We were interested in working with the probabilities that google vision API attaches to the label recognition of our images. What does it mean to recognize 0.674 Musician? 05.644 Lighting? 0.843 Art? What is then the rest of this percentage? Why isn’t it sure? Working with a tool of AI, we learn a lot about our human intelligence, creativity and artistic process. The way we approach object theater, in particular, is interesting in relation to how the image recognition systems are trained. How do we use our imagination for seeing something in an object that is not the ordinary ‘result’ of what this object is? How do we make a common agreement - audience and performer - to see in objects something else/more? Are there different ‘probabilities’ for transformation of objects? We created three games to visualize and represent these questions and values of probabilities/uncertainty of the AI:

game#1 - what is this?

–> how to play: one person is presenting an object to the others, and asks “what is this?”. The others say what they see. Different arrangements and constellations of objects are possible. (we found out that the ‘audience’ then functions like an image recognition AI, giving labels to images. That’s a nice game that can be further developed and have more complicated rules).

game#2 - probability

–> how to play: arrange values 0.0-0.8 on the floor, prepare different objects for use. Someone declares a label (ex. spaceship, dinosaur, elephant, castle…) and the others need to arrange the objects according to how probable they think this object fits the label, 0.0 being the lowest, 0.8 the highest value (we discovered that when played in a group, all participant start negotiate the probability of each object to fit this or that label, including demonstrating how and thus starting to manipulate the objects).

game#3 - objects&labels

–> how to play: arrange different labels on the floor (we used a classical world - garden, castle, princess, prince, horse, sword, dragon) and prepare different objects for use. Start to ‘converse’ with another person, matching an object to a label.

Beim dritten Spiel scheint besonders interessant, dass sich die Vorstellungen im Bezug auf die Objekte verändern, wenn sich die Relationen der Objekte zueinander verändern, bzw. einzelne Objekte ausgetauscht werden und so neue Relationen entstehen. Es ist als würde die Bedeutung im Zwischenraum, bzw. durch den Vergleich der Objekte entstehen. Das Spiel macht das irgendwie sehr gut sichtbar. (Es ist etwas anderes, wenn ein als Prinz gekennzeichneter Korken neben einem als Schwert gekennzeichneten Kugelschreiber steht, oder neben einem als Schwert gekennzeichneten Pürierstab.)