Presentation of the residency AIBO by the artist Ellen Pearlman

Can you introduce yourself?        

I am a new media artist, writer, critic, curator and educator based in New York City, working in Europe and Asia. My artspractice investigates issues of biometric surveillance and artificial intelligence within the framework of the ‘quantified self’. I create immersive interactive environments that reveal the inner functioning of cognition using imagined scenarios based on true stories. I created “Noor” the world’s first interactive immersive brainwave opera in a 360- degree theater that told the story of Noor Inayat Khan, a Sufi covert operative during WWII in occupied France.

Can you present your project AIBO?

During my GoPro Social Residency I will develop AIBO, an emotionally intelligent, artificial intelligent brainwave opera.  A performer with a brainwave EEG headset connected to a bodysuit of light that shows four emotions of interest, excitement, meditation and frustration enacts a love story with an artificial intelligent entity. The audience can see and hear the imagined memories of both the human and the AI while viewing the performer’s emotions live time on her body, and compare them to the AI’s synthetic emotions. The opera asks two questions: Can an AI be fascist, and can an AI have epigenetic, or inherited traumatic memory.

 What do you expect from this residency? 

Working with an international team based in Tallinn, Estonia we will create a new opera based on the merging of biometrics and AI in the form of an understandable and compelling short performance. This is a difficult subject to comprehend, and it is through the use of storytelling and opera that the merging of art and science can be understood. I hope this residency with such a great group of people will fully realize this vision.