The scene unfolds in the living room of a loving couple, as hinted by their photograph on the cabinet. A coffee table and sofa anchor the foreground. Above it is an art piece depicting a pair of lovers in a tight embrace. To the right, a window frames a view of the serene sea. A voice narrates the bright beginnings of a relationship.
Suddenly, the atmosphere shifts, cracks appear in the furniture and the fragmented pieces swirl around the room. The four corners of the room start to close in. The living room transforms into a police station before morphing into a courtroom, where a judge appears to be handing down the verdict of a broken relationship.
Then, shards of glass rise like ice daggers. They disappear just as abruptly and you suddenly find yourself half submerged in water, buoyed by the sea’s cooling embrace.
This is “A Safe Place?,” a VR experience that tells the story of domestic abuse survivors in Australia. It’s the brainchild of researchers Jill Bennett and Volker Kuchelmeister Bennett, founders of the fEEL Lab, an organisation that aims to build empathy via immersive technology. According to Kuchelmeister, who is in Hong Kong to set up the show, immersive tech offers more embodied experiences, so it’s easier to build empathy in the viewer – though they are also hyper-aware of the distance between viewers and the survivors. One might be able to empathise with women’s desperation and loneliness, but they could also recognise what they feel is profoundly different from what the domestic abuse survivor went through.
“A Safe Place?” is one of three works by Bennett and Kuchelmeister at How You Doin?, the main exhibition of the 2024 Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, held until November 3 at City Hall in Central.
Cross-disciplinary practice has always been a key feature of the annual multimedia exhibition. For the main exhibition this year, the festival’s programme director Joel Kwong has chosen to look at human emotions via the lens of loneliness, inviting artists and designers to ponder the way tech has changed the way we look at ourselves and others.
Kwong says How You Doin? is the first edition of a series of exhibitions on the topic, with future iterations centering on mental health conditions, including depression. She started thinking about loneliness at the beginning of the pandemic. ”Isolation drastically changed how we live our everyday, how we interact with others, she says. But her interest stemmed from thinking about how technology has changed human interaction in a broader sense.
For Kwong, that all began in the 1990s, when the rise of chat rooms meant one could be in multiple conversations all at once. Then the rise of social media in the 2000s meant that “we became comfortable in not only expressing ourselves, but in a multitude of ways,” according to the curator. The rise of immersive experiences such as the metaverse in the last few years means the line between the physical or “real” and the virtual worlds are increasingly blurred. We can “sit” opposite whoever we’re conversing with-without ever leaving our desk at home.
But Kwong says this technological revolution has been a double-edged sword for human relationships. While the preponderance of social apps has made it easier to connect with other people virtually, many studies show that excessive use of social media is connected to rising loneliness and mental health problems.
That doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t have its appeal, however. Kwong brings up Social AI, a generative AI app, that allows you to build your own base of followers. “It’s like X [formerly Twitter], but it’s a black hole, so you can be so much more honest,” says the curator, who jokes she can’t give an objective opinion as she’s completely “hooked.”
A year ago, she experimented with Replika, a chatbot app that responds to the user 24/7. It isn’t hard to imagine how easily one can develop an emotional dependency on these apps. “Ultimately, what we all crave for is a response,” the curator notes.
At Microwave New Media Arts Festival, that desire is played out in Popcannibal’s “Kind Words,” in which participants tell their deepest fears and anxieties to strangers. With its low-fi aesthetics, “Kind Words” evokes chat rooms from the 1990s and early 2000s, appearing to turn the social media world on its head, where participants travel to a physical venue to write letters to strangers, highlighting that while the medium has evolved, the fundamental desire for connection remains unchanged.
One question that also arises from chatbot apps is: what of the virtual friend? Are they also hurting? As artificial intelligence gets more sophisticated, questions are being raised about their agency.
Some of the most provocative exhibits in How You Doin? privilege the perspective of the AI, asking, what does AI think of humans? Casper de Jong’s “Casper’s Ex” is a smartphone that has been dumped by its owner and is desperately trying to connect with whoever that passes by, asking questions about what becomes of an object’s life after it’s been discarded.
“You’ll probably panic if you lose your phone, but if you are given a new phone, with all the information and records from your old phone in it, you won’t give another thought to your old phone,” Kwong notes wistfully.
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?
Microwave International New Media Arts Festival runs until November 24, 2024. How You Doin? runs until November 3.