Empathy

The Golden Age

Xintong Wang (CN)

The project aims to build a path for audiences to explore and understand empathy, both how it is designed and misused. The uncanny valley shows that to a certain extent, the more humanoid the form of a machine is, the more empathetic a human is.

Alter Ego (Version II)

Moritz Wehrmann (DE)

Alter Ego questions the mimetic inter-relationship between two persons. It creates a mental conflict of self-localization, a feeling of self-loss and a feeling of empathy at the same time. The work is foundation for a cooperative with neurophysiological researchers, e.g. with Prof. Alain Berthoz of at Collège de France in Paris. It plays an important role in the research areas of self-other perception and mechanisms of sympathy and empathy research and their disorders, e.g. schizophrenia and autism.

I, HUMAN

SAINT MACHINE (RO)

I, HUMAN uses empathy as content to influence the feeding conditions of microorganisms, and light as content carrier. Developed around the idea of interconnectivity, it analyzes how individual interactions can produce collective outcomes at different scales. I, HUMAN is testing new models of synergistic behavior mediated by technology in an attempt to identify coherence patterns, a metaphor for our evolution as a species, which may depend on our capacity to empathize.