Interactive Audiovisual Performance
created by Juliana & Andrey Vrady, coded with ♥ by Andy Junginger
"Meanwhile, Juliana and Andrey Vrady’s “Dream Blender Hong Kong” makes use of facial recognition sensors to visualise human emotions. “We talk so much about how AI is good, or it’s bad. We want to change the perspective to ask ‘How does AI perceive us?” says Juliana. As viewers watch a short video, “Dream Blender Hong Kong” detects and visualises their emotions in different colours. Yellow is associated with joy, blue with sadness, according to the art duo. Importantly it’s always a mix of colours, “as different emotions cycle through us simultaneously,” says Juliana. She is adamant that AI is unequivocally a tool and nothing more. “I’m using AI like a painter would use a paintbrush,” she says. Behind “Dream Blender Hong Kong” is the idea that humans have feelings and they “won’t easily be replaced by AI.” While that may be true, AI algorithms can also be particularly adept at recognising the nuances of our facial expressions. When they first developed their AI system, Andrey became the first test subject. It turned out the AI might have understood Andrey better than Juliana did. “I showed him a funny video, and he smiled, but the AI detected disgust and contempt,” she says. “I asked Andrey how he actually felt. And he told me, “I wasn’t happy. It was a stupid video.” That anecdote succinctly captures how complex human emotions are-but sometimes how undecipherable it can be to other human beings. At the end of the day, we are all bound by the shared experience of loneliness, as the exhibition’s cultural statement, quoting Charles Dickens, notes: “A multitude of people, yet a solitude!” But it also begs the questions: as AI becomes more advanced, can we — and should we — rely on AI to take a closer look at ourselves and others?" Zolima Citymag, Hong Kong
juliana & andrey vrady