Hello, my name is Chris Elsden, from the University of Edinburgh, and this, is Zoom Obscura.
We are present in front of the camera all the time, there, as a subject ready to be analysed and defined.
The software develops a doppelganger of the user by projecting their image into the StyleGan2 model
Zoom Obscura is a project aims to give agency and control to the users of video-conferencing technologies such as Zoom
while still allowing them to participate in online spaces and debates.
Enabling us to negotiate our own presence, and our own value, in these new spaces forced on us by pandemic living and working.
The project brought together artists, academics, hackers, designers and creative technologists
to develp critical interventions that make the problematic workings of these technologies legible to wider audiences
while empowering users to experiment with and control how their personal data, be that visual, audio, or textual, manifests in online spaces.
After three online workshops based around ideation, prototyping and presentation
the seven commissioned artists presented their work at a launch event in 2021.
Martin Disley uses maching learning and a generative adversarial network, to conjure up a deepfake doppelganger
that creates a continuum of difference between the closest match to the input face, that the network can produce,
and the median face at the centre of the network's distribution.
The avatar created, which is the one that I'm using now, is a close enough likeness that people will recognise who it is, but different enough that computers won't.
B Wijshijer's Zoom_Mod Pack enhances the theatricality of video-calling,
providing users ways to control their entrances and exits
and challenging the normalisation of front row visibility and constant surveillance.
Ilse Pouwels enacts a Masquerade Call with her custom made masking emoticon,
exploring ways of expressing emotions on video calls without leaking data and compromising privacy.
Michael Baldwin's piece 'Group Dialogues' is a playful yet incisive exploration of temporality in video calling.
Playing with concepts such as time-lag, interruption, and responsibility, Group Dialogues cleverly shows us how our behaviour and etiquettes are influenced by technologies such as Zoom.
Using a live audio score "How To Touch Through the Screen" is an interactive piece by Andrea Zavala
which invites participants to discover ways of feeling connected, while being physically apart, and being present in the digital space of a Zoom meeting.
Facing others. Visible to others. Breathe in that moment.
But keep breathing. Look at them.
Are you endlessly stuck in Zoom meetings that you wish you could just walk away from?
Yes!
itsnotreally.me is a comedy sketch by Lloyd Henning and Peter Sutton of Foxdog Studios.
Lloyd and Peter got fed up of the exhaustion of being permanently alert on video calls
so built a series of interventions to enable users to fake or disrupt their presence on screen.
And finally, in Paul O'Neill's work "For Ruth and Violette" a World War 2 code poem reveals itself
as both a modern day romance and tragedy and a contemporary subversion of networked communications.
So that, was Zoom Obscura.
And this, is a paper that my co-authors and I have written about these seven artist projects, reflecting on each of them as powerful exemplars of 'Counterfunctional Design’.
In the paper, we say much more about the origins of Zoom Obscura, and how we worked with the artists to produce this work.
But here, I would just like to focus on our analysis of counterfunctionality and what that might mean, for the futures of video-conferencing.
Counterfunctional Design was developed by James Pierce and Eric Paulos in these two wonderful papers at DIS 2014.
Fundamentally critical, counterfunctional design is most easily understood through this schema that they provide to encourage the practice.
Crucially the approach here is both critical and adversarial.
resisting or contesting a presumed affordance or use of a technology.
But in doing so, it should also be generative of something else, creating or allowing for new experiences and affordances.
So let me illustrate that with a couple of examples from the projects.
Itsnotreally.me by FoxDog Studios, replaces live video with pre-recorded canned responses.
What this means is: normally, one is viewing a live video stream.
Now one may not be viewing a live video stream.
But now, one might politely disengage from a tiring call, when not required.
Group Dialogues by Michael Baldwin experiments with interrupting and redirecting conversation through Zoom.
And here, normally one can rely on audio filtering - that little yellow box in a Zoom call – for a clear conversation.
Now, through Group Dialogues, conversation is deliberately disrupted.
But instead one might pay more attention to how conversation is constructed.
So in this way we identify some key strategies through which it is possible to counter the surveillant tendencies of video-conferencing software,
and by which we might aim to offer users greater agency in how they present themselves.
We might look for ways to reduce visibility
to resist the Zoom window, and the bounds of that,
counter the presumption of a face in a Zoom window,
switching off entirely, or introducing new temporalities, countering liveness.
In the paper we also discuss ways in which we might design alternative ways-of-being with video-conferencing as a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives.
So please read more in the paper, and I encourage you to visit the Zoom Obscura website, we're also on Twitter @ZoomObscura
I want to thank sincerely my co-authors, David Chatting, Mike Duggan, Andrew Dwyer, and Pip Thornton.
I'd also like to thank the funders who supported this work, and thank you for watching.