Winnie Yoe, Chenshan Gao: Smile, Please
Title:
- Smile, Please
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Medium:
- Arduino, button, digital print, lcd display, monitor polaroid, tens unit.Smile, Please is an interactive installation created in response to societal coercion of emotions and the prevalence of emotion AI.
Artist Statement:
Several events informed our perspective: Huge global deposit of emotion database collected by companies such as Affectiva. Impact of psychological warfare in tech as revealed by the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. China’s social credit system. Against this backdrop, we created a smile evaluation and training system that uses a muscle sensor and a TENS unit to train participants to become a citizen of the preferred society, where they are guaranteed better future prospects. The only entry requirement is that they smile well enough.
Through an extreme approach, with reference to ideas from psychology and experience design, and devices from graphic design and theatre, we hope to shock our audience into thinking about the control and ownership of our emotions in the current societal and technological landscape.
