Consensus Gentium is took him the Grand Jury prize for SXSW Immersive 2023, and it’s the most immersive phone-based experience that I’ve ever had. The Latin title translated means that “If everyone believes it, it must be true,” and it’s a near-term speculative sci-fi piece that explores what China’s social scoring system might look like in the context of the United States where mobility is restricted by algorithms but can be expanding if citizens agree to be surveilled by a phone app. The experience shifts automatically shifts between mobile app videos onboarding you into a surveillance state juxtaposed with Facetime calls where your face appears in the lower right corner, and text messages are seamlessly popping throughout the experience as you jump in between different tasks and cut scenes that build up the world and immerse you deeper into what director Karen Palmer describes as a “reality simulator” that feels entirely plausible near future.
The piece is also tagged with the logline of “the film that watches you back” as it integrates facial tracking technologies and an eye gaze mechanic that allows you make a few conscious and unconscious choices throughout the piece. Some of the themes of the piece are around algorithmic bias in facial detection algorithms and how that impacts marginalized communities (and why the EU’s AI Act bans facial detection in certain contexts like police enforcement). It also explores agency, self-determination, and biometric threats to freedom of thought as you are scored on a spectrum between how compliant you are to the state versus any deviant or resistant behaviors.
Overall, using the multi-channel communication affordances of the phone is able to create an entirely plausible portal into this near-future world that Palmer is creating for us which I found deeply, deeply immersive. It’s no wonder that this piece took home the top prize as the SXSW jurors seemed to agree with that sentiment, while this piece also presciently covers many relevant topics around AI, bias, and threats to our cognitive liberty — notably I spoke to Palmer on the same day that Nita Farahany’s book officially released titled The Battle for Your Brain, which I had a chance to unpack with Farahany ahead of SXSW.
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