Emotional Computing with Behnaz Farahi
Beth Jochim, creative AI lead Libre AI; Twitter: @_bblurred
Behnaz Farahi is a designer and creative technologist who critically explores interactive environments and their relationship to the human body. Trained in architecture, she holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Design, California State University, Long Beach.
I discovered her work when I briefly introduce the 3D interactive online exhibition Returning the Gaze, and I was very impressed by the underlying vision of it.
Farahi uses garments and architectural elements as extensions of our skin and brain to create new ways of interaction between the human body and the world around us.
Caresse of the Gaze (2015) is a 3D printed wearable, made in collaboration with Autodesk Pier 9 and Madworkshop, which responds to other people’s gaze. It uses human-like behavioral responses and the flexible behavior of the skin itself to interface with the world, addressing issues such as intimacy, gender and personal identities. Our gaze communicates feelings and emotions, and the way we respond to it can change our surroundings.
“It does so in the belief that by implementing design and motion principles inspired by natural systems, we might be able to rethink the relationship between our bodies and the surrounding environment. Even though this approach is still speculative, it opens up the possibility of a radical new approach to interactive clothing (using computer vision technologies).” — Behnaz Farahi.
Synapse (2015) is a 3D wearable helmet that maps the brain’s attention levels. It wraps around the face when we don’t pay too much attention to our surroundings and opens up when we do. The helmet is a shape-changing structure around the body and functions as a second skin. Controlled by the electroencephalography (EEG) of the brain, it controls the environment around us through our thoughts.
“The environment therefore becomes an extension of our bodies. This project aims to play with the intimacy of our bodies and the environment to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred, as both have ‘become’ a single entity.” — Behnaz Farahi.
Interactive design, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and critical thinking materialize and merge into Can the Subaltern Speak? (2020). The project investigates new ways of communication for marginalized groups that look for strategies against their oppressors.
Developing their own language, two masks start a secret conversation using AI generated Morse code, rapidly blinking their eyelashes and transforming the wink in a means to protect against sexual predators.
In this very inspiring work there are several influences. First of all, we find the inspiration that comes from the traditional masks worn by the Bandari women of southern Iran. Introduced in the past as a way to protect them from slave masters, masks are used here to promote “a feminist, advanced tech resistance to patriarchy.” Then, the experience of many women who used the code to report domestic abuse during the COVID-19 confinement. Facebook’s experiment on Artificial Intelligence agents that developed their own way of communicating, and the Morse code used by an American soldier in Vietnam to report torture.
AI becomes a means of creating an instrument of protection against powers that undermine the freedom of minority groups, and a way to free the voice of the latter.
The project, which is part of the Returning the Gaze exhibition, has been defined by Farahi as “dear and personal” and has taken part in Ars Electronica Garden Long Beach.
