SENSING CHAMBER
Three-channel interactive video installation. 2023Data Imagination. Ph.D. seminar and exhibition. La Carré, LUCA School of Arts, Ghent, Belgium.
/Organised by the “Art, Philosophy and Technology” research cluster of Image Research Unit, Ghent/
How to see, talk, fantasize and collaborate with AI?
Apart from a technical and scientific focus on the development of AI, there is also the human experience of it. We interact with technology, whether we understand it or not. Nowadays AI affects the human condition in all its dimensions. Therefore, it is important to reflect on the technological relations we are taking part in. Should we merely adapt ourselves to the newly developed technological features or can we also turn them into something personal or positive? How can we design that which is designing us? Artists and designers, experts in experience and expression, might offer models enabling people to reposition themselves facing AI. So as to address this issue the PhD seminar and exhibition will bring some concrete cases to the fore in which human activities like seeing, talking, fantasizing, and collaborating are reviewed considering the presence of AI.
/ Frank Maet /
Exhibition
Corneel Cannaerts, Michiel Helbig, Kasper Jordaens, Rosa Menkman, Nicolas Provost, Veronika Romhány, Vincent Thornhill, Wiebe Van Ranst
Prototype with changed environment and sound. Made in Unity. 2024
Sensing Chamber
Where did the speaker go?She is burnout and missing. Only an agent left behind: a generative, automated replacement.
Plants; Room; Navigation; Sound; Voice; Narrative
Gameplay demo with conversational AI. Detail. 3D Game made with UE4.2. 2023
The installation expands the focus of Cage’s famous 4’33” performance inward emotional material. It draws up a void: an archive of the absent person by constructing a chatbot applied to a photonic digital body. A hollow shell of an identity that we might never even see. Yet, through interaction it can be summoned as it senses the visitor and cognitively echoes the copied artist. Whether this is a tool for a friendly future or not, interaction design is under a certain shift - pushed by the stormy winds of the appearing conversational AIs.
Dynamic feedback systems - these dialog-based interactions - are eating up the very meaning and method of how humans use AI to access information. They also redefine the means in a capitalist sense of what users pay in exchange: with cognitive, visceral, and emotional capital translated to data.
To target the highly problematic affective computing, the installation plays around with the conditions of trust in the context of human-avatar/AI interaction.
Stills from the agent-driven video game prototype. Made in UE5. 2023
Installation view. La Carré, LUCA School of Arts. Ghent. 2023