It’s all about the feelings…

Description

This talk will give an overview of a digital performance project that creatively critiques emotional, empathic, and sentiment recognition technologies, as an area of AI of significant implication for our current and near future lives. Pitched as capturing ‘real-time emotion’ and ‘non-conscious responses’, sentiment recognition technologies have been developed as a method to measure and map our emotional expressions. However, there are serious concerns about both the efficacy of these technologies and the ethics of use. Central to these concerns is the reductive nature of these systems and the problematic standardised categorisation methods embedded within their databases, which present serious issues of representation and bias, with the potential to reinforce inequalities, including racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism.

It’s all about the feelings… is a performance that makes visible how these technologies actually work in their attempt to read us, behind the smoke and mirrors. Led by artist and researcher Beverley Hood, the project brings together interdisciplinary collaborators including professional actor Pauline Goldsmith, and AI, affective computing, and cognitive science researchers, Dr Benedetta Catanzariti and Dr Robin Hill.

The project teases out how authentic and rich the relationship between the performer/user and technology can be, and the slippage between technological aspirations and lived reality.

Period	15 Nov 2024
Held at	University of Malta, Malta
Degree of Recognition	International