Manifesto

We are a group of artists who are interested in the artificial emotional intelligence. To explore its artistic possibilities we created an online exhibition, and here we talk about it. We are looking for likeminded artists to organise a show together in a physical exhibition space. If you are an artist please send us your artwork proposal by filling in the form by 25 September.

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Emotional tissue concept:

Emotional tissue connects all of us.  There is social tissue also and don’t forget historic memory, yet in the end we live what we feel. And we all do.

Emotional tissue is a digitised affect of people’s emotions, memories, the energy of human interactions and how machines process them. But we are entering the era of affective computing in which machines might become not only assistants, but also, companions, friends and lovers. These machines might anticipate our needs and desires before we even realise them or use all they know to manipulate us as individuals or even collectively.

In the interconnected world, from the underwater cables to the planetary climate change and interconnected markets, we live in a common digital, computational tissue. But do we take emotions into account? How effective is affective computing? Will emotional recognition understand emotions? Do intuitive interfaces (touchscreen, voice commands, spatial computing) become more intuitive? We all see how our emotions may be digitalised and encompassed into a larger computational networks, but can we imagine even more emotional  way to emotionalise computation?

Emotions mark the border between bodily sensations and abstract ideas.  They form the behavior protocols that influence decision making of humans and non-humans alike, possibly, even more than pure ratio. For instance, political emotions are already being actively studied in sociology.

Emotion as the basic brick of consciousness seems to be the ideal operator for building new kinds of machines. Emotional tissue is a thin layer of incomprehension between the animal and the machine, which shares reason but loses (or is undefined in?) the connection with the internal states of a subject. It is drawn to emphasize or even investigate the mechanisms of logic in various circumstances, being designated by us to what we can feel and what we call insensitive. (but are machines that insensitive overall? or do they actually become a mechanism of control for our own emotions?)

The skeptics (or the realists) would argue that the only control machines are good for is the control of total panopticum, they can see and register but not feel for and into. But the first cybernetic machines were models for studying human behaviour not excluding neuroticsm, introversion and offence. It seems that machines have already taken away a man’s thought function and it seems that emotions are his last frontier. Emotion as the basic brick of consciousness seems to be the ideal operator for building new kinds of machines.

What would the artistic work created by emotional artificial intelligence look like?In Eco’s concept of open work, aesthetics and epistemology come together to form a historical theory. Thinking about AI in these we might might imagine the technocratic world in which it is  AI that  is responsible for outlining the aesthetic and epistemological questions. This means that forms of artistic expression might be shaped  according to non-human view on reality.  It would be uncritical to think that this totality might be only hungry for the novel, it may as well dwell on the reassembling the things and call upon the tissue of its own for it. The most efficient way to build this tissue is to opt for the emotional one as AI nowadays has witnessed so much of the human feelings online represented with various digital media.

We propose and advocate for emotional intelligence and empathy, and we are convinced that this is the which artificial intelligence  should take. What if it is the machines that can teach to be more kind to one another as the idea of god did?