Title of the dissertation

Intimate Encounters: Documents of intimacy and mimesis from encounters with chatbots and conversational user interfaces (working title)

Project description

Since the 1960s, when Joseph Weizenbaum developed the computer programme ELIZA based on George Bernard Shaw’s stage play Pygmalion (1913) to parody a virtual psychotherapy, chatbots and digital assistants, so-called conversational user interfaces (CUI), have been ubiquitous in contemporary digital cultures. Based on the use of such conversational user interfaces, e.g. in online shopping, customer service, dating and in therapeutic contexts, the dissertation project asks to what extent artificially intelligent communication has caused changes in the relationships between people, media and machines, and how concepts of intimacy are reformulated to that effect.

The project is based on the observation that the economy in the 21st century is no longer just one of many moments in social life, but that it decomposes common practices of knowing, feeling, producing and consuming as well as the subjects themselves (Illousz). Companies have developed a keen interest in retaining customers and creating impressions of intimacy. What is remarkable, however, is that in recent years they have increasingly pursued this interest through the systematic use of text-based dialogue systems, the simplest form of natural language processing. The dissertation project investigates whether new practices of approach, trust and distancing may emerge from this mass use, in which a culture of staging – or culture as staging (Fischer-Lichte) – shows itself.

There is no shortage of analyses of the uses of the affective in the present; however, the planned project wants to (1) place intimacy and its situational-dialogical moment at the center of the consideration, (2) understand intimacy as a performative practice that decisively configures constellations between human and non-human actors in postfordism, and (3) establish a connection with the project of an intimate aesthetics, as suggested by Marianne Streisand in her studies on the history of concepts from 2001, i.e. understand intimacy as a question of theatrical representation that requires both an understanding of appropriate actions and specific texts and forms of play.

The dissertation project takes this into account insofar as it examines contemporary uses of such communicative, relation-forming codes, starting from the chatbot as the most excessive text producer of our time, and converts the documents of precisely those interactions in the shared space of the chat into a scientific discourse. The dialogic element of these Intimate Encounters, together with the inherent processes of making oneself similar and becoming similar, emphasizes on the one hand the participation of non-human actors in theory formation; on the other hand, it also makes the researcher herself visible, who appears as a questioner, answerer, writer, reader, riddler and discerner in the material in which she writes or is read from outside – and which may only then receive the status of a document.