The Veils of Transference

The Veils of Transference is a non-interactive pre-scripted film produced in 2001 at StudioBlue at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, with support from Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, National Science Foundation (Grant No.DUE 9980873), NSF Gateway Engineering Education Coalition at Cooper Union, and PSC-CUNY Research Foundation.

It depicts a 20-minute psychoanalytic session between a robot and a human, during which the robot and human switch back-and-forth between their roles as analyst and analysand. In the end it is the robot, and not the human, which evidences a cathartic "baring of the soul" experience.

The robot's locomotion, movements, text-to-speech, and camera pan and tilt were pre-scripted as "gestures' and operated remotely from a keyboard in the studio. Each keyboard stroke would send the next line of instruction to the robot . A program was written that allowed the robot voice to be imbued with changes in volume, inflection, pace, pitch, etc. The puppeteer at the keyboard could improvise with the human actor only in terms of timing; i.e., it was at the puppeteer's discretion to decide when to execute each keystroke entry.