MALPER

MALPER is currently an animated glitchy brain avatar, acting as a personified representation of Rachel Parry's multi-neurodivergent storytelling.

The current work-in-progress chatbot, offers a weird and wonky web-based, interactive, clickable experience, resulting in a whimsical yet disastrous choice-driven piece.

MALPER mimics Parry's lived-masked experiences. The chatbot's speech bubbles pop up at various speeds, often getting distracted, too fast, loud, oversharing, telling long-winded and disjointed stories, bad jokes, day-dreams, offering advice trying to connect with the visitor.

Reloading or continued playthroughs change the outcomes. Text wiggles in/out, descending into bombastic poetic rants, maps that smell, videos pop up, loops of noises build up. MALPER asks each visitor to perform actions of self-care and, on the surface, offers a playful interactive experience, a typical virtual service-healthbot.

The idea evolved from the random connection of how Rachel Parry's great-grandmother has the same name as the first developed virtual assistant psychotherapy chat-bots: Eliza Parry.

The faux-corporate logo on MALPER, alludes to critical questions around the commodification of care, mental health and disabilities. The illusion of choice, misused data, issues around diagnostics and prolonged exposure to microaggressions, misunderstandings of the spectrums and embracing my chaos.

MALPER was assisted in code development by Creative Technologist, Rachel Smith.