Takayuki Todo is interested in how people establish an emotional relationship with humanoid robots. As the discipline of robotics has shown for years, a realistic similarity to the human form alone is not able to break down the distance between a human and a machine. The term “uncanny valley” refers to this very narrow but significant gap between what a person perceives as real and credible, and what they perceive as artificial and uncanny.
For Todo, the central element that offers a way out of the “uncanny valley” is the gaze. For years he has been working on anthropomorphic figures that are made of entirely synthetic materials yet acquire a liveliness through their gaze. Created in 2018, Todo calls his “Simulative Emotional Expression Robot” “SEER” - evocative of a seeing being. Using a 3D printer, the artist produced a head made of several parts that was designed on a reduced scale and without any gender or ethnicity-specific features.
The robot has a camera that perceives the human counterpart, focuses, and then reciprocates their gaze. “SEER” not only interacts with the viewer through eye contact, but also by nodding its head and moving its eyes, eyelids and eyebrows. The intensity of the movements increases as the person approaches “SEER”. The figure has a childlike physiognomy, its facial expressions and movements are comforting in their tenderness. “SEER” seems to have a life of its own in which it encounters us. It reflects the facial expressions of its counterpart, it generates movements as reproductions of existing ones, but does not produce any autonomous gestures.
Source: http://www.takayukitodo.com/
(Script by Franziska Nori (the director of Frankfurter Kunstverein))
The Human Detector inverts the rules, it becomes a gain not to be detected:
"By doing this, I recreated my own experience with ml4a and AI, but I inverted the rules so that I win every time. " (1)
By subverting the rules of the facial detection apparatus Iyo aims to question what biases are propagated by machine vision technologies such as facial recognition.
]]>Who doesn’t get seen on the internet? In the new world order of robots and talking heads, a reality exists that’s part life, part cinema, and part algorithm. But as the robot curators silently curate, an alternate reality also emerges, starring the humans who win at losing the losing social media game. A secret cinematic world, seen only by robots.
‘What the Robot Saw’ is a perpetually-generated robot documentary live stream and durational online performance and archive. It’s a Sunday drive through the awkward intersections of performance, surveillance, voyeurism, and robots — in the age of the talking head. The Robot uses contrarian ranking algorithms to curate some of the least attention-grabbing new videos on online media — videos hidden by commercial social media ranking algorithms, which may usually only be seen by robots. Using face and image analysis algorithms to curate videos and study their subjects, ‘What the Robot Saw’ assembles its film and identifies its performers — as the Robot saw them.
Revealing a mix of underacknowledged media makers, performed selves, and obsessive surveillance algorithms, ‘What the Robot Saw’ enters into the complicated relationship between the world’s surveillant and curatorial AI robots and the humans who are both their subjects and their stars. It’s not a video about how robots actually see. It’s a response to processes of representation in the contemporary collision of performed selves, screen-centric perceptions — and robots.
Source: https://what-the-robot-saw.com
]]>Source: https://nordhjem.net/2018/02/01/faces-in-motion-embodiment-emotion-and-interaction/
]]>However, the camera is, in fact, a little insecure. Easily startled by sudden movements, it is shy around strangers and tends to avoid direct eye contact. The intention in creating the (In)Security Camera is to invert the relationship between the surveillance system and its subjects, giving the machine an element of human personality and fallibility that is by turns endearing, tragic, and slightly disturbing. This behavioral reversal can be read as an expression of the anxieties and fears underlying the security camera’s authoritative role; as an anti-voyeuristic refusal of visual pleasure; or as a kind of withdrawal, avoiding difficult questions and challenges.
Source: http://silviaruzanka.com/art/insecurity-camera/
]]>The book is logged as a novel rather than as separate short stories because the stories are interconnected, referencing the same technologies and social constructs and exploring the same possible future. Characters in some of the stories are also minor characters in other stories.
]]>Like Physiognomic Scrutinizer (2008 – 2009) and Mirror_Piece (2010 – 2011), 15 Minutes of Biometric Fame also incorporates face-recognition software employed in surveillance and security applications. In contrast, the design draws inspiration from camera dollies utilised in television and cinematography.
A circular track is fitted with a camera crane mounted with an independently operated camera. The camera lens imposes on public space, seeking out and scanning the visitor’s facial features. Rather than identifying a person, the biometric video analysis software assists in comparing their characteristics with a preselected data base of “celebrity” faces.
Compiled by De Nijs from a series of multilingual online search results, the initial 75,000 strong data bank consisted of typical celebrity personages as well as those who have attained fame through exposure on reality television and from the world of internet video. Each individual is tagged with one of twelve categories of stardom in one of eleven languages. These can range from artist to rock or porn star through to soap actor and musician.
Attached to the camera, an LCD monitor displays this matching process and those visitors who can be partnered as lookalikes to a data base celebrity are then projected on a large public screen. Not only are they similarly tagged but they are further identifiable with a generation label. A direct match with an original celebrity earns a 2nd generation tag. It follows that a comparison with subsequent generation levels moves you further down the lineage. This "ancestry of fame" is also displayed in its entirety.
Once a visitor is captured, matched and tagged, they are subsequently added to the continually expanding data base, uploaded to the internet and hence promoted to instant stardom. In this way, 15 Minutes of Biometric Fame is not only critiquing the act of “becoming famous”, but the precursor conditions for celebrity credibility as well.
Source: http://www.marnixdenijs.nl/15-minutes-of-biometric-fame.htm
]]>Wireless surveillance video, transmitting from offices, streets, stores and homes, was intercepted walking through different city streets while carrying a commercial model video scanner.
An animated selection from this archive, separated over three screens, cycles through scenes from Brussels, Berlin, Chicago, Seoul, Barcelona, Montreal, and other cities throughout Europe and North America. Moving from the commercial space to the street, to the home, the bed, to the televisual (television wirelessly distributed between rooms in homes can also be intercepted), and finally moving back out into the urban nightlife, parallel stories start appear, and cities start to merge into a meta-narrative of contemporary urbanity as depicted through the eyes of the surveillance camera.
Source: http://www.ubermatic.lftk.org/blog/?p=203
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