The Digital Sad Ice Cream is a p5.js-based face filter that features a sad melting ice cream who obsessively talks to itself in a state of existential crisis.
The digital sad ice cream lives a melting life during its existence in an opened browser window. Once verbally greeted by the human audience, the digital sad ice cream attaches onto the audience's face using face tracking. Following, it spends the rest of its life in recapturing what it heard from the audience (mostly incorrectly) using shitty speech recognition, and then speaks it back to itself to be further mis-interpreted. This interpreted text gets more and more illegible over time, finally being reduced into broken words that get virally repeated.
Much like its human companions and creators, the digital sad ice cream is forever trapped in this cycle of attempting to self-reflect and self-interpret and then failing to do so. It is about the reality of dysfunctional imperfect technologies in parallel with that of the flawed and mortal humans who make the technologies.
The digital sad ice cream melts and evaporates when the browser interaction is ended.
Play with it now.
