Artist and filmmaker Karen Palmer discusses her work using neuroscience and artificial intelligence to create emotionally-responsive stories that help people understand their own subconscious biases.
—
Available wherever you listen to your podcasts:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | iHeartRadio
—
Additional Links:
—
Charlie Melcher:
Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of The Future of StoryTelling. And I'd like to welcome you back to the FoST Podcast. My guest today is award-winning multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Karen Palmer. As a self described storyteller from the future, Karen's work combines elements of film, gaming, installation, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to create interactive experiences that aim to empower their viewers by helping them better understand their own emotions and implicit biases. Her work, which confronts issues of racism, protest, and police brutality could not be more timely. We're honored to have first exhibited her work in 2016 at our own Future of StoryTelling festival and have had her back several times since. Karen always seems to be two steps ahead of the latest advances in storytelling technology and uses these cutting edge tools to create more emotionally powerful, immersive and fundamentally human experiences. I'm elated to welcome Karen Palmer to the Future of StoryTelling podcast.
Charlie Melcher:
Karen Palmer, I am so honored and delighted to have you on the Future of StoryTelling Podcast. Thank you for being here.
Karen Palmer:
I am so happy to be here. I'm delighted to be here today. I think of myself as a member of the FoST family.
Charlie Melcher:
I think of you as FoST family royalty.
Karen Palmer:
Wow. Wow. That is an honor indeed. The Future of StoryTelling was a real kind of tipping point for my career coming to that festival the first time. And after that, the world just opened up so many doors and was so interested, that global platform. And yeah, so always whenever I've been to the summit or the festival, it's just always been an adventure.
Charlie Melcher:
Well, that's a perfect description of my feeling about experiencing your work at the Future of StoryTelling festival. That's when I first tried Riot, that incredible piece that you made, and I thought that'd be a great place for us to start. First, can you just describe Riot for us?
Karen Palmer:
So I create what I describe as immersive documentaries from the future and Riot was the first one of that type of exploration. Riot is a film that watches you back using artificial intelligence and facial recognition, and as you watch the film, the narrative branches, depending on your emotional reaction. If you're calm the narrative will brunch in one direction. If you're angry, it will branch in another. It uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition because I wanted to bring that narrative and that conversation to the masses, to the participants. And also in terms of technology, I wanted to create an imperceptible interface. I didn't want you have to put any wearable tech on. I wanted you to stand there and your emotions would be read and makes you conscious of your subconscious behavior by putting you in the middle of a riot environment. So it kind of shows how you may respond in that situation.
Charlie Melcher:
And tell me, where did the inspiration for that piece come from?
Karen Palmer:
I created that piece in 2016. The inspiration came from actually watching the Ferguson riots in 2014. Even though I'm a British black chick, the kind of global black experience, what happens in America really resonates with us black British people. It's kind of like a cousin, a close cousin of what's happening over here. And it really influenced my work in terms of what I was seeing on the media and the representation of it, I was quite disgusted in terms of the portrayal of the people, my people just try and fighting for their rights and injustice. And I wanted to put people in the middle of a riot environment and show the lead up to that and enable people to respond from an emotive, visceral perspective, as opposed to a third party one they were being fed in the media. And then make them conscious of the subconscious behavior where the film responds to them.
Charlie Melcher:
Let's make sure that our listener understands exactly what the Riot experience is. So you enter in and you're watching a screen. And take it from there.
Karen Palmer:
Also what happens before you go in is that I have an actor dressed in white clothing. It's a male. And he'll ask you three questions. "Are you here for Riot?" "Yes." "Have you got a weapon on you?" "No," most probably. Hopefully not. At your events, I think there were some dodgy people though, Charlie. No, there wasn't. And then the third question is, "Do you have anything that can be used as a weapon?" And these questions are designed to kind of prime people, but also to start to kind of tease out their personality. People could start to have fun with it. Some people might say, "Oh yeah, my phone. That can be used as a weapon." They might video something. I had the black lady once that said, "Yeah, she has her mind." That can be used as a weapon. So people start to become primed and you start to see their personality.
Karen Palmer:
Then they step into the space and they're standing inside a live site installation where around them is smoke from a haze machine. It's dimly lit. And in front of them as a projector on the screen and around them is 3D ambisonic sound. And in front of them is a set design of gravel and splits of a street and dustbin, overturned dustbin and rubbish. It's as if the film set of a riot has built out from the screen to be around the people. I wanted to create this truly immersive environment, but also fuse digital film, theater. Because I find there's something very sexy that happens when you put digital in the person in the mix, like can actor. It kind of becomes more three dimensional plus.
Charlie Melcher:
And I remember feeling that the audio and the music were so powerfully used, using it to really elicit emotion of being in a riot.
