a project proposal in the form of a stream of consciousness

just went to the yerba buena center for the arts

for their annual public square event

showcasing the work that fellows there have done over the year

and as i was looking at all of the displays and installations,

i wondered if i myself could do this work,

if i were to be a fellow here,

what would it take?

what would i make?

would it be poetry? music? what else?

the installations presented were anything from

zines to sticky notes on a wall to short films

to music remixes to photographs to poetry readings

all centered on things involving social justice and equity

this is a prestigious fellowship, and

brilliance was all around.

the voice inside, that i had suffocated so long,

feels it could be brilliant too.

and i started to think.

.

what could i make?

to be engaging

to make a statement

to make a difference

.

my mind immediately drifted to

artificial intelligence — the work that i do now —

and how it relates to society

how it relates to race

how it relates to oppression

and amplifies it

and amplifies our hate

and amplifies the systems of inequities that have existed throughout our history that tech doesn’t disrupt like it thinks it does but actually builds off of and takes life from

and i thought and thought

and couldn’t think of anything

and thought some more

i know how to write books

but who reads a book at an installation

is a book accessible

is a book provocative?

in some spaces, yes

but for an installation in person, maybe that’s not the best i could do

there were zines today on display for one of the installations, but

do they engage the audience in the way i want to engage them?

i love the poetry, i love the music

but in the ways that we move in these spaces

in the ways that i observed today

maybe there’s something else to do, a better way to bring them in and say what i want to say but also have it be felt. be known. be understood at the core of their being.

.

i’m being dramatic

i can aim for that lofty goal, but

there’s a certain destructive hubris that comes with trying to be too grandiose

just… make something you think will make people stop and think

there’s always computer vision

remember that time at disneyworld (or was it universal studios?) when you came off the escalators and started to enter the park and there was a big screen playing a live video feed of the people entering? there was something chilling about that and so unavoidable by the eye when you saw it because the display was so huge and there were so many people passing by

and you wonder,

why are they monitoring you

who’s monitoring you

are these being recorded?

who keeps these videos?

did i consent to this?

and my mind continued to think

maybe i can do an installation around computer vision and have a camera in the room and when people walk in, they see themselves, and the system is designed to use AI to be able to track human beings captured by the camera

there are things called bounding boxes in AI, where in pictures and videos you can teach a computer to draw a box around where it thinks there’s an object — let’s add that to the display, so people can see that the AI is following them. observing them. analyzing them.

it brings in questions of surveillance, of consent

of safety

why are we being watched

who is being watched

how are we being watched

now i’m thinking about joy buolamwini’s gender shades project, where these computer vision AI systems can’t detect black faces (esp faces of black women) but can do very very well on white faces (esp faces of white men)

i’m thinking about how these systems often guess your gender, fitting you to the gender binary, and assuming that optics are what defines your gender identity

i’m thinking about how these systems are used to find criminals and deployed by government agencies… how propublica’s machine bias article showed us that black individuals are systematically biased against in these sorts of systems, where they receive higher criminal risk scores than their white counterparts, even if their previous arrest records would not make you come to that conclusion

.

so what if the installation was that:

• a computer vision system
• a camera tracking people entering the room
• and the screen, where people can see the AI doing the work of identifying where the people are in the room; and the public observers entering the room see on the screen the AI system, following your every move, and based on the biased training data that many systems deployed in the world use to discriminate unfairly against black individuals, the system labels you as a criminal or not

that would be a shocking display to see

but shocking to whom?

the black individual who walks into that room sees the video as videos always see them — a black body, surveilled. objectified. and sometimes, invisible.

the white individual does not have this experience. and yet, they are so much of my target audience. the audience i want to shock and make realize, that for many of the rest of us, for the people of color in the world, our reality is so much different than yours.

.

i think of derrick bell and his call to reverse reality to see the absurdity of the systems of oppression that are all around us.

.

so how about:

we train the computer vision system on a reversal:

a large dataset where

the criminals included are largely white people

and not the people of color

the system learns from that data

amplifies that bias, now biased against white people

and in this display, people see the automation happening

where as white people enter the room

and engage with the installation

they are labelled as criminals

with boxes around them

the camera, watching them

the AI following their every movement:

criminal.

.

how would that make them feel?

how unnerving would that be?

would they be confronted with the realization — that’s what we’re made to feel like, always?

but of course, “the system is objective”, right?

if the AI system says it’s true

if the algorithm is “objective”, then

this is the truth right?

and so, maybe, they begin to think.

and realize,

the system can be manipulated

the system is manipulated.

it always has been.

.

.

and of course, logistically speaking,

if i applied to be a fellow,

the work that would take a year to do

could be to learn how to create this computer vision system

learn how these systems are built and trained in the real world

select the dataset as they are selected in the industry

and follow all the steps to create these very real systems that are very really out here

and document that whole process

and put in that data that has the biases of the world, but in reverse.

that would be an interesting technological contribution

an interesting pedagogical tool

an interesting experiment to showcase how these systems actually amplify bias, in a concrete and tangible way,

and then showcase it, in person, with a live, captive audience,

and make the white individuals really, really have to grapple with this reality.

i think that would be an interesting project.