Live Tracking with Varvara & Mar

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

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.