[Air-L] Research larp about machine vision - Scandinavian language required

[Jill Walker Rettberg]

Dear AoIR researchers,

We are organising a research larp (larp=live action roleplaying game) about machine vision in Bergen, Norway 21-23 Nov 2021, and are looking for researchers who can communicate in a Scandinavian language (Norwegian, Swedish or Danish) to participate. Sorry about the language requirement – but I know there are many Scandinavian-speaking scholars on this mailing list who may be interested, and if it’s a success, maybe we’ll do an international version later.

The goal is to allow participants to experience ethical dilemmas relating to new technologies, and for them to make ethical choices that have (simulated) consequences – the idea is that technology has developed so fast that our societies haven’t fully developed practical ethical frameworks for it yet, and that larping could be a way to develop such ethics.

If you’re interested, please sign up at http://sivilisasjonensventerom.no before 16 June, and also send me an email explaining why you’d like to participate – we have funding to cover travel expenses from the Nordic region for at least some scholars, so may be able to cover your costs.

The larp – a live action role playing game - is called Sivilisasjonens Venterom (Civilization’s Waiting Room) and is funded by the Norwegian Research Council as an experiment in research dissemination, and it’s also connected to the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media.

The actual larp takes place on Monday 22 Nov from morning until evening. The day before we’ll be workshopping and preparing for the larp, and the day after we’ll have a debriefing, and for the researchers, also a discussion to see what we thought of the larp as a research tool. Could we develop this into a teaching tool? Perhaps simulating worlds or societies that are NOT like our own could be used as a more deliberate research method?

Sivilisasjonens venterom is set in a post-apocalyptic future where most of the world is a barren wasteland, but refugees clamour to enter Civilization, a town run by a benevolent AI system that offers the ultimate democracy: it makes decisions for society based on all of our data. We are also developing other larps in the same world – a children’s larp where 10-14 year olds are brought up by robots who tell the kids there are no other humans in the world (the kids may outwit the rather simple machine learning algorithms used by the robots, or perhaps they’ll just accept the robot leaders) and a short larp designed for conferences.

The larp is developed by experience Nordic larp developers, and we’re hoping to recruit about 20 researchers working on AI, machine vision and related areas, and 20 experienced larpers. If you’re both, and can speak a Scandinavian language, you are basically our dream participant, but we do want to include researchers who are new to larping as well. (To be honest I’ve not larped much myself and am really nervous about it – but I’m convinced it’ll be fun!)

So if you’re interested, please sign up – and feel free to forward this email to anyone else you know who might be interested.

Jill


Jill Walker Rettberg
Professor i digital kultur
Universitetet i Bergen

http://jilltxt.net