The artist collective Doublelucky Productions on Thursday gave a lecture-performance titled “True-You — We Know How You Feel” at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman.
The event was held at the invitation of Goethe Institut, the German cultural association in Amman, according to organisers.
Exploring newly developed machines that track how users feel, the collective examined the history of these machines, which reaches back to mediaeval times, and presented voice analysis micro-expression analysis and visualisation of brain waves as methods “to read the truth from the body, making the latest software, such as lie detectors, operate” .
The collective is made up of Christiane Kühl and Chris Kondek, who are responsible for text, performance and video, Hannes Strobl, who is responsible for music, and Kim Albrecht, who is responsible for IT and data visualisation.
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During the performance, the collective mentioned a new system to be used by the European border control agency Frontex called iBorderCtrl, which uses an artificial intelligence lie-detecting system.
“These technological developments are a global phenomenon,” said performer Kühl in an interview with The Jordan Times, adding: “A lot of money can be made from machines that know how you feel.”
“I don’t know if we really want that,” said performer Kondek.
“For me, the question is also: Can machines actually know how we feel and are emotions something that we can express mathematically?” IT specialist Albrecht added.
“This event is the start of a whole series of events that we call technopocene,” said Laura Hartz, the head of Goethe Institut in Amman, in an interview with The Jordan Times.
The term “technopocene” is the proposed name for today’s geological epoch, in which “new technologies shape almost all aspects of our lives”, according to the institute’s website.
It is derived from the term “anthropocene”, which is widely used in the humanities field to describe the current geological epoch in which earth is “fundamentally marked by humans”, Hartz explained.
“The possibilities of these machines and inventions really determine our lives everywhere,” she said, adding: “It is also a little scary thinking about how far-reaching this is.”
This article has been adapted from its original source.
