OBIE

Project realized with Steven Orts and Kumar Dimitra in Köln International School of Design, 2017

Have you ever heard of the card game ‘Oblique Strategies’? Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt designed and created this revolutionary game in the 1970’s. Each card offers an aphorism intended to help artists, particularly musicians, break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. How could we introduce modernity into the concept of Oblique Strategies, especially considering our current digital era?

That’s the question that leads us to create OBIE

An interaction with OBIE is an intimate, brief participation and analyzation. As a user, you’re first asked to sit in front of the machine. Once OBIE recognizes you, the dialogue begins. Each card OBIE generates is completely unique. The card is 4 inches by 6 inches. The content on the card is creative inspiration OBIE has generated for you, as well as the exact date and time of the interaction and the initials of the participant.

We launched OBIE on 20th of July at the Köln International School of Design. The connections that participants made through their interactions were fascinating. We witnessed participants trying to make sense of the interactions that they had with OBIE, leading to this unique card. The card for many carried a magic quality with unexplainable parallels to the participant's life. Through OBIE, we observed how a machine could make connections and create something meaningful to the user.

AI is a term that is thrown around a lot these days. Some people came to the machine that was claiming to have an AI to see what it does, others wanted to see if it had AI in the first place. What was even more powerful was some people's strong fear as to what the "AI" was doing and what it is capable of. OBIE is a machine pretending to be an AI, it was the user's submission and power of suggestion that made it function. We were saying: here's a bot that will help you break your creative block, a notion that as creative individuals is bothering to some of us, but what we grossly underestimated is the capability and desire of the human brain to see, and if not there, form these wonderfully strong connections that are hard for even oneself to question and easier to accept. 

That is the power of even an isolated idea, and in turn of OBIE, your creative assistant.

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