Cindy Shi - Creepers

Creepers

Creepers is an installation art piece for the exhibition The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It harnesses Artificial Intelligence to collect and visualize exhibit visitor behaviours in an impactful and thought-provoking way.

The Project

Preference engines guide us daily as we move through the world. They suggest products, services and information. They give shape to our experiences, behaviours and choices. The news you read, the music you listen to, the clothing you buy, the video you watch, and the information you seek was probably offered by a preference engine. In this sense, we have all become data within a massive artificial intelligence that tirelessly monitors our activities with the intent of gauging our interest and engagement.

Curiously, most art galleries and museums have actively avoided the type of monitoring that is required to make accurate predictions around visitor preference. Some galleries monitor attendance and ticket sales—occasionally taking user surveys or consulting with focus groups—but artificial intelligence provides us with some new options.

Our team worked with the Vancouver Art Gallery to develop Creepers as a tool to visualize visitor movement and attention in this exhibition space. As visitors enter this portion of the exhibition, they are tracked by human detection software that assigns them an individual number and colour; and their movement is tracked and displayed on a nearby monitor with a coloured line that marks their path in real time. When they stop to look at an object or image, a slowly growing concentric circle marks the place and duration of their pause. With this simple tool, the gallery can easily gauge visitor behaviour: do people look at everything in the room or only a few select things? What’s the path of their movement? Do they pause to look at an artwork or read a label? How long do they stop? Which works attract the most attention? Which attract the least?

The Team