Lecture | Film Screening + Q&A
Household Robots : Training Datasets & the Politics of Categories
- Date
- Tuesday 26 November 2024
- Time
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 1.01
We are delighted to host a screening of a selection of short films by designer and researcher Simone Niquille, of Amsterdam-based technoflesh Studio. The screening will be followed by a Q&A & discussion moderated by Dr. Rodrigo Ochigame.
Model Homes
Household robots rely on computer vision to navigate their environment, but a camera does not know what it is looking at. In order to recognise and understand the spaces and objects it encounters, a robot’s vision technology needs to learn about its future home. To this end, large datasets of 3D files are assembled into model homes, which ultimately are unable to represent the complexity of life itself. This gap between models of reality and the lived experience is referred to by scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski as ‘the map is not the territory’. If the map is not the territory, are the datasets the home? This talk speaks of the absurd and precarious state of the training datasets of home robots, using them as a way of entering a wider discussion about cohabitation with technology and an obsession of sorting the world into categories.
The following films will be screened:
- Homeschool (2019) 13min
- Sorting Song (2021) 7min
- Beauty & The Beep (2024) 15min
About the Artist
Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher. Through her studio technoflesh, she produces films and writing that explore computation as the new optics. Her work examines vision technologies, the images they generate and the worlds they construct – from computer vision and 3D animation to computational photography and synthetic training datasets. Her work advocates for non-binary technology and against the use of machine learning as a tool to validate and instrumentalize assumptions and reduce reality.
In 2023 Niquille founded parametric truth Lab in the Master Information Design program at Design Academy Eindhoven, a space to annotate, document and critique software beyond its immediate functional and productivity-driven focus. Since 2023 she has organized a lecture series on technology and architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Currently she is also a tutor at Elisava Barcelona for the temporary Master in Algorithmic and Networked Photography. For 2024-2025 Niquille is also a fellow in technology and storytelling at the Dutch Film Festival.
Her work has been featured internationally in exhibitions and publications. In 2016, she was a research fellow at Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and received the Talent Development Grant of Creative Industries NL. In 2018 she was recipient of the Housing The Human grant and commissioned contributor to the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018) with the work ‘Safety Measures’ on the entangled history of computer generated imagery, ergonomic software and standardized human measurements. She received the 2020 Pax Media Art Award and was a 2020 resident at La Becque while joining ECAL’s Master in Photography department as guest lecturer for the research project Automated Photography.
From2021-2023 Niquille was a Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Center for Architecture and is a contributor to [permanent beta], a research platform by the Fotomuseum Winterthur. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in design from the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam.
Discussant
Dr. Rodrigo Ochigame is an assistant professor affiliated to Leiden University’s Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. Their work investigates atypical models of computational rationality, including nonclassical logics originating from Brazil, nonbinary Turing machines developed in India, and information science frameworks emerging from Cuba
image Credit: Simone Niquile (Model Homes)