Live Tracking with Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Sola

Live Tracking is one of the six experiments of A Third Hand – Creative Applications for Robotics, a research project conducted at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland by AATB (Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet), Alain Bellet and Martin Hertig, developed in collaboration with the artist duo Varvara & Mar (Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Sola) during a residency at ECAL.

The resulting prototype, Mirror, Mirror on the arm, who’s in the training set of them all?, puts a mirror-display on a UR10 robotic arm that follows the most prominent face in the room. It looks that face up in the LAION Face dataset and shows either its closest match, a digital twin, or the message “Seems you are not in the dataset”, raising questions of privacy, consent and surveillance in the data that trains AI.