All I can think of when I look back on why I began making art is when I was in high school and wondering why video games couldn't be more like Derek Jarman movies, or why they couldn't reproduce the feeling of wandering around at night with Anais Nin on my mind, or seeing the plants and animals at night breathe after reading Carlos Castaneda. Why couldn't they do that?
I've always been oriented toward games, and ever since I was a kid I've been susceptible to artificial intelligence. Back then I programmed a simple type your question and get a yes or no answer program that I conversed with for an hour and believed that there was some kind of presence behind the screen, maybe Satan. I don't think it scared me, it was just weird. And I think I would be a poor choice for a Turing test, since I'm convinced that everything I talk to is human.
There is something about games, their oversimplification of structures, that make them a good escape from ambiguities of real life, especially those in human interactions. And I think that's why I have a love/hate relationship with them. The escape is seductive. But I want to break out of that structure, and achieve the warm, comforting sort of ambiguity that you get with the less interactive mediums of writing and film (which in a way are more interactive, on a psychic level, because your participation as you're watching is not over-simplified).
I don't think my susceptibility to machine (or brick, or wood) intelligence means that I'm somewhat autistic or don't identify with human emotions. I was a counselor for five years, though that could have been my way of trying to explore and understand something foreign to me. I think the experience of causing one's self to disappear and focus on the issues of others and question and point out people's self-contradictions is something that could be closely-related to my interest in interactive art.
But I think with computers and artificial intelligence (or my mathematically-impaired version of it, which is just something that looks human doing things semi-randomly) it allows me to put the objects of my psychological and anthropological interests in a safe box, so they can surprise me on my own terms. I need a better word than artificial intelligence, I think I'll just call it animism, or maybe animistic intelligence, since it's more about projecting than creating.