What does it mean to understand AI?
How does it feel to feel an AI?
Felt AI is an instrument that uses Machine Learning (a kind of AI technology) to analyze your interaction and synthesizes voice-like sound. You can cuddle, tickle, caress to make it moan and whine. Instead of seeking for a rational explanation to “understand”, we have a capacity to feel how things are and how they behave. This instrument is a training device for us to exercise our ability to feel and listen as a way to understand the algorithmic opacity of unknown in a more human way.
The Felt AI, an AI embedded instrument, is made of old, used stuffed animals, equipped with capacitive touch sensors. How you cuddle and squeeze these animals is analyzed by a Machine Learning algorithm (gesture recognition toolkit), comparing with the training data given by the artist in order to control the voice synthesis (pink trombone) parameters. Though, you may not know what data was given in the training phase and how the decisions are made within the algorithm, you can start to feel which interaction corresponds to what sound outcome after a while.
Photography/Videography : Xavier Antoinet
Instrument Player: Andrea Parkins
This project is an response to the series of conversations I had with a Human Centered Design scholar Daniela Rosner and a Feminist theory and AI technology researcher Goda Klumbytė, over the years of 2023- 2025.
Our conversations also resulted in a writing as a format of a journal article. The abstract of the article starts like this:
“What does it mean to understand AI? While a host of algorithmic experimentation has focused on the knowability of an automated system, analysts often overlook the important question of what makes an algorithm available to the human perception—oriented toward the experiences of affective, embodied, and otherwise other-than-cognitive encounter…. (w)e propose sensings-feelings to trouble contemporary logics of algorithmic opacity in ways that exceed and reimagine extractive formations of knowability and suggest some strategies for developing a more expansive sensorium for feeling AI.” – Goda Klumbyte, Daniela Rosener, Mika Satomi
The first version of the Felt AI was created during the Artist in Residency program at the Radiona Croatia in 2024. The Makings of the felt AI is posted here.