Encoding Reality
The limits of our brains
“The time and the intensity in which we engage online continues to increase. Real suddenly seems entirely fake, and fake has the power and the presence of the real.”
New self-learning systems, advances in computer technology and progress in robotics are capable of changing the foundations of how we have built our lives and our reality. History shows that any effort to stop the progress of new inventions only causes a delay, new technologies emerge regardless of attempts to stop them.
Together with machines, humans are able to construct new intertwined realities which impact both how we see ourselves and how we understand the world. With technology advancing at a rapid rate, we discover the limits of the human brain, and simultaneously find new ways to design machines that are able to go beyond those limits. We have arrived at a point where we can feel awkward as a human in virtual and non-virtual realities.
Around sixty per cent of the traffic on the Internet is human, and the remainder are bots, of which a large proportion pretend to be human. Real and fake presence on the web seems to be inversed, termed the inversion.
The ability of machines to autonomously identify, make sense and independently act are further evolving. The real power of artificial intelligence and the restructuring of fundamental parts of society that result from AI are only just emerging. The long-term effects of AI and our connected world will not be known for decades.
Machine Vision
Engines of seeing
AI is the driving force behind the current industrial transformation. There is little privacy and we already have more interaction with bots such as interactive speech assistants. Automated systems assess people, fight crime and are linked to insurance and credit systems.
AI systems know everything about us, but what do we know about them and how they see and classify us. Looking at who is observing us and studying machine-made interpretations of the world can be a way to learn how AI views and structures intelligence. How does a spy satellite interpret the world? How is the world interpreted by artificial intelligence, trying to understand images and data?
Ingrained human biases are starting to show up in AI automations. If AI decides what jobs we take, what healthcare we get, who we connect with, it needs to be injected with fairness and ethics and to better represent women and minorities.
Interaction with the machine will only increase. AI can help the workflow, simultaneously teach and becoming a close companion. This leads to a new coexistence between man and machine.
Bots are becoming part of a product. Bots are not yet refined enough but future products will seek you out, contextually aware products, deeply personal, that are able to capture your interest. Learning about the locations you visit, restaurants you frequent, linking your calendar, even indicating when your blood sugar is low. An api can be magical when done well.
Why this matters
Getting closer to understanding how humans are interpreted and codified through machines and how technological systems gather, classify and use this input.
Training humans/ Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen
A photography exhibition devoted to the rapidly evolving machine visual culture and training images sets: the collections of photos used by scientists to train artificial intelligence systems in how to “see” and categorise the world.
Activation atlas/ OpenAI and Google researchers
A technique for visualizing what interactions between neurons can represent. As AI systems are deployed in increasingly sensitive contexts, having a better understanding of their internal decision-making processes makes it possible to identify weaknesses and investigate failures.
Face to face/ NIngly Zu
The video work explores how virtual interactions, especially applications of facial responsiveness provide a sense of compensation and fictional self-perception. The video questions the humanness in our relationship with machines and how they influence our relationships with each other.
Synthetic Reality
Time is not linear
Human interaction with AI systems result in intertwined realities, we like to immerse ourselves in subjective realities. The ability to replicate and create the “presence” of objects, people, or entire environments influences our understanding and sensory perception of physical reality.
Replicas of lifelike environments, people or objects can be converted into photo-realistic digital components to create new stories and realities. Creating synthetic realities provides access to places and people who would otherwise be unreachable.
Creating an ideal reality changes our notion of reality, place and time. Digital media makes physical distances disappear. Time changes into a block in which everything can exist simultaneously, we can now live in multiple times.
For the generation that grows up playing games, there is no distinction between the virtual and physical world. Gamers are ahead of their time and exemplify how people interact and live online. Aspects of the gaming world are entering physical reality with specific game design elements such as achievements, unlocking elements and seeking help from when you get stuck.
The physics of games are intriguing. You can open up a portal on the floor and on the ceiling, challenging our perception of gravity. Worlds can be experienced that are impossible for our world of physics and the brain has to think in entirely new ways and as a result new connections are made.
Why this matters
More people are choosing fantasy over reality.
Map of Speculative Fiction/ Michael Chabon
A diagram to explain how the various speculative genres were (broadly) defined. There is no real centre, only a set of conventions.
Hyper fountain/ Research Lab project
“Is Memory Data?” invites you to discover water as an interface, between human and technology, between physical and virtual experience.
