“A Spoon” and “Client ID: NSyuO-fJxYI4DTUf7zWa-osilclb5E7-qmEzyjuu”
In this pair of student projects, two contrasting tools — artificial intelligence, and the spoon — are applied as mediators of human experience and observation.
In Youngjin Song’s (MDes ’17) “A Spoon,” viewers are invited to choreograph improvisational movements with the spoons presented in front of them; a spoon is animated by two people and vice versa, the two subjects are animated by the object. The project presents an attempt to experiment how a very personal yet ordinary tool could contribute to a shared eating experience and to help build relationships between and among people. Holding an unfamiliar and uncomfortable personality, “A Spoon” invites people to negotiate and interact as a mediator, or as mischief-maker. Here the tools are intentionally devised to prolong the process of eating and physically stretched to trespass across personal boundaries.
In Tanuja Mishra’s (MDes ’17) “Client ID: NSyuO-fJxYI4DTUf7zWa-osilclb5E7-qmEzyjuu,” the artist has alienated herself from her work and looked at it from the eyes of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The resultant artwork has been developed in collaboration with the algorithm, where she has allowed it to generate insights on her work. In turn, she has used those insights to further interpret the work. Four artifacts have been chosen from her body of work in order to highlight those cases where human perception is distinctly divergent from that of machine vision. The presentation of these objects has been made absurd by placing them in unrelated contexts identified through the eyes of the algorithm. This discordance in perception is further reinforced through a playful audio-visual re-interpretation of the machine’s (mis)understanding.
