Proposal

We plan to make use of randomness and indeterminacy to generate comedic situations by playing a telephone-like game with the audience and making use of improv comedy.  The game of telephone is played by having one person whisper a phrase in someone's ear, who then listens and whispers what they think the person said into someone else's ear and so on - and at the end of the sequence of people, the last person says the phrase out loud, often resulting in a garbled version of the original phrase with humorous results.  This kind of interaction is similar to the bad translator, which allows people to input a phrase to be translated into many different languages and eventually back to the original language. 

Machines inherit human biases in translation.  We plan to show and play on these biases to show that computers are more human than we give them credit for due to being programmed by humans. Comedic situations can arise from both human mistranslation and computer mistranslation (when trying to spread a message, things get lost in translation due to differences in ways of “understanding”).

For our project, we can either make use of existing technologies such as Google Image search or generate images based off of a phrase to add a visual component to this game and project the results on a screen.  We can then have the performers react to or riff from what's presented to them and use it as the input for the next round.   In this way, the piece will be interactive and create different results every time.