Intentions > Who Owns Our Emotions @ EdgeCut, NEW INC
EdgeCut is a project by Heidi Boisvert and Kat Mustatea
Based on the interactive project Intentions. Transfer and Disappearance II, this is a brief and playful performance about Face Recognition and the fake empathy of “emotional” technologies.
In her essay Seeing, Naming, Knowing Nora Khan writes, “We have the illusion of mastery over our own avatars”. Intentions. Transfer and Disappearance II > Who Owns Our Emotions? address the hijacking of our emotions, and the potentials of glitch and failure to subvert the underlying purposes of an “emotional” technology. The emotional transactions might be a simulation, but the subconscious understanding embeds itself through play and repetition and provokes a reaction.
Technologies are ever more opaque, more privatized. I am interested in the human gesture and expression as way to finding out how technologies work and using the failures of these technologies to fool and reclaim them.
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The interactive installation Intentions. Transfer and Disappearance II was made with the technical collaboration by Sai Liu and Fan Feng, and with the help, or advise of Oren Shoham, Hans Tammen, Mark Romein, Todd Bryant and Luke DuBois.
Performer Thisby Cheng.
Performer at EdgeCut, Marissa Delano.
Photo by ©Andrew Demirjian
The performance at EdgeCut consisted in projecting live FaceOSC + Wekinator interactions while participants play with the face mesh and the performer tries to fit her features into the mesh/face. The public is invited to fit their own faces and to “help” the Face Recognition AI called Thisby, and the performer by adjusting their expressions to its (metaphorical) data set.