SENTIENT BEINGS
Salomé Bazin in collaboration with William Seymour & Mark Coté (2023 )
Are AI assistants always listening?
Sentient Beings is an immersive, evolving soundscape inviting us to question our relationship with AI assistants, how and where we use our voices and the value that we place on them.
Enter this whispering gallery, where movement and murmuring circulate around you in what seems to be an infinite loop. AI assistants intervene when ‘triggered’, asking you how they can help.
We increasingly use our voices to interact with digital tools, and by extension, the technological corporations who own and control them. In these more conversational exchanges, what elements of our personal data and private selves might we be giving away all too freely? What are the possible biases in the voices AI creates?
This installation invites you to reflect on the way AI assistant models are trained, as an echo of our own reality, or at least what we give them to listen to.
SATURDAYS, 11am - 6pm
FRIDAY LATES, 6 Oct & 17 Nov
CREDITS
Commissioned by: Science Gallery London
Supported by: EPSRC
Artist: Salomé Bazin (Cellule Studio)
Researchers: William Seymour, Department of Informatics, King’s College London ; Mark Coté, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London
SALOMÉ BAZIN is a french designer and artist, founder of experiential design studio Cellule. She holds a BA from Olivier de Serres in Paris and MA from Central Saint Martins London. Starting as an assistant for award-winning stage designer Es Devlin, followed by work as a freelancer in media art, lighting and experience design, Bazin gained experience in her early years working for a portfolio of high profile clients including Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Samsung and WhiteCube, amongst others. She founded Cellule Studio in 2018 - a design studio bringing a creative and collaborative approach to science and healthcare innovation that was acknowledged by the British Design Council as one of the 10 UK emerging design practices of 2018. Bazin’s work is a tension between digital art, experiential and scenography, and an exploration of new mediums to relate to scientific phenomenons, evolving technologies and human physiology. She is particularly interested in poetic-technologic experiences as a way to reconnect to our bodies. Website
DR MARK COTE is a Reader in Data and Society in the Department of Digital Humanities and researches both the human and technical object in order to understand the societal dimensions of data, computation and AI. He is an investigator on major European and UK cross-disciplinary research projects, collaborating with computer scientists in social data analytics and cybersecurity, social scientists and policy experts and legal scholars. Website
WILLIAM SEYMOUR is a researcher exploring issues of privacy and security around AI for smart homes and AI assistants. His work sits at the intersection of computer science, social science, and ethics, asking questions around peoples’ concerns about using AI systems, what values they should embody, and how we can make them work for the people who use them.