Project

sheep/dog: Trial by Eire

In this installation you play the role of a shepherd who must herd a bunch of sheep with attitude through a course using Duncan H. Terrier (a.k.a. Duncan of Innisfree) as your sheepdog. Duncan and the sheep are fully autonomous, although Duncan responds to voice commands such as "bye," "away," "steady," and "down." In fact, Duncan can be trained to respond to any set of utterances, in any accent, because rather than using speech recognition, he is looking at an acoustic pattern. Both the sheep and Duncan have minds of their own: for example, if the sheep get frightened, they may bolt or charge.