Memories of Passersby/ Mario Klingemann
The fully autonomous work uses a complex system of neural networks to generate a never-ending stream of portraits: uncanny and eerie representations of male and female faces created by a machine.
Alienation and Closeness
Mind trips
The reality-building effects of AI have evolved in a way that people now no longer recognise the difference between what is real and what is not. Machine learning alters media, and phenomenons such as fake voices, avatars and videos have entered our everyday environment. These new technologies affect our ability to trust and understand the world. Deep fakes have led to discussions about the future understanding of knowledge and truth.
Our reality is subjective. We have always lived in a world where our senses can misrepresent reality. Someone’s truth is their personal collection of ideas that form their view of the world. New technology sheds light on an uncertainty that has always existed.
Memories, emotions and reactions are linked to devices and open for all to see. The most intimate thoughts, dreams and imaginative dimensions of our mind are visible, our very existence has become transparent. The self seems to be limitless, resulting in a new perception of intimacy and privacy, a sense of alienation and closeness.
What is considered as shocking and taboo is continuously in flux. It is nearly impossible to shock audiences today; the number of images available on the Internet expands the boundaries of taste and changed sexual taboos. Accepted norms from the past can now be experienced as shocking and vice versa but the most shocking today seems to be reality itself.
Why this matters
The virtual will become the standard by which to measure the imperfections of reality.
Feetish/ Hung Sheng Lee
Hung-Sheng Lee uses video to enhance sensuality. Exploring beauty and sensation in a variety of shots, the video is a celebration of male feet.
Wearable video mask/ Bill Shannon
A wearable, projection-mapped mask that displays a range of recorded facial expressions. With so much of ourselves, uploaded as images and videos to apps, creating not one digital doppelganger but a multitude of them, what are we to make of our real biological selves?
Video still/ Cattnap
Still of the video by Cattnap.
Visual culture
Thinking in pictures
People around the world increasingly share their life experiences online and are more open than ever when it comes to expressing their feelings. This sharing of ourselves leads to thoughts about what it means to be human and what it means to make contact, not only with other people but also with yourself.
Using visuals, we make stories about our lives. The unlimited possibilities for expressing yourself creates layered identities that transcend the boundaries of reality and self. The rapid flow of images in the digital domain can be overwhelming and at the same time, lead to boredom. The speed will only increase, Netflix, for example, tests how the speed can be adjusted at which viewers can watch shows and films.
It is complex to document your existence because no one else can. For most people, there is more recognition and connection with ugliness than beauty. To be vulnerable, you have to reveal parts of yourself that can be seen as ugly, it is the way to have intimacy.
Young people have an extensive image archives in their heads that they play with. They quickly change and combine times, references, links, humour and irony. Linking images, time, references and emotions with sarcasm, humour and cynicism that become a lifeline.
Sharing photos and videos via social media has led to the global visual culture of today. Soon we will subconciously move towards other senses, audio and tactile, and switch to more mutli-dimensional documentation of self and the world.
Why this matters
Culture has become a globalised space based on the common language of internet culture, shaped by linking images, time, references and emotions.
Strange Days: Memories of the Future/ Camille Henrot
Through a series of film clips, Henrot questions humanity’s future by means of a methodical dive into the past. The installation shows that the physical, inanimate and meticulously labelled systems of knowledge are capable of recording only a fragment, a singular facet of life’s prism.
Post-bed-post/ Felicity Morris
A self-broadcasting bed that live streams straight to Instagram, questioning the merging of our physical and digital identity.
Joint Writing of Today/ Jenni Juurinen and Dasha Pears
Teens were interviewed on what kind of language they use, outcomes were incorporated into their clothes.
Further reading
Radical Technologies/ Adam Greenfield
Having successfully colonized everyday life, radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us. Complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics and even redefining what it means to be human.
New Dark Age/ James Bridle
Are we are lost in a sea of information? Increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics rule our daily news. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, are we living in a new Dark Age?
Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans/ Douglas Copeland
Technology has placed the future at our fingertips. We marveled at devices that could tell us where we were at that exact moment; it became odd when they recently began to tell us where we would soon be. The question is how we want to relate to a future guided or created by technology as human beings.
The Posthuman/ Rosi Braidotti
The Posthuman outlines new forms of neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.