During the Digithalia Festival – a festival for virtual theatre forms at Schauspielhaus Graz – we had the chance to watch Decoding Bias, a multi-channel spatial video and sound installation.
The concept of this installation consists in having eight different types of Artificial Intelligences (AI’s) attending group therapy sessions. As the play starts, they encounter themselves in one of these sessions, and begin to express how their days have been, similarly to human therapy sessions. However, as the AI’s are built for different purposes, they all have different backgrounds and often disagree, creating lots of room for discussion which makes up most of the play. With these discussions, they are able to reflect upon the fact that their “thought patterns” come back to their human-made datasets, which in its core are often inaccurate, incomplete or incompatible, failing to represent the entire population. One of the biases that was discussed was regarding gender and racial stereotypes, where one of the AI’s couldn’t consider a black woman for a high status, leading work position, just because of being a black woman.
Amidst other discussions, desert yoga and dancing sessions, this piece offers a speculative future scenario that enlightens the viewer and suggests reflection on this very present and sensitive topic, that might, or is already, affecting us humans.
Regarding the sound experience, I consider that the piece really benefited from the spatial aspect, as the viewers sit at the middle or next to the AI characters, which are positioned in the form of a circle and each voice is located at the respective AI position, making the whole experience more immersive. The music and sound compositions were also surrounding the viewer, with effects such as delay going through all the speakers and creating a great experience.
