This practice-based research explores how bias can be creatively expressed in technology design and transformed into tangible experiences. Through materializing bias, this installation reveals new aesthetic possibilities that emerge or disappear in relation to how people interact with one another.
āThe Aesthetics of Biasā, highlighting and amplifying what disrupts the balance in human relations.
This project encourages a deeper reflection on whether our biases selectively honor who speaks and allow a dominant voice to prevail in a meeting, thereby preventing us from hearing diverse perspectives. By using four everyday objects trained and acted upon by machine learning, āThe Aesthetics of Biasā progressively produces palpable provocations when dominance has not been addressed among people.
First, the window starts with ĢDetecting the Direction of Speaking Ģ and signaling it by the breaking effect in the windowpanes. Second, the sugar jar follows up by ĢIndicating Dominant Personnel Ģ by simultaneously chasing the personās face, aiming to pointing a laser beam at their mouth. Third, the coffee pot continues to 'Responding to Dominance' in a more physical way, walking towards the dominant person's nearest cup and even dripping coffee on the dominating person Ģs lap. Lastly, the table threw all objects that were in front of the dominating person onto the floor as ĢInterrupting the Situation Ģ.
This aesthetics could be completely changed depending on how people relate to each other. If dominance did not prevail or was interrupted, the aesthetics of bias would not appear.
About Young Suk Lee and Daniel Saakes
Daniel Saakes is an associate professor at the University of Twente.