Hi! My name is Jesse Josua Benjamin, I'm a post-doctoral research associate at Lancaster University, and I'm here today to talk about my paper that I wrote together with my co-authors and collaborators
Heidi Biggs, Arne Berger, Julija Rukanskaitė, Michael Heidt, Nick Merrill, James Pierce, and Joseph Lindley called "The Entoptic Field
Camera as Metaphor-Driven Research-through-Design with AI technologies". To start off, just some quick key takeaways.
We talk extensively in the paper around metaphors, research-through-design and AI technologies, and we encourage design researchers to think broader, to think of evocative material analogies.
So in contrast to metaphors that are conventional and that reify AI as discrete entities, we call them to think of these evocative material analogies, such as the entoptic metaphor that we'll be talking about here, which refers not to AI as an
agent, or anything of the sort, but rather to the interplay of material components that make up AI technologies.
And the second, we call for metaphor-driven Research-through-Design to study situated AI literacies rather than AI literacy as technical or declarative knowledge.
Which we think is a really powerful way in which researchers design could contribute to this important field, and lastly, because of the efficacy of the antoptic metaphor, we also think that it encourages deeper reflection on how 20 first century design is shaped by and also
shapes, technological affordances to start and to ground why the entoptic metaphor is such a powerful way to think about
AI technologies, I want to talk about this example.
So in the summer of 2020 wildfires colored the Californian skies massively
and surreally deep orange. And of course, people wanted to capture this phenomenon with their smartphones, and but in contrast to the press photographs, seen on the left taken with DSLRs, smartphone images such as on the right often failed to capture the deep
orange of the skies. As Ian Bogost put it in The Atlantic at the time, the cameras never expected the sky to be red, which obviously speaks to the AI technologies used in smartphones.
Generally they are there to "improve" images along color, saturation, sharpness, or to establish a background blur, but at the same time, if the training data are used for these technologies never saw red skies, it will have an impact on how people perceive the world and how a record of the world is
kept. So this is an excellent example, we think, that encourages designers to think more deeply around nonconventional forms of how to design with AI technologies, and particularly because this is an example of how subtle these influences of AI on perception can be, rather than the heated
debates especially around text-to-image synthesis models that has started since last summer.
So entoptic phenomena typically refer to perceptions that come from the internal, physiological interplay of the eye and brain.
So many of us will have experienced these floaters that appear in our sight, or bright blue dots that appear against a bright sky.
So these are phenomena that do not directly correspond to physical objects
but rather purely are coming about due to the structural physiological makeup of human perception.
And we transport this to AI technologies to center on the material interplay of data, model and algorithms as components of AI technologies that shapes how these technologies mediate our perceptions of the world.
So we introduce this as what we call a material analogy, which introduces friction with how we commonly represent and conceive of AI technologies.
So this led then to me designing a developing the Entoptic Field Camera, which essentially is a simple web application in which a user can call up their smartphone camera interface,
take an image and send it to a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which then creates a wholly synthetic image based on the incoming pixels.
And so in the example shown here of the kind of flow I took an image of the Brighton seafront at night, and then an image was returned that has some correspondence to the input image.
But obviously also distorts it in many meaningful ways. I'm just going briefly through some aspects in the paper.
I would hope that you would read it, because the breadth of things we consider is very extensive.
So as one example, as a designer of the camera,
one thing that I noted continuously was the tension that it brought up in finding symbolic, indexical, or iconographic forms for the interface design of this object
that spoke to this material interplay. And I think this is a very productive tension that this evocative metaphor calls for.
So, rather than to rely on conventional metaphors, such as "AI is like X" or "X as Y", and this speaks to a much more material quality of what the actual technologies are, and the consequence of their deployment.
And second, while developing the prototype, I continuously engaged in experiments with what it would actually produce and what kind of questions it elicited.
So one was around the notion of subjectivity, where I would take what I then called entoptic selfies, which transformed my notions of the self in the way that I anticipated strange transformations, but also alignments that would probably and as it turned out were definitely not given
for all kinds of people. Then I handed over the Entoptic Field Camera to my co-authors, and they engaged in 3 week reflection-in-use phase of which I'm going to show some examples.
They were asked to use the Entoptic Field Camera in whichever way they saw fit, and reflect on it
similarly so. One example is by my co-author, Nick Merrill, who used the Entoptic Field Camera to take images of what he referred to as intimate moments.
So things that he normally would never share on camera, but because of the strong transformations you would think there's no apparent appearance or resemblance to this notion of intimacy. The pictures he then eventually shared with us as as a group, however, to him the notion of intimacy was still there
which calls up questions around the material connection between images.
So the input image that was "actually" intimate, and how the material connection may override the apparent disconnection.
Similarly, co-author James Pierce engaged in a long series of input-output recursive pairings between a surveillance camera, part of a long-standing research interest, and the Entoptic Field Camera which went into this tumble of representation and
observation, where the question of what was being surveilled was constantly being put into question, and who was doing the surveilling?
So this is just a brief example of what we were engaged in through this project, and we gather manifold implications for design from this evocative metaphor.
Briefly, just on the materializing distributions of agency which is really important, how an artifacts, such as the Entoptic Field Camera allows one to test boundary conditions in situ on the go with actual technologies and the tension that I described before between the dematerialized
appearance, were a disconnect is obvious, but then also the material connection that calls into question particularly privacy concerns around what is being represented, and then the experimentation with forms of subjectivity as shown, and the notion of decentring the typical logics of representation which is quite interesting where
the raw stupidity of a GAN does not conform the conventional human-centered objects of representation, and then ludo-entoptic play, which we think is quite an evolving future research avenue,
where play moves beyond the situated human-artifact locus, and rather also extends into the material arrangement of these technologies. And there are manifold implications for research.
We particularly centre on the notion of moving beyond AI literacy as technical, declarative knowledge or conventional metaphors, such as "learning", "agent", "intelligence"; where objects such as the Entoptic Field Camera can rather elicit deeply subjective and situated AI literacies and we see this as a
way in which Research-through-Design can massively contribute to this field.
And lastly, we also think there are many manifold implications for design theory, and given that the entoptic metaphor is so efficacious in considering AI technologies, we think it's a good impulse to consider how metaphor plays a role in twenty-
first century design, and the way that its affordances are shaped by technological development.
So thank you so much for listening again. My name is Jesse Josua Benjamin. Please do reach out asynchronously, synchronously, in person or hybrid.