With nearby Silicon Valley driving the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI is the first major museum exhibition to reflect on the political and philosophical stakes of AI through the lens of artistic practice. This series highlights select artworks included in the exhibition.
Working within the tradition of political collage, the Zairja Collective builds on the metaphor of mining in order to comment on the extractive dynamics of today’s data-driven economy. The collective’s intricate pieces use imagery rarely seen by the public. They overlay actual open-pit designs sourced from mining corporations with manipulated visualizations and photographs of neuron fields produced by a bioscience institute. This fusion of collage—which combines different source images—and décollage—the interlacing of superimposed prints—generates collisions between mining pits and neurons.
By creating what it calls a “critical topology” between pits and neurons, the Zairja Collective exposes the complex strategies of AI-driven behavioral design, which applies psychological principles to machine learning and its processes of data collection and interpretation. A key tenet of the field’s approach is the principle of variable reward. The concept was first developed in the 1930s by behaviorist B. F. Skinner in his experiments with rats. It was later introduced into computational science in the late 1990s by psychologist B. J. Fogg, who spearheaded the idea of “persuasive technology.” This idea, which became foundational to behavioral design, relies on a sense of uncertainty related to the outcome of an action. If an outcome is predictable, people will only act upon immediate need, but if an outcome is unpredictable, that need gets overridden by fear of it not being met when acted upon. This fear triggers the repetition of the action to ensure that the outcome remains the same and, subsequently, addiction to performing that action. Or, as the artists put it, the principle of variable reward sets the parts of the brain dedicated to processing positive and negative emotions—the reward system and the amygdala—against each other.
As product designer Nir Eyal explores in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2013), social-media platforms have been particularly successful in applying the variable-reward principle to people’s need for attention and affirmation. In this model, fear and uncertainty are the ores extracted from the human brain. The platforms are able to meet users’ emotional needs (and undo their fears) before they have even become consciously aware of them. By creating formal confusion between neurons and pits, and insisting on the neurons’ sheer force, the Zairja Collective suggests that this asymmetric relationship can potentially be reversed.
