Bobo's Paradox, 2025
2025
installation
dimensions variable
An experimental installation exploring behavioral modeling and agency
Drawing from Albert Bandura's influential Bobo doll experiments, this installation transforms psychological research into an immersive space for examining how we learn social behaviors through interaction with "the other." The work creates a contemporary laboratory where visitors become both subject and observer of their own behavioral patterns.
Interactive Dummy Station
At the installation's core, a life-size interactive stuffed fabric dummy hangs suspended within a pulley system, offering visitors manual controls to raise, lower, and manipulate the figure. This neutral recipient of human action serves as a behavioral mirror, reflecting back whatever approach visitors bring—whether gentle exploration, forceful manipulation, curious investigation, or caring touch. Visitors can dash the figure against walls and floor, and pull out its exposed red belly, with each interaction revealing learned patterns of dominance, collaboration, or care.
The dummy interactions are captured through a live video feed that streams to a stable diffusion AI node. A computer monitor displays the AI's real-time interpretation of visitor interactions combined with an image of Dummy Tree (see below), rendering evolving still images that shift gradually over approximately one minute. This technological layer adds a speculative dimension to behavioral observation, questioning how artificial intelligence interprets and potentially influences human social learning.
Dummy Tree Installation
Adjacent to the interactive station stands Dummy Tree, an 8' x 10' x 2' static sculpture featuring a tree-like structure populated with multiple dummy limbs. Its presence serves as both witness and context for visitor interactions, while oscillating between dual interpretations: is it merely a fantastical recombination of human forms, or does it suggest something more ominous—a gradual subsumption of human agency by AI? The tree embodies the installation's central paradox: while AI collaboration might enhance our creativity and understanding, it simultaneously raises questions about autonomy and potential technological dependence.
Visual Documentation
Generative AI prints on the surrounding walls display interpretations of the dummy interactions, creating a feedback loop between digital and physical forms. These images document the AI's "learning" process while inspiring future iterations of the dummy sculptures, blurring boundaries between human and machine creativity.
Conceptual Framework
Rather than prescribing correct behavior, Bobo's Paradox creates neutral space for examining our instinctive responses to vulnerability and difference and layers in compelling machine learning visualizations. The installation asks: How do we approach the other? What behavioral patterns do we unconsciously model and transmit? How does technological mediation alter our understanding of empathy and aggression?
This exploration extends into the realm of “AI Philosophy” through the concept of latent space—that multidimensional mathematical territory where AI stores and recombines learned patterns. Just as humans develop behavioral models through observation and interaction, Dummy Tree emerged from AI's latent space when prompted with images of the interactive Dummy. This generative process mirrors our own learning mechanisms, raising questions about whether artificial and human intelligence follow parallel paths of pattern recognition and behavioral modeling.
Works in this Project
Dummy Installation, 2013
Subsumption, 2025
Dummy Tree, 2024
Dummy Photographs, 2013
Bye Bye USA (Dummy 2024)
Sucka, 2013
What's Mine is Yours What's Yours is Mine, 2013
