trained in painting, she first learned how to use the computer in 1993 during her stay in New York, "when 'www' was just a catchword on an AOL ad."* Upon her return to Taiwan the following year, she decided to learn more about computers and new media. Her subsequent first exposure to and experience with net art in 1998 inspired her to start working on interactive net art.

Currently Tseng is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Applied Arts at Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University, and in May 2005, her solo show Immersing ME (Multiple Electroplate) will be held at the SLY Art Space in Taipei.

Footnotes:
7 Transcripts of O's Chatrooms can be found at <http://www.pyart.com/ochat/page/cmmtpcliste.jsp>
* Excerpt quotes taken from interview with Yu-chuan Tseng,