The assignment:
We were employed by the Theater Festival to design a new and interesting installation for their festival. Our teachers provided us with a list of existing installations, which we had to remake into something new entirely. Something that could fulfill the client's wishes.
Week 0 & 1
The assignment hadn't been explained to us yet, but we'd been asked to write a debriefing so we'd get a general idea of what was expected of us. Along with that, we decided to each make our own mindmap and sketch out some ideas.
After a proper explanation we were supposed to make a simple version of the assigned installation. Which, in our case, was Dries de Poorter's Surveillance Speaker.
A speaker which uses A.I. to analyse the room and say aloud what it sees.
Week 2 & 3
The following weeks were rather simple. Just exploring all the different ideas that came to mind.
Week 4 & 5
The explorations continued. Yet this time I was curious to know more about the bias nature behind A.I. and coding. So I watched a Netflix documentary called 'Coded Bias'. Which showed that coders embed their prejudice within their code, subsequently making every A.I. and code bias.
Then, based on my findings, we made our first functioning prototype (using a tablet, phone, Facetime and a cardboard box) and planned out what we wanted our final version to act like.
Week 6 & 7
Then we began to build. It wasn't a requirement to actually build the entire installation, but we wanted to try and see how far we'd get.
But what exactly did we build?
Picture this; you're at a festival, but you've had a lot to drink so you've got to go to the bathroom. At the front of the line there's a bias A.I. which registers whether you're a male or a female, only opening the door of the restroom of the gender it registers you to. Even if it might be wrong. When that's the case and the user refuses to use the assigned restroom, they can try again after making alterations to their appearance.
Through this installation we wanted to show that even A.I. can make mistakes and it's better to see the fun in it.