Karen Palmer:
Yeah. So it was very important to have the ambisonic sound, which is the closest format to a human ear. So you have all the speakers around you. So you had this cube so that you actually physically really felt there. We didn't want to put headphones on people because we felt that would be quite restrictive. So you're in this space and the sound is really heightened. I kind of used this kind of junglist type music sound to kind of have this frenetic pace and beat. We really wanted to connect with all your senses. We had the film, we had the sound design. We had a haze machine. We had scent as well. I used scent of fire in the room too. I just really wanted you to feel totally immersed. Martin Luther King said the riot is the voice of the unheard and I want you to hear that voice and feel that voice.
Charlie Melcher:
Riot did a beautiful job of in a way sort of presaging, to anticipate that this was an experience that would be something for everyone, not just for those others. You let anybody come in and experience what it was like to have this very rough interaction with frankly, with aggression, police brutality.
Karen Palmer:
Yeah. There was different levels of the piece in that you would, depending on your emotions, that would elicit the branching narrative. So you come across a cop who's aggressive towards you. And if you are angry or fearful, then he's going to attack you or arrest you. And if you're calm, he may not perceive you as a threat, particularly depending on your race and your gender. Also, you would come across other characters. You would come across a looter. And I worked with the actors in London and we workshopped those scenes with a young black actor, who was actually involved in the London riots that happened where a young black man, Mark Duggan was killed by the police and that spawned the London riots.
Karen Palmer:
In the film, he's saying, "I'm going to take this stuff." And he's saying, "Look, this isn't for me. This is for mumsy. And this is a one chance I'm going to have to kind of make things a bit easier for her. Are you coming with me?" And you're the character. And you've got to decide if you go with him or not to do the looting. And it was really interesting because if you respond in a particular way, you would go with him. And if not, you would run away. I'd say to people afterwards, "Was that accurate with the artificial intelligence?" And I remember a white lady watched in Sheffield in the UK and she was like, "Yeah, I heard what he said. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense. I'm in."
Karen Palmer:
It was really interesting this middle class white lady going, "Yeah. I felt what he said. And I was like, yeah, I understand you, man. Let's go." And I was like, "Oh wow. Shit. That's exactly what I kind of wanted someone to say, like on a human level." And that's the power of story, that it can transcend that and it can connect with you. And it's about feeling and it's about gut. I feel that we're very disconnected from that at the moment in society. There's so much information, but we've never been more separate or divided. So it's about bringing us together as one race.
Charlie Melcher:
Let's talk a little bit about the technology. I mean, you were using facial recognition technology so that you could read people's emotional response to the action in the story. You were also using artificial intelligence in there to help with bridging narratives. Tell me why you chose those and how do you feel as a storyteller they're powerful in your toolkit?
Karen Palmer:
Prior to Riot, I created about four or five interactive film responsive experiences. And when I got to Riot, I was starting to work with Brunel University, London, their computer science department, Professor [inaudible 00:09:47] there and his PhD and master's students. As a artist working with tech for over a decade, I was deep down the rabbit hole. And I had to look at what is my objective. If I'm about making people conscious of their subconscious behavior and monitoring your emotions, then that's what we came up with, that it's artificial intelligence and facial recognition.
Karen Palmer:
Just to explain when you build artificial intelligence, it's like building a brain. So we had to build like a neural net, which is similar to your neural net brain. And then we had to build the content to train it on, what's called a dataset. And normally people you buy that off the shelf. But the unique thing about what we did is that we built it from scratch, not just to make our lives harder, but it's kind of the authenticity of the artist. You're not just going to buy these things and bot them on. You need that inquisition as part of your practice.
Charlie Melcher:
One of the things that I love about your work with AI and facial recognition is that it enables a kind of conversation, right? There's a feedback loop, as you said, where we're not just pushing the story onto you, the story is responding to you. So there's a dialogue now that's going on between the storyteller and the story listener, or in this case now the story doer, the story actor. It's something that we love exploring at FoST because that's how stories started, right? When you and I sit around and share stories, you're telling a story and I'm listening, but I'm responding to you. And all of that kind of got ripped out when media got fixed in celluloid or in print, when media became one way, unidirectional.
Charlie Melcher:
And so in a way I see what you're doing as one of the early pioneers in bringing us back to a kind of storytelling, kind of human communication that is responsive. And I think that's so human. I think it's more human than a passive audience just consuming something. And I think there's incredible opportunities to tell new kinds of stories, to create stories that are even more personalized or meaningful to people because they are impacting them in one way or another. I mean, talk a little bit about how you think about your audience. Are they even an audience? Or are they like co-collaborators or ...
Karen Palmer:
I've got so much answers for that. So I describe my audience as participants.
