Interview Questions for Erica Tandori, an Artist, Scholar, and Intellectual at Monash University

Erica Tandori, an artist in residence at Monash University in Australia, is using her unique perspective as a person with low vision to create innovative, multisensory art experiences. Tandori's work focuses on enhancing access and use of new technologies for people with disabilities (PWD), and she believes that engaging a variety of modalities to convey information can lead to deeper and more dynamic levels of understanding.

Tandori's projects often incorporate digital technologies in unconventional ways. For instance, her HIV Capsid Data Projection Project is an interactive sculpture that simulates the structure and surface of the viral HIV protein and projects computer-generated molecular structures onto it. The project was inspired by the classic Horton-Conway gameLife and the HIV RNA protein set used in the project was color-coded based on a Markov chain model.

One of Tandori's most intriguing works is the Sleeping Pangolin sculpture, which incorporates AI and data into screens that show mutating viruses. This project, like many of Tandori's works, aims to increase inclusion, accessibility, and education for low vision, blind, and diverse audiences.

Tandori also advocates for including those with the lived experience of disability in discourses around science, technology, art, medicine, and everything else. She argues that AI systems should be trained on pictures taken by people with disabilities to better understand their lived experience and needs. This approach could help focus research on including those with disabilities in the development of more accessible, adaptable, user-friendly technologies and environments.

In addition to her work in art, Tandori has discussed "artistic intelligence" and its potential combination with artificial intelligence on the AI for Good 2020 Global Summit podcast. She believes that if data can be released from a screen-bound environment and utilized in multimodal delivery, it may further eliminate obstacles to data access for diverse needs.

Tandori's art exhibitions also explore science and biomedicine, aiming to make these fields more accessible to everyone, irrespective of their socio-economic position. The research areas with the greatest potential to improve the use of new technologies for people with disabilities include the development of barrier-free navigation aids, voice-controlled orientation systems, personalized assistance services, AI-based tools for accessible communication, AI-supported job matching for neurodiverse individuals, and AI-generated audio descriptions for media accessibility. These technologies aim to eliminate barriers by enhancing independence, inclusion, and equal participation in everyday life and the workplace.

Interestingly, Tandori uses digital tools to simulate her eye disease and explore the gap between seeing and non-seeing. However, she also employs traditional methods of art-making in combination with digital technologies to fully articulate the range of symptoms of her eye disease. For Tandori, oil painting and drawing seem to articulate more about an experience, whereas digital images seem to be more about data.

One of Tandori's most notable experiences with her art was when her Sleeping Pangolin sculpture was misrecognized by object recognition software. This incident underscores the need for more inclusive and accessible technologies, a cause that Tandori is passionately advocating for.

*Note: This article is based on factual information provided and does not contain opinions or unrelated information.

The classic Horton-Conway gameLife* is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input after it starts. The game is played on an infinite two-dimensional grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. The rules of the game are simple: any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Interview Questions for Erica Tandori, an Artist, Scholar, and Intellectual at Monash University