- In 2019, Rimini Protokoll, a collective founded in 2000 in Berlin with the aim of using theater to open up new perspectives on reality, brought on stage a robot, the identical copy of a human being: identical in physiognomic traits, eyes, skin, movements, gestures and posture, tone of voice. The android aroused compassion and sympathy, but also suspicion and aversion, since the spectators were situated in an "Uncanny valley", according to the metaphor of Masahiro Mori that gives the title to the performance, and that refers to the space between man and robot: a space in which the latter resembles the former, as its defects and imperfections appear monstrous. The Rimini Protokoll experiment consisted precisely in questioning the public, in checking which limit must be crossed in order for empathy to turn precipitously into an abyss, into a deep ‘valley’ of repulsion. At the end of the Rimini Protokoll performance, spectators were invited to approach the robot, to observe it, to touch it. Only by touching the robot did the people really perceive that it was a machine, becoming aware of the gap and the difference between it and a human being.
- During the performance, the spectators were of course aware that they were seeing and hearing a machine; however, they reacted as if they were in the presence of a human being. The technical perfection made the robot in no way dissimilar to a man, and therefore the public identified itself with it, had compassion for it; until bewilderment prevailed, making the audience afraid of it. How can a machine be so human? The problem is what is meant by 'humanity': its humanity consists, after all, not in the fact that it reproduces the human model, because if the machine were immobile and did not speak the result would be different. Rather it concerns the fact that it expresses the same emotions with the artificial 'body', the same fear of the disease by which the model is affected, the same ability to react and express the joy of life and resistance of a human being. So, the question posed by the performance sounds very different: the robot can certainly imitate emotions - we know this - but can it also express them? Are emotions possible without awareness of them? And if so, what value does individual consciousness have: that which makes each human being unique amongst other human beings?
- In the last sixty years, scholars of Artificial Intelligence have "educated" machines to recognize human emotions, feeding them with an immeasurable number of images that describe mankind in all its bodily characteristics and emotional states. Firstly, machines recognize emotions, then they classify them; subsequently, they understand how to predict them, becoming able to manipulate the judgments, behaviors and decisions of human beings. Eventually, what happens inside and outside of us could become the unconscious consequence of a series of algorithms, which subsume an increasingly complex amount of data and information and put them in relation to each other. The recognition of emotions becomes increasingly sophisticated as the images of emotions placed on and collected from the Internet become more natural, innumerable and casual. This category of recognition and facial filing serves to build strategies for targeting emotions and, especially, their cognitive power. There are, therefore, very disturbing aspects in this mapping of emotional states: the transformation of man into robot, or rather into an emotional robot, would seem without a possibility of return. It is exactly this that the Rimini Protokoll performance wants to suggest. This is the meaning of the question that the robot asks the spectators: 'if I can function, thanks to technology, will I lose my humanity?' The question could be expressed in a different way: do we really still need the man, when the machine acts like a man, feels the same emotions and arouses the same emotions? Does the machine question the role of the individual in the world, and in the human species to which it is biologically related?
- The question is relevant, as it concerns our whole future. As Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, who have worked for years for the Training Humans exhibition (Fondazione Prada, Milan 2019), have written, the artificial intelligence training sets aimed at the recognition of emotions are dangerous. First of all, because they classify emotional states without being able to distinguish between simulation and conscious feeling of emotion. Secondly, because they describe human beings on the basis of prejudices that have historical and political reasons, aiming to measure moral characteristics of individuals and to apply this immense 'mapping', for example, to politics, the market, and judicial investigations. It is precisely due to the dangers of mapping and classifying emotional states that studying the phenomenology and history of emotions has a fundamental importance: the importance of studying the possibility of reactivating emotions through a recognition that is not implemented by a mere quantitative classification, but, on the contrary, by a reconstruction that is historical, geographic and cultural, and through awareness and rational reflection of the environmental factors that arouse and influence emotions.
- In other words: today, more than ever, for the progress of artificial intelligence and for the methods with which it is 'educated', one must enter those immense archives of emotions that are literature, art and material culture. These human activities do not transmit data or information, or not only, but an experience that has a bodily dimension, which is reactivated when we open these 'archives' and sift them in order to study them. Art and literature, thus, become archives of the 'feeling' of the body, ours and others', until a narrative reactivates it, presenting it to the world. The 'things', large and small, ancient or contemporary, activate ways of 'feeling', through which we form our judgments about them and their cultural contexts, through which we understand them: the museum becomes an 'enactive' laboratory of embodied knowledge.