Charlie Melcher:
Here, here.
Karen Palmer:
They're not observers. They are participants in this experience. But I am trying to fully immerse you in this experience totally through all your senses. And things are going to evolve because when moving into a digital age, more of a digital age now. So maybe these live site experiences are going to become not the focus and I have to reiterate, translate what I'm doing onto a digital format in some way, which I'm currently looking at. So you have to adapt with the times. A big live [inaudible 00:12:47] site installation is fine, but not everybody may be able to access that as we move into a different age now.
Charlie Melcher:
Okay. So let's talk about artificial intelligence.
Karen Palmer:
Yes. Let's go.
Charlie Melcher:
What is your take on this as a tool for artists and how some of this can get misused in our world today?
Karen Palmer:
Every artist has their own paintbrush and tool kit of what they have in them. I, as a black chick, went deeper down this rabbit hole about AI and in terms of social justice and how it's being used within society and law enforcement and bias within the criminal justice system and how there's a system called Compass. And this Compass system has been proven to be biased against people of color and black people and given them longer sentences based upon the datasets that's created.
Karen Palmer:
So for example, the question in a Compass system might be, "Are your parents still together," for example. And that's going to determine the length of your sentence. We call it a black box. You can't see the AI, you can't see the data set that was created. You can't see the parameters. So what happens is they sell the system to the government and the government use it. So there's no transparency, there's no governance, there's no regulation, even more dangerous because it's automated and because people's perception is that a computer is neutral and actually someone has actually programmed that system. And I guarantee you, it is not someone of color or a black person. But you cannot argue with a biased or racist algorithm. It's just end game. It's over. And then also people are just going to hold it up and say, "Well, it's not me. It's the computer."
Charlie Melcher:
I think about the example that's happening in China now, where they are using facial recognition and-
Karen Palmer:
Social credit system.
Charlie Melcher:
Yeah. And gait to be able to identify people on the streets. They have incredible surveillance in certain cities and they can tell if you've jaywalked or not. And then they establish a system of points, social point system, kind of like the points you might get if you were applying for a loan or for a mortgage, but this is just for societal. So if you get points off because you drove erratically, or you said something against the government, then when you apply for a job, when you're trying to get your kids into a better school, even your travel, your ability to move from city to city can be restricted.
Karen Palmer:
Millions of their travel was restricted because of this system.
Charlie Melcher:
So here's a kind of dystopian looking future where artificial intelligence and facial recognition and computer sight are being used to control populations and take away freedoms. Traditionally it's been in fiction where we've seen this kind of thing, and now it's in fact.
Karen Palmer:
Technology is not inherently good or bad. It's what you use it for. And the government and private corporations have a very specific ideology and agenda, which may not often or always be beneficial to the people. In fact, it could be detrimental. That's what you're seeing. You're seeing the system using it for an extension of their policy. So if the policy is control or the policy is institutionalized racism, wherever that is, it's just going to be extended. So when it comes to when you're talking about things people are crying for, defunding the police, I totally as a black chick fully understand, feel, and comprehend this rage, this necessity for change. However, I'm just concerned. And particularly at the speed in which this is being taken on board, is that if you kind of defund or dismantle aspects of a police force, I don't know if you're going to be replacing it with people of color or black people walking the street or people you can trust more. That a lot of these systems I believe would just be automated and that these are going to be automated by a system.
Karen Palmer:
So I'm very concerned, highly concerned at the implications of such a complex thing. And also, I am very conscious of the stories which I'm created and my objective with creating them. And I also want people to be very conscious of the stories that they tell themselves and each other. So if you're saying we can't fight the system or we're going to kill the system, wherever it is, we have to be very strategic in what we're doing. The future is not something which happens to us. It's something which we build together and that if we are creating stories of co-creatorship of this reality, that's how I, as a artist feel we can be moving into the future and changing it, as opposed to just taking these default narratives that are being thrown at us and not realizing that we can create our own.
Charlie Melcher:
It reminds me a little bit of the conversation I had with Margaret Atwood about the role of dystopian fiction, where she was saying it let's you see one way the world might go and choose not to go there, to realize you have the chance to not pursue that path and to pursue another. The other thing is to look at protopian storytelling, which presents a very positive future and models, a path that you would want to take. Are you thinking of working more in the positive imagination or are you helping us to see bad outcomes and try to avoid them?
Karen Palmer:
Wow. I'd love to hear that interview by the way. And I really like that question.
Charlie Melcher:
It's one of our podcasts. You can go listen to it.
