Us Xtended

Set on a disintegrating stage of an old Greek theatre, the experience revolves around an emotional creative encounter with an AI character, which turns into a Turing test with a twist. This time it is the humans who need to prove their empathy to the AI. You’ll enter a world ruled by an emotion recognition system. Based on the system’s reading of your emotions, the environment around you changes thus attempts to influence your feelings. The co-creation between you and the AI unfolds and will eventually turn into a digital sculpture of your journey through Us Xtended. But will it really express what you feel? Will you and the AI character understand each other without words?

You’re in the body of a digital human on the stage of a Greek theater. You learn the structure of Us Xtended including a mirror – reflecting your body and serving as a portal to the levels/worlds – and a communication device: your emotions. First you transmit them through theatre masks, then through movement, and in the end through your facial and gaze interaction. Passing through the portal from world to world, you realize that it’s your emotional interaction that shapes the world you experience, which is turning more abstract the longer you engage with it. Will the emotional AI understand how you really feel? Or will it stay on the surface, representing the algorithmic regimes of truth?