- In fact, making something, manipulating matter, does not mean giving it an intention internal to the mind: the object contains part of the Self of the person who made it and it is not something external or extraneous to the consciousness of the Self, but quite the opposite. And therefore also the documents of material culture, daily 'things', non-literary texts that come from remote antiquity, such as graffiti and epigraphs, retain emotions, as if they were frozen, keeping in a crystallized form the practices that served to enunciate them. From stone-age fossils, to classical statues, to the architecture of every era, up to the most complete humanoid robots, 'things' collect the behaviors and perceptions, even non-visual ones, developed by homo sapiens during his evolution. Things also 'tell' and, in the 'operational chain' (the reference is to André Leroi-Gourhan) which led to their formation, their narrative precedes its linguistic expression.
- 'Archives' is a term that can evoke fixity, and therefore needs to be further clarified here: the 'archives of emotions' we deal with are open and constantly updating. They are not immutable or fixed, because emotions vary together with culture, time, place, context, and the human being who expresses and elaborates them. They are 'mobile archives' which are deconstructed and reorganized when they are consulted; archives that are continuously being implemented and corrected. Unlike the databases and catalogs provided to artificial intelligence, the 'archives of emotions' we are talking about here are not used for classification, but for questioning. They are not useful for conditioning emotions in the present, but to avoid them being conditioned. The term 'archive', in the way we intend it, rather expresses that distance, of time and psychology, necessary in order to look at emotions and to understand the ways in which we re-live them. In fact, we should never be reducible to a category; if through the cataloging of images the artificial intelligence might predict our feelings, our emotional states and therefore our actions, the study of those images can conversely serve to understand our uniqueness and unpredictability, the space that remains and must remain between the robot and the human being, the content of an identity that cannot be mapped on any basis. Understanding the power of feelings and of the ways implemented in their classification (thinking of Paul Ekman's theories and the use that has been made of them) also means rebelling against these ways and the simplifications they necessarily imply. It means claiming an individual space of perception and also of simulation of emotion, of revolt, after all, towards those who want to impose and convey emotions.
- The task that we give ourselves is therefore to explore these archives, which does not involve a rational and taxonomic activity, but to identify with them, to immerse ourselves in them, because the ways in which we feel the world (and the ways in which we perceive that feeling) repeat themselves over time. Thus literary, philological, theatrical, archaeological and aesthetic hermeneutics, in continuous comparison with 'life' and the science of life, is confirmed as a way to get to know better ourselves and the world, the past and the present, to improve it and improve – or so we might hope.
- Furthermore, the comparison with robotics and artificial intelligence is not necessarily negative. It is also due to the rise, in theoretical reflection, of a new perspective that can be labeled as post-humanist, where post-human is all that follows the traditional idea of man, no longer adequate to describe the interactions and hybridizations of anthropos with technology, of which there is mistrust, but which also becomes a means of rescue and aid, not least in the medical field. The prefix 'post' should therefore be understood in a positive sense to indicate an overcoming and a progression, something 'better than human'. On the other hand, the loss of man's centrality corresponds to a growing re-evaluation of the 'life' around him, and requires a repositioning of man within a history of his mutual relationship with other species, animals and plants, and with inanimate objects. This relationship is bodily and therefore emotional.
- Studying emotions and their phenomenology in art, literature and material culture, therefore, means studying the mechanisms through which verbal and non-verbal communication stimulates the same emotions it represents, speaking to bodies in their different historical, social and cultural contexts. On the other hand, it means questioning which emotional processes have contributed to training the scholars themselves, in love with their object of study, in constant emotional dialogue with them, on which they project dreams and desires, and through what practices the scholars leave in inheritance, together with their objects of study, also the emotions related to them.
- This journal questions what the archives of emotions, in literature, art, and material culture, can reveal to us about ourselves, in every age, from the remotest past to the present. It ask questions about our imagination and its potential, about the emotional strategies we are subjected to, about the possibility of opposing or transforming them, about the urge to take into account what the world and things in it manage to say, to suggest, to ask, to demand, even without words.
Manifesto
