Noah Levenson is not only director and scriptwriter of the documentary Stealing Ur Feelings (Stealing your emotions). It is also your developer. Because his movie is actually a story interactive created with augmented reality. This means that you, as a viewer, you put yourself in the place of the protagonist… if you turn on the camera of your device while you watch this short film of six minutes.
In it, Levenson proposes that reactions to the image of a puppy, a slice of pizza or the face of Kanye West. The film will take some decisions or the other depending on whether you smile or wrinkle your eyebrows. Do you want the artificial intelligence to make decisions for you?, question the filmmaker-computer.
click on the caption of this GIF if you want to try this experience which has funded the non-profit organization, Mozilla, has exposed the Tate Modern in London, and has received recognition from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). You can read the interview with its creator from the next paragraph.
Stealing Ur Feelings
in Addition to combined discomfort, humor and entertainment, the u.s. thus raises the debate emerged in the summer of 2019 around our safety as users of apps facial recognition. Since then, the user poses more often if we have to give our information, anecdotal as it may seem, to apps that make us look old or that compare our face with a work of art.
He ensures that you will not use your expressions and emotions contained in your work for other purposes that are not artistic, but what do you do? “It’s not about becoming paranoid, but being highly skeptical with respect to each and every one of the apps and internet tools to which we give our data,” he says to THE COUNTRY during the presentation of his essay digital at the Documentary Film Festival of Montreal (RIDM).
“Without doubt, we have nothing to worry about FaceApp, but there are many other tools that we should do it. Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram… There are those that know how to use all of them,” says Levenson. “It doesn’t matter that an app has been created in Russia or San Francisco, all these platforms are looking to the daily way of violating our privacy, to achieve economic benefit from our personal data and, in summary, to make our life more complicated.”
Transparency information
The data collected in his short film disappear once the window is closed. “As consumers, since we do not know what we should be afraid. The risks of using these platforms evolve very rapidly and we struggle to be the day,” he says.
Almost daily, we click on the ok button in tedious files called terms and conditions of use. For the u.s., which previously worked on MTV, and it takes years to creating interactive content, one of the struggles of digital consumer passes by demand the transparency required of other industries. For example, proposed to impose, “tags so clear with the that show the nutritional values of food products”.
Our personal information has become a new currency. And Levenson, like many others, sees in it a danger: “it Is also a currency whose value is not fixed. Maybe these anecdotal data that we give in exchange for a bit of fun is not worth anything now, but they are stored. In six months or six years it may be worth a lot more.”
what that wants to warn Stealing Ur Feelings is that the information that they give to you comes easily at the hands of the brokers data (companies unknown to the consumer that is dedicated to storing any digital trail), which in turn sell it to other organizations.
“it’s Not that Facebook and Amazon will be better or worse than the extreme-right parties, is that they are the ones who have opened the door to the rise of that ideology, helping to destabilize our societies. And that is the problem that we must resolve,” says the director.
