POM BERLIN 2021

Politics of the Machines
Rogue Research

The 3rd POM Conference
September 14-17, 2021

Within the Politics of the Machines conference series – following Copenhagen (2018) and Beirut (2019), the third POM conference will take place as a digital conference on the 14-17 of September 2021, hosted hosted by the chair for Open Science at the Technische Universität Berlin (Einstein Center Digital Future) and the Berlin University of the Arts (Weizenbaum Institute) in Berlin.

Free registration is still possible for digital audiences. 

On Tuesday 14th of September at 17:30 our FeLT PhD fellow, Hege Tapio, will be opening the conference with her curated Intervention: Emotional Machine. 

What kind of relationships can emerge from “emotional” machines interacting with biological beings, human and non-human? This panel questions the current cultural and technological path towards machines’ emotion technology. Emotion technology seeks to interpret, mimic and use the language of emotions to engage humans. In this field, machines are imbued with emotion recognition and processing algorithms so that they can be modeled and customized with personalities that may emotionally support a user. But what if these perspectives were tilted?

Research into Emotion technology is conducted by various actors in different fields – artists, scientists, designers, philosophers, psychologists and activists. Some of them experiment with the possibilities of these technologies, others seek to critique these developments by arguing that emotions are not something to be registered, monetized and engineered. In this panel three artists/researchers shape some perspectives on the possibilities and the impossibilities of a convergence between emotions and machines. Following concise presentations by the panel members, the conversation will be open to the audience aiming to collaboratively answer some urgent questions on the topic.

On Thursday 16th of September at 11 CEST Piera Riccio will give a presentation of AI-based Artistic Representation of Emotions from EEG Signals: A Discussion on Fairness, Inclusion, and Aesthetics. This project was developed from her master’s thesis advised and written as a part of FeLT. 

To learn more about POM Berlin 2021 and to see the full program please visit the official website