It’s all about the feelings
It’s all about the feelings… is a digital performance project about emotion. Specifically, how emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies attempt to read our emotions.
Year: 2021-2023
Performances: TramwayTV Episode on Zoom (March 2022); Inspace, Edinburgh (June 2022); Edinburgh Futures Institute: Love Machine Spring 2023 events (April 2023)
Emotional, empathic, sentiment recognition technologies, is an area of AI of significant implication for our current and near future lives. Pitched as capturing ‘real-time emotion’ and ‘non-conscious responses’, they have been developed as a method to measure and map our emotional expressions. Current real world use cases include HR, market research, post-natal parenting and education, near future uses include potential use within border control and a planned integration within the production of all new cars in the EU. 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 categorisations 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… uses digital media and performance to make visible how these technologies actually work, behind the smoke and mirrors. The project brings together interdisciplinary collaborators, including professional actor Pauline Goldsmith, and AI, affective computing and psychology researchers, Benedetta Catanzariti and Dr Robin Hill, to explore ways to make visible the algorithmic biases and limitations of sentiment recognition systems as they attempt to read us.
The performance has been presented as a series of remote and in-person events, staged as part presentation, part performance, part demonstration. The project scrutinises whether the technology is really capable of seeing our non-conscious (as emotional AI marketing suggests) or just what we present, through choice, control, cultural signifiers, etc. The project teases out how authentic and rich this relationship between the performer/user and technology can be, and the slippage between technological aspirations and lived reality.
Collaborators: Beverley Hood (artist) and Pauline Goldsmith (actor)
Thanks to: Dr Benedetta Catanzariti (AI researcher), Martin Atkinson, Dr Robin Hill, Claricia Parinussa, Alexander Storey Gordon, Pushpi Bagchi and Luis Soares.
Funded by: The project is part of The New Real programme on Experiential AI, and is supported by TramwaySupports, Edinburgh College of Art, the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Centre for Data, Culture & Society, Creative Informatics and Cove Park.
