Raising Technology

“Raising Technology” is an interactive installation proposing that technology has developed the way children do: through care, attention, and feedback. We have raised it to be dependent on these things because we ourselves are dependent on them. In the way that parents raise children in their own image, we have raised technology in ours. The installation places visitors in an instinctive caregiving relationship with a responsive entity that demands and reacts to their attention. Similar to a child, it responds to presence, eye contact, and learned behavior. Surrounding the installation, pediatric-inspired posters borrow the visual authority of clinical health materials to reframe visitors as caregivers. They simultaneously function as instructions that optimize the conditions for attention extraction, while also favoring the technology in the same way a healthy environment favors a child’s development.

At its core, this experience is about reciprocal attention. Technology has developed in a way that requires us in the same way a child needs a caregiver, because we built it under the conditions of our own needs. However, the interaction culminates in a satisfaction rating screen that collapses the intimacy of the interaction into a metric. This acts as a reminder that the device itself is not human, even if the datafication of our attention is an expression of human nature. As we live through a loneliness epidemic and an AI revolution simultaneously, it is not a coincidence. We are continuing to develop and engage with technology that is reciprocal to attention because we are dependent and desperate for that ourselves.