Stories We Tell

What would it be like to tell a story to a robot? There’s such a vast array of questions that spans from this simple sentence. While we wait for the next big leap in science that would help us unlock the workings of consciousness, while we speculate on what AI truly is, always finding ourselves on the brink of the future, we can imagine a time when robots will become ubiquitous, tangled in a game of gods and slaves. In a way, that time has already started. What would it feel like to tell a story to a robot? We could imagine this scenario. The one in which, in a last condescending attempt to regain our lost status and purpose, we would decide that the very robots that have taken away our jobs need to be told stories in order to perform optimally. This installation invites the participants to speculate, in an intimate manner, on where we stand in relation to the concept of empathy as work, and of work as empathy. This is an object / text installation I did together with Ioana Hogman for the Work Upside Down group exhibition on the Future of Work in Cluj Napoca.