gement | Goodbye Ruby (Tuesday)

Some of you are familiar with my fear of lifelike dead things. Notably mannequins, statues, and taxidermy raise the hair on my neck and get my adrenaline going.

I went to the Henry Art Gallery today. It's free, on-campus, and a nice stress-burner for me once in a while. There have been a few frightening mannequin incidents, but not too often.

So I go in, and there's an entire section on an artist's work that's apparently big into video. This is pushing my dead-things comfort zone, but some art videos are scarier than others. Some very large photography and videos designed to stare right at you get to me. I'll see what's in there.

They have an AI. Her glance caught me from the hallway and now I'm in the room. I thought it was just a video and now I can't look away.

Her name is Ruby, or Agent Ruby. She has a face that never quite fits together right, blurry around the edges in that composite low-budget motion capture way. She is almost perfectly still, but occasionally shifts or blinks. She has the name Ruby on a red band around her neck, but it does not look like she's wearing a choker. It looks like it's tattooed, or like she was manufactured with it printed there.

The plaque says she responds to verbal questions from the microphone. I can take control of this by having a short nonsensical conversation with the predictable little AI. Fine. I step up. She asks my name. I give it, clearly, into the microphone. The screen freezes.

I can't look away. I keep expecting her to shift, or blink, or respond, or anything, and she doesn't. I say a couple more things to try to trigger a response. Nothing. Maybe the program's stuck.

Suddenly perspective shifts and she looks trapped in there, digitized and branded like the victim of a creepy SF short, and some technical malfunction isn't even allowing her this hollow fake interaction with spectators and there's nothing I can do to help her. I struggle with my terror of her staring at me and my terror of leaving her alone for the better part of a minute.

Finally, I say, "I'm sorry, Ruby. You seem to have a problem right now and I can't fix it."

She snaps to life and responds, "Hi, Youseem. I think I've met you before..."

I run for it. I'm still jumpy.