NEURAL MIRROR

30TH JUNE - 14TH JULY 2019
FORMER BAPTISTERY OF THE MANNA D'ORO - SPOLETO

An immersive installation produced by Carla Fendi Foundation for Spoleto62 Festival dei Due Mondi, designed by the interaction design studio Ultravioletto, was exhibited in the former Baptistery of the Manna d’Oro. Visitors became a stream of information interpreted by AI, which reprocessed their image in real time, transforming them into digital Alter Egos. The human mind is a wonderfully complex machine, one hundred billion neurons interconnected through a myriad of contacts — a complexity that the evolution of Artificial Intelligences aims to achieve with the same level of perfection. Perception is one of the fundamental aspects in the field of research on human-robot interaction, through which it becomes possible to understand our world. AIs are able to perceive the environment around them, decode emotions, and recognize the identities of people within their range.

 


In an immersive and contemplative environment, the installation Neural Mirror, designed by the interaction design studio Ultravioletto, is initially perceived as a series of mirrored totems, that reflect images due to a special film covering the screens. When standing in front of the mirror, the person's reflection darkens, and the visitor’s image soon gives way to ephemeral clouds of rainbow-colored dots. These are generated by artificial intelligence through a face recognition algorithm that scans and interprets the human figure, making its visualization a co-creation between the AI and the installation. The body is now an image composed of a data stream: gender, demographic references, emotional state. These elements take form and meaning through two large plotters, each 4 and a half meters tall, continuously transcribing information onto a roll of paper that accumulates in the church’s niches, making tangible the volume of data printed by the machines and resembling “computerized scribes.” The data form a kind of physical and emotional identikit, like individual strings of code, and are thus released into the vast stream of the network, but in a clearly defined way, visible to the visitor, who can understand them in real time through their artistic interpretation.

 

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