Fast Familiar (Dan Barnard, Rachel Briscoe & Joe McAlister) is exhibiting Looking for Love, at the Science Gallery London as part of the exhibition AI: Who’s Looking After Me in collaboration with FutureEverything, open Wednesdays to Saturdays, 11am – 6pm until 20 January 2024. The piece playfully explores the differences between machine ways of seeing and human ways of seeing and asks what a machine might learn from looking at images that are tagged “love” , “romance” or “romcom”. In recurring motifs that draw on the “prove you are not a robot” online tests, it asks how a human might reverse that and instead try to prove that it is a robot. What do we then picture when given the prompt “CEO” for example – and are we really as good as we think at telling the differences between dogs and blueberry muffins?
What’s the most efficient way to fall in love?
What would happen if you let data determine the biggest decisions of your life?
Surely training a machine on everything the internet knows about love will result in unparalleled romantic success?
Can you teach a robot how to love? Looking for Love is a playful interactive artwork for humans. Part modern-day tamagotchi, part interactive fiction, part experiment, the experience happens over three days (or less if you’re impatient) via a message-based chat app. Artificial Intelligence, human intuition and everything that gets lost in translation, this artwork invites you to take the perspective of another form of intelligence to reflect on the peculiarities of our own.
Looking for Love is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
CREATED BY Dan Barnard, Rachel Briscoe & Joe McAlister | UI DESIGN BY Diana Monova | IMAGE DESIGN BY Guy J Sanders