The Cute Machine

About the work

‘The Cute Machine’ CD-ROM is a compilation of earlier installation works such as ‘SORRY’ (1996) created by Corompt using an Amiga 2000 and displayed on Amiga 2000s within elaborate and performative gallery installations. They combine the zoological process of neoteny (the evolutionary process whereby a species retains the infantile or juvenile traits of its predecessors into adulthood) with the logic of 'cute' modes of representation in computer interface design. Utilising Screen Australia funding, Corompt remade these installation works in Macromedia Director on the Macintosh as ‘The Cute Machine’, adding an interactive guide and an additional interactive where users can try to optimize neotentic features on gestated cutelings, morphing them into grotesque mutations. The CD-ROM interface is designed to echo the bright colours and simplicity of a child's toy and reflect the ‘low-tech’ simplicity of her work.

Corompt’s interest in multimedia work “evolved out of a dissatisfaction in working exclusively in any one media coupled with a fascination for the spectacle of the technologies of the arcade game and the shopping mall, which beep, flash, whistle and jiggle to sustain the interest of users” ...[The] work is designed with the wisdom of the arcade game and includes the voyeuristic pleasure of watching others work for the pathetic rewards that the user-friendly machine offers (Stuckey, 1996:45). Corompt describes how the work asks users to "'suspend our belief [in] the computer's mechanical nature and regard [it] instead with human virtues of intelligence, patience, helpfulness, and even personality'. It is not until things go wrong 'that we remember that they are idiotic, cryptic computing machines'." (Stuckey 1996:44). In SORRY, she attempts to intensify this paradox by creating an absurdly simple user-friendly environment. However, to relate with this 'friendly beckoning blob', one is required to abuse it. The four control buttons only offer this one possibility. 'And', the artist says, 'like the dumb machine that it is, it must endure the procedure until the user is satisfied-but the 'abuse', of course, is purely subjective and is completely meaningless to a computer. We are suspended between the desire to project life into these cute graphic representations of infant-like characters, and the more objective understanding that it is, in fact, only a machine'" (ibid).

Corompt was drawn to the intimacy of the desktop computer, explaining that home computing felt like a traditional women’s cottage industry such as using a sewing machine where you can work in isolation (Cleland, 1996:10). ‘Whilst she has stated that her choice of the Amiga was “dictated by economic considerations…the simplicity of form and effect that the Amiga has determined provides the work with much of its strength” (Stuckey, 1996:45). Corompt's work is also “extraordinary by virtue of the fact that it is fun…a quality that…is a vital part of the audience's engagement with the work” (Stuckey 1996: 44). Corompt also deliberately set out to confront the ‘beige box syndrome’ and the user’s bodily interactions. “Unlike most computer interactive work, which offers the unmitigated seduction of [a] beige monitor on a white plinth where the user indulges purely in a conventional mouse/screen relationship, 'SORRY' requires the user to stomp its four control buttons with their feet. The effect of this enforced activity is to make the interaction more confronting then (sic) mere mouse clicking, giving the simulated blows to the cartoon cuties a poignancy and violence that they otherwise would not have carried” (ibid). Exploring the opportunities afforded by CD-ROM, 'The Cute Machine’ extends the concerns of Corompt's installation work to “have a voice that extends over and above the frustrating insular world of gallery-based exhibition” (Corompt in Cleland, 1996:130).

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