Ken Rinaldo and Emotional Computing (#2)
By Roberta Alvarenga
In studying contemporary media arts I had become more interested in artists that critically engage the use and implications of technology within sociopolitical system, such as Rafael Lozanno Hemmer, Simon Penny and Lynne Hershman Leeson. Each of these artists are not so concerned with "beauty" in the classical or formalist sense, but situate their works in the larger context of observing and critiquing technology and culture. Still, I have not thrown away all the lessons I learned as sculptor, so I still believe that the artist must seduce the body and eye with form and color, before the viewer/participant is willing to consider the concepts which the artist has posed.
What does the phrase "emotional computing" mean to you?
For me "emotional computing" defines a need to find other ways of interacting with our machines that are not purely logically but instead, emotional. It allows design and manifestations of custom interfaces that move beyond keyboards and monitors and situates the work into a physical and embodied realm, so it becomes more corporeal.
As an undergraduate student studying human communications research I was excited to learn that most of the messages we send and receive from each other, in face-to-face communication, is transmitted through body languages. It is often not what we say but how we say something that carries most of the message and meaning. I did not realize until much later this was to be an important lesson for my artistic practice.
Most computers are logical devices based on digital, yes-no logic, and this can make them inflexible in determining the soft and imprecise nature of human and biological communication. However, we humans desire to interact with the world on an analog basis and emotional computing is an attempt to give our computers a face and allow them the ability to understand emotional and biological ways of interaction. For instance, wouldn’t it be marvelous for our computers to understand when we are depressed and adjust our screens to give off more daylight balanced light? Or computers that understand our hormonal languages and or body languages and could determine if we are feeling horny or happy?
The question then becomes what do the machines do with this computing realization? Do they use it to control us, or does it instead permit us to begin to create a new form of ecology with humans and machines co-evolving? These questions are the beginning of understanding how to create an enhanced symbiosis of humans and their intelligent machines. Of course you can be sure that if we have computers that sense our body languages or hormonal output we will have advertisers and marketers that will be selling us products based on this knowledge and I guess this is the scary part. Imagine a cookie collected by your Internet browser that contains your hormonal output? We get enough spam through companies tracking our web cookies without the advertisers also knowing that we are putting out certain hormones.
Do you feel there is a danger in creating works of artificial life?
Yes in some senses and no in others, and here context is most important. In Manual DeLanda’s book War in the age of Intelligent Machines he talks about the move toward turning more and more executive control over to intelligent machines that make decisions for us. Situations where we have given the intelligent machine the ability to sense and react to the world and sometimes to annihilate us. Examples would be military tanks that find other military tanks and kill them or artificially intelligent cruise missiles that find targets and kill them. The sad part is, people are generally in the tanks and the machine has no emotional knowledge of the tanks inhabitant’s grieving family or the ripples of sadness that are part of any culture at war. I have a real problem with world cultures that believe that violence is a solution to conflict and use machines to execute warped social constructs, often at a distance of the notion that you can "win" wars. It has always seemed a strange irony that we have the intelligence to create sophisticated and semi intelligent weapon systems but have not the intelligence to analyze the implications of what it means to let machines kill us or to find ways to be better diplomats and talk with our enemies before shooting.
continues on https://nyartsmagazine.net/articles.php?aid=467
