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Household Robots : Training Datasets & the Politics of Categories| Film Screening + Q&A | 26 November 2024 | 15:15 | Leiden University
November 26 @ 15:15 - 17:00
Join us for a screening of a selection of short films by designer and researcher Simone Niquille, of Amsterdam-based technoflesh Studio. The screening will be followed by a Q&A & discussion moderated by Dr. Rodrigo Ochigame.
Model Homes
Household robots rely on computer vision to navigate their environment, but a camera does not know what it is looking at. In order to recognise and understand the spaces and objects it encounters, a robot’s vision technology needs to learn about its future home. To this end, large datasets of 3D files are assembled into model homes, which ultimately are unable to represent the complexity of life itself. This gap between models of reality and the lived experience is referred to by scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski as ‘the map is not the territory’. If the map is not the territory, are the datasets the home? This talk speaks of the absurd and precarious state of the training datasets of home robots, using them as a way of entering a wider discussion about cohabitation with technology and an obsession of sorting the world into categories.
The following films will be screened:
Homeschool (2019) 13min
Sorting Song (2021) 7min
Beauty & The Beep (2024) 15min
Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher. Through her studio technoflesh, she produces films and writing that explore computation as the new optics. Her work examines vision technologies, the images they generate and the worlds they construct – from computer vision and 3D animation to computational photography and synthetic training datasets. Her work advocates for non-binary technology and against the use of machine learning as a tool to validate and instrumentalize assumptions and reduce reality.
Dr. Rodrigo Ochigame is an assistant professor affiliated to Leiden University’s Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. Their work investigates atypical models of computational rationality, including nonclassical logics originating from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines developed in India, and information science frameworks emerging from Cuba.
