2015 – 16 SPACE Residency: This Time With FEELing

12 artists will take part in the This Time With FEELing residency cycle at the White Building, producing exciting new work at the nexus of art and technology which gives form to the idea of algorithmic emotional capital.

International artists:
Sarah Abu Abdallah, Saudi Arabia
Debora Delmar Corp., Mexico
Megan Snowe, USA

National artists:
Adham Faramawy
Sophie Hoyle
Jeremy Hutchison
Christopher Kirubi & Cassandre Greenberg
Sophie Mallett
Fleur Melbourn
Holly White 
Laura Yuile

The human body is commonly accepted as the primary site of subjectivity, empathy and affective subcortical processes. However, with the pervasive and increasingly commercial development of Affective Computing – which aims to detect and respond appropriately to users’ emotions – and related prosthetic tracking technologies, the breakdown between human and machine is recast in the popular imagination once again – this time pulling focus on algorithmic affect instead of Donna Harraway’s cyborg.

MIT professor Rosalin Picard’s Affdex Inc.– a webcam based system that detects “the emotional connection between people and brands” – is the most commonly cited instance of this phenomenon and points towards the assumption that emotion detection is a fast track to the limbic system and nexus of both our cognitive and lived experience. The growing integration and popular understanding of the nuances of sociotechnical systems disrupts the old binary of the technological “artificial” versus the authentically “natural” human experience.

The This Time With FEELing residency takes a critical approach to this boundary raiding and questions the commercial drive towards the naturalizing and subsumption of technologies that enable the trading in and simulating of algorithmic emotional capital.

SPACE residencies enable emerging and mid-career artists an opportunity to produce new work, on a major public platform.