SHARED SENSES

Artists-researchers Lancel/Maat Lancel/Maat call for an innovative aesthetic AI approach to experience of intimate and empathic connections, in public space of merging relations.

Currently, such processes are increasingly technologically mediated, measured and datafied, serving (AI) purposes of predictability, automation and control, shaping our behavior and experience. ‘Shared Senses’ critically responds with an innovative Aesthetic approach, for AI empathy ‘Trust Systems’.
Intimate orchestrations in public space invite participants in distributed performance of vulnerability, self-disclosure; proximity; and witnessing, responsibility and care. These orchestrations aim at public dialogue by intimate publics (Berlant 1998), imagination and authorship of embodiment.

The aesthetic approach proposes innovative, poetic Meeting Places and Meeting Rituals for public space. Their aesthetic design disrupts familiar sensory and emotional relations to evoke ambiguous perception (Benford 2012, Kwastek 2013). Instead of telematic prosthetics, new direct and indirect relations seeing, hearing, touching are created between participants. Through intimately (self-)caressing and kissing, participants connect through spontaneous data-fication, emerging from biofeedback sensors and shared neuro-feedback systems. They are hosted for staging shared reflection in public space and to feel, explore and make sense of being together - through mirroring, attunement and dialogue. All people present in public space perform, experience and witness intimate embodied connections.

‘In science, digital data represents things. In art, digital data points at itself'. (T. Morton 2018).

Reflexive DataScapes: Meaning of data patterns, Data validation, Data mystification.
"We show intimate data in public. Mediated intimacy needs public dialogue.'' Lancel/Maat's ‘Reflexive DataScapes’ are public intimate settings, provoke new connections, authorship and shared, critical reflection on experience of embodiment in merging realities. Instead of humans being directed by data (that represent and interpret their activities), a mode of living with data as 'Co-Actors’ is proposed. The data are staged, fueled with personal memory of intimate, embodied experience. Emerging data audification and visualization have shown to stimulate tender and strange, unfamiliar, (non-)human relations and emphatic connections. The co-created data traces, patterns and data feedback are often described as privately felt, 'intimate portraits' - and as a new form of shared storytelling. For experiences, see Artists Texts.