This dissemination project expands upon the scientific research of the ERC-funded project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2023; (grant agreement No 771800) by developing an exhibition and a live action roleplaying game that will allow participants to act out situations where they have to make ethical choices about new visual technologies, in addition to learning more about how these machine vision technologies work, and possible positive and negative consequences of using them.
We will develop a temporary, three-month exhibition about machine vision at the University Museum in Bergen in the spring of 2021. The exhibition will be experientally focussed and designed as a labyrinth or path that visitors move thoguh. We will include artistic elements, ethical dilemmas around the use of new visual technoloiges and knowledge dissemination to explain how machine vision technologies such as facial recognition, emotion recognition or deepfakes work. The combination of the aesthetic, the ethical and the technological will give visitors insights into how the humanities can give greater insight into technology.
The live action roleplaying game (larp) will give participants practical experience in thinking critically and ethically about the use of new technologies, and machine vision in particular. We will test out a series of pilot larps in 2020 and early 2021, in order to develop a larger three day event in the autumn of 2021, and will also develop self-contained, three-hour mini-games that can be used at conferences or other events. We will document the process so that others can use and develop the material, in the hope that larping may prove an ideal way to provide the practice ethical experience that society needs to make good, democratic choices about new technologies.
