In 2009, along with artists Tommy Perman and Ziggy Campbell, Simon was commissioned to create an artwork that addressed the rapidly growing interest in the general public of social media platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, and a relative newcomer at the time: Twitter. They wanted to capture some of the unease that people felt at the time of outsourcing emotional well-being to large corporations.

Simon, Tommy and Ziggy had for a long time been interested in musical automata from the turn of the previous century such as orchestrions, nickelodeons, and player pianos.

What might the 21st century equivalent be? Would it also be obsessed with its own online popularity?

The result was Cybraphon: an emotional robotic band built from junk shop instruments, housed in an antique wardrobe, that googled itself every 15 seconds. Cybraphon’s mood was shaped by whether its popularity online was increasing or decreasing, and this determined the mood of the music it played. As one of Twitter’s first ever “bots” it also regularly tweeted about its emotional state for its followers.

In this talk, Simon will set out what happened next: an unlikely tale of touring, BAFTA glory, being collected by the National Museum of Scotland, and what it was like to have a machine become more famous than its creators. Simon Kirby is a Professor of Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh and elected Fellow of the British Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Cognitive Science Society, and a member of the Academy of Europe. He works in parallel on scientific and artistic investigations of cultural evolution and the origins of human uniqueness, particularly the evolution of language. He founded the Centre for Language Evolution, which has pioneered techniques for growing languages in the experiment lab and exploring language evolution using computer simulations. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx