DECODING DIGITAL TECH THROUGH CREATIVITY: CONTENT VIENNA COMPETITION
Once again this year, Content Vienna, the Vienna Business Agency’s competition for digital design, was looking for creative, digital projects in development – from games to AI and extended reality projects. The winners have now been selected.
Apart from five production grants of 10,000 euros, two projects were honoured with special prizes on the topic of Digital Literacy in the amount of 5,000 euros each, to support projects that strengthen the understanding of democratic processes and enable self-empowerment in a digitally shaped society in cooperation with the Vienna Media Initiative. Discover the projects Choose Your Own FER and Total View – Sensing Sinicization, which creatively reveal how digital technologies work and invite users to explore and question them critically.
Total View: Sensing Sinicization
Your collective’s name, “Total View,” references Baidu’s Street View tool. What does the name mean for your artistic identity, and what vision drives the collective as a whole?
In China, many websites and apps used globally aren’t accessible, which has led to the development of a parallel digital ecosystem. One of the major players is Baidu, often compared to Google. Its Street View tool is called “Total View,” allowing users to navigate cities through 360-degree images. We used this tool as a basis for our project, and since our intention was to understand the bigger picture of these environments and their changes, the name “Total View” fit perfectly. It reflects both the starting point of our research and our broader artistic goal: uncovering what usually goes unnoticed.
Your project “Sensing Sinicization” investigates the impact of enforced assimilation policies on minorities in China. What sparked the idea for this project – a political urgency, an artistic question, or something else entirely?
One of our members lived in southern China for years and started noticing unusual traces in everyday architecture – glue marks, covered signs, painted-over symbols. These subtle but consistent changes pointed to something systematic. He photographed these findings and shared them with our group. As artists focused on revealing hidden phenomena, we became intrigued by these visual clues. They raised the question of whether it was possible to reconstruct what had been removed – and what these absences reveal.
You work with millions of publicly available Street View images. Can you explain how an ordinary image becomes meaningful evidence in your system?
Because academic, artistic, and press freedoms are heavily restricted in China, gaining on-the-ground insight is extremely difficult. Researchers and journalists face limited access and a lack of reliable data. To fill this gap, many remote investigation techniques rely on satellite imagery, but these images often miss crucial details. Street View, captured by cars driving through cities almost daily, offers a different and far more detailed perspective. These cars pass the same locations repeatedly, creating a timeline of visual change. By comparing images of the exact place across different years, we can identify and document architectural alterations – turning everyday pictures into meaningful evidence.
Your analysis is based on everyday Street View images – content most of us scroll past without a second thought. What do you hope people notice differently after seeing your work?
Technology is now embedded in almost every part of our environment. Devices constantly capture and store images of the world around us — often without us realizing their potential beyond convenience. Street View, usually used simply for navigation, becomes a kind of time capsule when examined over time. By comparing public images, we can track how places change and what disappears. With our project, we want to show that technologies offered as services can also become tools of empowerment – and that even small groups with limited resources can work with large datasets to uncover important stories.
The project covers an enormous geographic and political landscape. How do you decide which visual traces of repression to focus on, and how do you keep audiences engaged without overwhelming them with scale?
We started with one covered-up symbol photographed by our colleague. This led us to explore similar visual traces within Muslim communities, where we found many removed signs and architectural elements. These discoveries became the basis of our catalogue for labeling the dataset and training our recognition system. We also work closely with researchers and community members to validate our findings. In exhibitions, we intentionally create a flood of images to convey the sheer scale of these changes. Dozens of screens allow visitors to zoom into individual cases while still feeling the weight of the larger pattern. Our next goal is to make the entire annotated collection accessible as a browsable web tool, supporting further research and public awareness.
What surprised you most during the development of the project – something small, strange, or unexpected you discovered in the data or images?
The sheer extent of architectural changes surprised us. It felt like these interventions appeared almost everywhere. Baidu Maps does not censor these images, making the documentation unusually accessible. We found cases where mosques changed step by step: small ornaments disappearing first, followed by domes and minarets. In some instances, Street View even captured demolitions in progress – unexpected moments that revealed how common these events must be.
A core part of your work is making digital technologies understandable to broad audiences. How do you give visitors the chance to explore these technical processes themselves and to critically question how such technologies shape what we see?
We aim to be transparent about the data we use and the methods behind our analysis. By making algorithms and processes accessible in the exhibition, visitors can see how these systems work instead of treating them as invisible mechanisms. Opening up these processes creates space for discussion and helps audiences better grasp the technological forces shaping their environment.
To wrap up, what inspired you to take part in the ‘Content Vienna’ competition organized by the Vienna Business Agency?
Content Vienna allows us to present our work beyond the art world, where it has mainly been shown so far. We’ve exhibited the project at Forward Festival in Berlin and Vienna, and we’re excited to bring it to new audiences and contexts.
Sara Mlakar & Natalia Shepeleva: Choose Your Own FER
“Choose Your Own FER” is an interactive story where participants navigate by showing emotions. What inspired you to explore Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) through a choose-your-own-adventure format, and what do you hope this approach offers that traditional storytelling can’t?
A few years ago, I noticed examples where people could blink, wink, or tilt their heads and have their devices recognise it as an input. That sparked my interest in emotional expressions as a form of interaction. Initially, it was just a thought experiment, but diving into FER revealed a rich story about its capabilities, limitations, use cases, and regulations. Turning it into a choose-your-own-adventure lets people explore the nuances of FER — its benefits, risks, and social implications — while interacting with the technology itself. This experiential layer engages participants more deeply than reading about the technology ever could.
FER technology is becoming part of everyday life, from AI chatbots to surveillance systems. Why did you decide to focus on this technology now, and why is it important for people to engage with it critically?
FER is already present in daily life, though not yet widespread in Europe. We can see both promising applications and misuses, and regulations like the EU AI Act are already restricting certain uses. We wanted to raise awareness about FER’s potential future impact, explain how it works, and empower people with knowledge so they can make informed decisions about the role they want FER to play in their lives.
In your project, participants’ facial expressions directly shape the story. How do you design the experience so people feel in control while also learning about the ethical and societal challenges of FER?
The system primarily recognises explicit expressions – a smile, frown, gasp, or scowl – giving participants control over the story. There are also paths where they can experiment, trick the system, or experience how micro-expressions could be detected, showing the technology’s limits and risks. These variations make the story engaging and encourage multiple playthroughs to explore different outcomes.
The project turns participants’ emotions into choices, creating a loop of learning and experience. What reactions or insights do you hope people take away after engaging with the story?
Many people are unfamiliar with FER, so the project introduces both positive applications – like therapy or adaptive learning – and manipulative ones, such as surveillance. We aim to demystify the technology, showing when it works well, when it can fail, and how it could be misused. Participants gain an understanding of the technology’s capabilities, limitations, and social implications by experiencing it firsthand.
The project combines creative experimentation with educational goals. How do you make complex technology understandable and immersive without overwhelming participants?
The story is structured in small chunks – a few sentences per scene – followed by an interaction where participants show an emotion. This step-by-step progression keeps the experience manageable while gradually building understanding. The narrative follows two or three protagonists whose lives are shaped by FER, allowing readers to discover applications and consequences naturally, as they interact with the technology themselves.
Looking at the bigger picture, what role do interactive art projects like “Choose Your Own FER” play in helping society understand and navigate emerging technologies? Can creative experiences influence public debate in ways that research papers or news reports can’t?
Absolutely. Projects with explicit user interaction create a strong impact. There’s a saying: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." Experiencing FER firsthand in a safe environment deepens understanding in ways reading or watching reports cannot. Digital literacy and science communication for non-experts are increasingly important, and interactive projects like this help bridge that gap.
To close, what inspired you to take part in the ‘Content Vienna’ competition organized by the Vienna Business Agency?
The open call seemed like a perfect fit for our project. Writing the proposal helped us refine the concept further, and the prize allows us to dedicate more time to realizing it, including building a small installation to physically show the project and spark discussions about FER.
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