The Simulacro-centric World. Version 5.1.
EYE CONTACT

© Art Project by
Galina Bleikh & Elena Serebryakova

Artificial intelligence (AI) has learned to read human emotions from facial expressions, track our moods and psychological states, and diagnose our medical conditions. Furthermore, thanks to its capacity for self-learning, its neural network will increasingly come to resemble our own. In the “Eye Contact“ project, we pose the question: Will the humanlike simulacrum of the future also behave like a living organism (e.g., blink its eyes)?

The AI sees the world through a digital camera. Therefore, it may categorize our eyes as a camera built along the same principles, albeit a biological one.

In our project, we achieve "eye-to-eye" contact between the spectator and the simulacrum. The digital camera sees the spectator blink, and the artificial intelligence interprets this as a failure in the human bio-camera. For the duration of the blink, the simulacrum breaks off eye contact and turns on the alert: "You blinked! Your camera failed!"

According to scientists, people blink more frequently than is necessary to moisten the eyes, because this action helps the brain to "switch off" its current condition and turn its attention from one object to another. According to calculations performed by biologists, people spend up to 10% of their total waking time blinking (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Obviously, the digital camera of the AI has no need of either a biological or a psychological reload.

We study the liminal area of the interaction between the living and the artificial, which gives rise to a conflict of meanings and interpretations. We conceptualize art as a universal language that can be used for negotiations between the two "parties" in the conflict.