Art, Literature & Technology: Understanding Human Experience, Expression & Emotion in the Datafied Age

In a recent article in The Atlantic titled ‘Artificial Intelligence is Misreading Human Emotion,’ the Australian composer and academic Kate Crawford contends: “There is no good evidence that facial expressions reveal a person’s feelings. But big tech companies want you to believe otherwise.” Crawford’s claim responds to a recent growth in the development of affect-recognition tools that can be found everywhere from national-security systems in airports through to recruitment software and tertiary classrooms. Yet the inference of emotions and facial expression via Artificial Intelligence technology is preceded by a much longer and complex history of affect, expression and emotion discourse in literature, art and the performing arts. This cross-disciplinary panel takes the current digital milieu of facial-recognition as its starting point and looks back (and forward) to other forms to consider how representations of the human face, expression and emotion have been conveyed, explained and contested over time.

Presented as part of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethic’s Seminar Series: Technology and the world around us.