The Mad Prophet challenges toys that track. The doll is meant to be part of a fictional product launch by a major toy manufacturer in a near (but slightly skewed) future. Participants can check out the doll from a mock-up trade show booth, and wander through the streets with it.

Produced exclusively for ISEA, the Mad Prophet, includes an embedded mobile multimedia device which triggers the doll to play location-based audio clips. The Mad Prophet is an interface to a narrative audio database, which allows the users’ path to be a method of nonlinear database narrative story telling. A user’s movement through time and space can trigger one of dozens of aphorisms customized for the local environment. The trigger for any one of these pieces will likely be unclear, asking the user to interpret and explain the utterances from this doll they carry.

Marketed to parents (and exhibition-goers) as a talking doll that helps “keep track of loved ones”, the project seeks to draw attention to issues of surveillance by modeling itself on emerging children’s toys such as “Pal Mickey” which uses location-awareness to both entertain and track a child within Disney theme parks. Soon after checking out a doll, as the participant moves away from her original location, she will find that the doll’s initially reassuring tones become increasingly disquieting eventually degenerating into a pschizoid commentary on present-day San Jose, spoken in by a Mad Prophet from a non-existent future.

Fictionally positioned as one in a series of similar toys, this particular doll’s character is called “The Mad Prophet”. A visitor from another time, “The Mad Prophet” creates a series of hypothetical mappings, shadows from another place co-registered with time and space. His poetic musings imagine the impact of political or cultural changes to the mundane urban landscape of freeways and office towers. By listening to the the doll’s aphorisms, the user constructs a narrative of the “Mad Prophet’s” universe, in the process exploring their environment from a new, syncretic point of view.

Examples of aphorisms:

For office buildings, etc.:

• “Inside the skyscrapers a psychological climate operated according to its own artificial rhythm induced by alcohol and insomnia.”
• “The office spaces where the zones of maximum psychological intensity while their homes became no more than service stations for their docile bodies to be fed, and entertained to sedation”
• “Though human stewardship had long since broken down, an illusion of control persisted for some time before the ultimate collapse”
• “In the car parks, abandoned vehicles entombed in silence, from a race long since departed.”

For highways:

• “From these ancient runic monoliths, the city unfolded as vast interactive narrative the tone of which oscillated between total boredom and utter violence”

For the suburbs and gated communities:

• “While polity was engineered into these new gravitational nodes, they were in fact founded on an counter-civic impulse.”
• “Following the invention of the bomb, new transportation and communication technologies shifted from the targeted urban centers to colonize the perimeter, through their human host the so-called nuclear family”