Greg Garvey isn't expecting his Automatic Confession Machine to become a regulation church fixture any day soon. Instead, Garvey, an artist and lapsed Catholic, is showing off the computerized confessional on the nascent electronic-art circuit.
Here's how it works: A penitent, perhaps attracted by the red neon cross or the stereoscopic image of a winking Christ, steps up to the gleaming black Plexiglas kiosk and kneels on the machine's red naugahyde stool. To start the confession, the user presses the Amen key, then selects from a menu of the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments. The priest-in-a-chip asks the user a series of questions, taking a special interest in sins of the flesh.
After the confession, the machine's expert system prints out the prescribed penance on a handy wallet-size slip of paper and signs off with a blessing.
The Automatic Confession Machine (ACM) wasn't created as a "diatribe against the Catholic Church," Garvey says, but as a method of examining the way that "technology has intruded into our lives, mediating what used to be human-to-human transactions."
Despite the system's manifest advantages - Garvey says it can conveniently provide the Church with a vast datastream for spotting sin trends among the flock - the ACM is unlikely to spring from gallery hall to hallowed hall anytime soon.
In order for the ACM to be anything more than an artist's prank, the software must be ordained. "Not likely," admits Greg Garvey, "but one must bear in mind that the Church only recently admitted to the correctness of Galileo." Garvey's e-mail address: ggarvey@vax2.concordia.ca.
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