As part of the Data Fluencies Theater Project
This interactive video artwork is created by Sahar Sajadieh as part of the Data Fluencies Theater Project. It is based on a dance film directed by Katherine Helen Fisher, which utilized an interactive choreographic interface with performance and concept by Jae Neil. Written comments from the team members in response to relevant questions about the project’s themes were collected and used for creating the AI-generated visuals. A Stable Diffusion-based computational platform for affective storytelling with generative AI, developed by Sahar Sajadieh, was applied to transform each video frame into a painting using text-to-image synthesis.
*For the full credits, please see below.
** Some of the videos are not yet open to the public. Please contact the admin if you would like permission to get access to them.
“Under the Machine’s Gaze” is an interactive AI-generated video artwork that uses Artificial Intelligence as a creative meta-tool to explore and problematize the impact of computational systems (specifically AI) as oppressive technologies to identify, classify, and control the human body in society. This work is a visual poetry about formation, deformation, fragmentation, and defragmentation of our data bodies and identities through the eye of the AI. It uses Natural Language (text prompts), bodily language (dance gesture), and text to image generative algorithms (Stable Diffusion Models, Natural Language Processing, and LLMs) to poetically and performatively visualize the frustration of the reduced, misrepresented, objectified body under the hegemonic gaze of the techno-social eye.
This work strives to provoke a dialogue about data colonialism and surveillance capitalism in the context of the societal applications (benefits and exploitations) of AI technologies, Large Language Models, and analytical systems used for mining human private data. Using the language of art, poetry, and performance, it brings attention to new modes and modalities of control and surveillance enabled by these powerful emerging technologies. The objective of this installation artwork is to illustrate the fluidity of motions and emotions of a body under the “Machine’s Gaze,” fluctuating between the human/animal, machinic, corporeal, and data bodies, and the tension in the transitional states in between: a body in a constant state of becoming and unbecoming.
These two videos show the interaction of the audience with the interactive video art installation version of “Under the Machine’s Gaze.” Using hand gestures and motions, the audience can design their own videos by moving along a grid of visual possibilities. In other words, in this interactive video art installation the spectators explore the latent space by making their own journey on a slice of the latent space translated into the image space. Through this particular interaction design, the audience members experience how a slight modification of input signals can change the transitional space in between the bodies, morphing and transforming into one another, and the portraits of how we are being perceived by these machinic eyes.
Under the Machine’s Gaze, © SaharSajadieh 2024
Credits:
- Video artist, interaction designer, and generative AI developer: Sahar Sajadieh
- Dance performance and concept: Jae Neal
- Creative direction of the dance film: Katherine Helen Fisher
- Sound composition: Suzanne Kite
- Prompts contributions by: Sahar Sajadieh, Ioana Jucan, David Mesiha, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Gavan Cheema, Ioana Jucan, Katherine Helen Fisher, Tushar Mathew, Jae Neal
· Interactive choreographic interface for the dance film: Mingyong Cheng, Shimmy Boyle with Safety Third Productions. Dance film was shot at SV Studios in Los Angeles, California.