talk
09/11/2020
Ars Electronica Festival 2020
»From delinquent to influencer, the profile has made a surprising career. Hardly a day goes by without a new profile. Some want to curate the traces of their own data, to design the digital self like a star cut. They are touched all the more eerily when their digital doubles with AI awaken to a new, second life. Around 1978, a metaphor found its way into English android research that the roboticist Masahiro Mori defined in 1970: the “uncanny valley”. Robots that resemble humans too much spread fear and terror. Like us, but never familiar, they inhabit the “uncanny valley” according to Mori. Today the uncanny valley has almost disappeared. Thanks to RFID chips, GPS and a wide variety of body sensors, our bodies and identities have become interfaces themselves – mouse pointers and prosthetic hands with which algorithms trace and continue writing our profiles. The valley that Mori dug out between the industrial robot and the Nō mask is levelled. What remains is a suspicion: the ghosts and undead are not only the robots, but us as well.«