Karen Palmer:
Yeah, I will. I will actually. So I think I should probably look at the positive, but I'm not because I'm a bit concerned about our future and I need to kind of shake people. So my next project is called Consensus Gentium. That's Latin for, if everybody thinks it, it must be true. Consensus Gentium is a series of immersive experiences, which are messages from the future to warn us of what is to come. I call them immersive documentaries. And then you can kind of experience this future and then see if you feel inspired or motivated to do anything about it, or if you can easily dismiss it.
Karen Palmer:
So, for example, there's an organization who I know who are amazing called Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in LA. And they subpoenaed the LAPD for their algorithms because they were going into certain areas of black and brown people and economic disadvantaged people all the time. And they're like, "Why are you here, man? Why are you here?" And they go, "Oh, well, the algorithm sent us here." And they're like, "Well, we want to see the algorithms because we believe those are biased algorithms." And they actually won that case. They took them to court and they won the case. And then now reviewing I believe the algorithms.
Karen Palmer:
And so I'm working with these people and other organizations and other thought leaders to kind of create tentative, potential real narratives. Like they've won one battle, but they may not win the war. And what would the world be like in 10 years if they don't win the war? Because they are really cutting edge techno activists and not everybody's on that. So it's very much dystopian in terms of I'm sending back these messages from the future.
Charlie Melcher:
As a warning.
Karen Palmer:
As a warning. As a warning, like a Mayday call.
Charlie Melcher:
As Brian McDonald, who was another one of our guests a few weeks ago, said, stories are these things that have been survival mechanisms. That one of the reasons we evolve to be story animals is because the stories held within them information that let us survive. And so we're so attuned to listen to them, to learn from them, to internalize and remember their messages. Somehow this feels very tied to your work, getting people to have these kinds of fearful experiences or confront some of their worst fears in these pieces. It is getting them to kind of learn something in a slightly more safe way that can be a survival mechanism.
Karen Palmer:
Much deeper than survival though. I'd say that we're living in a time where survival is going to be a pivotal word, but it's very much about becoming conscious of your subconscious behavior so that you can kind of access your true self. You can kind of go that deep part where you go to have the clarity in the eye of the storm. And it's understanding that part of yourself so that you can just be more self aware and then go back into the world and bring your true self into it. And storytelling to enable you to be aware of the power of the stories that you tell yourself.
Karen Palmer:
So it has to impact this world that we're in. Otherwise it's just not relevant. It can't just even be there as an alternative form of narrative or dialogue or inquisition. If it's not going to directly impact people's lives, it's going to become obsolete because things is going to get super, super serious when the next wave of things that's coming, whether it's corona or a recession or whatever the next wave of stuff that's coming down on us. And we need to use storytelling to go beyond surviving, but to be the best part of ourselves to bring to the party. Because that's what we're going to need now.
Charlie Melcher:
I love the way you say that, that it's really about looking in. It's about holding a mirror up and helping people to have more truthful internal stories that they tell each other, greater awareness of oneself. And certainly with that leads to the ability to be more openhearted and honest and mutual respectful with others once you have some of that yourself.
Karen Palmer:
But even deeper than that, it's your subconscious and your subconscious programming, which is directly and indirectly creating your reality that we're currently living in. We need to kind of be very conscious of the stories that we're telling ourselves. Some of our reality, I agree, is not all subjective. Some of it is cold, hard facts when someone's putting a knee on your neck, that's a fact. But there's ways that we can take back control and also become co-creators of our reality. And that's kind of the conclusion that I came to as a storyteller, that I am a co creator of reality now, and I need to be very mindful and aware of the creation that I'm bringing to the party.
Karen Palmer:
But I also want people to kind of wake up and realize that they are also co-creators of our reality. Whether they decide they want to run for office, or if they decide that they want to go on the frontline, or if they want to decide they want to create their own technology. We are authors in this narrative. The future is not something that happens to us. It's something which we create together. I need people to not just know that and realize it, but to live it.
Charlie Melcher:
That's beautiful. And that's a great place for us to end this conversation. I just want to say, I am so excited to co create our future with you, Karen. So thank you.
Karen Palmer:
Charlie, you're a [inaudible 00:23:53]. Awesome. This has been such a pleasure, Charlie. I am so honored to be talking to you and be called FoST royalty. Wow. Because everybody there's kings and queens as it is, so wow. There's no peasants in FoST when you go to FoST. So yeah. Exciting. Thank you so much.
Charlie Melcher:
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Karen Palmer as much as I did. If you'd like to read more about Karen or watch the FoST short film about her work, please visit this episode's page on the Future of StoryTelling website, which you can access through the link in this podcast description. Thank you for being part of the Future of StoryTelling family. Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast, give us a review, and share it with others. My heartfelt, thanks to Karen and to our talented production partner, Charts And Leisure. I hope you'll join us next week for another conversation with a storyteller. Until then, please be safe, be strong, and story on.
