| art.description.project | [Self] Confidence was made by the creative
collective STUDIO ALIGHT, which consists of
Samantha Hookway, Fredrik Garneij and
Christofer Kanljung. The installation was
built as a reflection on the fact that
Surveillance Capitalists (Zuboff 2014), such
as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Jeff Bezos
(Amazon) are capitalizing on our every
movement.
The work is described via the studio’s
website as:
”[Self] Confidence reveals an experience where
the viewer uniquely feels the tension between
the dangers of been seen and the dangers of not
being seen. In her book The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism, the theorist Shoshana Zuboff argues
that the goal of the surveillance capitalist is
to change us. This entails that what is at stake
is our agency in how we behave, how we choose,
how we connect, how we vote… they capitalize on
our experiences. This is a far cry from the
exploitation of our labor. [Self] Confidence
tells us, in confidence, what it has seen. And
thus, gives the viewer the power to reflect with
an individualized, and even an emotional,
response to the limitations of the systems that
surveils us.”
Frankly, this work maps the space, and,
then, uses one neural network to identify
humans with a “confidence score” and a
second neural network to classify that human
(and what it sees in the image surrounding
the human). It is an interactive sculpture
installation that consists of directional
speakers, stereo cameras, servos, a Jetson
Nano, trained neural networks, metal work
and other mixed media. Technologically, this
work to come alive uses code as an artistic
medium and in particular it uses algorithms
and machine-learning (a.k.a. artificial
intelligence, neural networks). It also uses
the stereo camera, to map the space in realtime.
The algorithms used are an object
recognition algorithm, called YOLO – You
Only Look Once, and an image classification algorithm called Googlenet, from the
ImageNet database.
The piece tells the secrets that are usually
kept from us in the seemingly alternative
universe, the Internet. The sound enters the
space in via a directional wave and thus,
the others in the room cannot hear its
whispers if it is not pointed directly at
them. [Self] Confidence even reveals the
added element of its confidence score,
meaning how confident did it read the image,
or how confident is the machine at its
chosen classification. This confidence score
will undoubtedly become as an evidential
element in a future court case, and/or
future regulatory policy because, for
example, just how confident does a selfdriving
car need to be?
Furthermore, the finissage of the
exhibition, Rob Law, which included this
piece was a co-curated event by ICIA, Studio
Alight and in collaboration with the
Business Design Lab, HDK with guest lecturer
David Carroll from Parsons, The New School,
NYC. Carroll came and revealed the behindthe-
scenes of the documentary The Great
Hack, his research, and his experience suing
the U.K. Government for his personal US
voter data, due to the Cambridge Analytica
scandal in the 2016 US Election. Like the
documentary, and the work of Carroll, the
piece [Self] Confidence aimed to give an
audience the experience and understanding
that there are consequences to allowing the
surveillance capitalists reign ungoverned.
After exhibiting this autumn at the ICIA,
[Self] Confidence is finding new exhibition
formats and locations. Studio Alight is
currently working with leads of showing this
work in further audiences, for example at
upcoming Vitalis this May.
IMDb. (2019). The Great Hack (2019) - IMDb. [online]
Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9358204/
[Accessed 4 Dec. 2019]. Medium. (2019). An introduction to implementing the YOLO
algorithm for multi object detection in images. [online]
Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/anintroduction-
to-implementing-the-yolo-algorithm-for-multiobject-
detection-in-images-99cf240539 [Accessed 4 Dec.
2019].
Medium. (2019). Review of Deep Learning Algorithms for
Image Classification. [online] Available at:
https://medium.com/zylapp/review-of-deep-learningalgorithms-
for-image-classification-5fdbca4a05e2 [Accessed
4 Dec. 2019].
Zuboff, S. (2014). The age of surveillance capitalism. | sv |
| art.description.summary | [Self] Confidence tells us, in confidence,
what the machine has seen. And thus, gives
the viewer the power to reflect with an
individualized, and even an emotional,
response to the limitations of the systems
that surveils us. This work maps the
space, uses a series of neural networks
that identify humans with confidence. | sv |
