Part of Sound Through Barriers, Empathy Test explores the sounds of a machine model of self-recognition, approach/avoidance behavior and the inevitability of any measurement to alter the thing measured. Randomly generated pulses serve both to drive the servomotors’ positions as well as to be interpreted as sound when a motor position brings it into the field of a pick-up coil. The piece is open to completion by the viewer (since it has no overt content) but is simultaneously a kind of mystery—since it is not clear to the viewer whether or not s/he is influencing the production of sound. The piece approaches the idea of “barrier” in terms of the limits of communication…what can be recognized, understood or spoken.