Beginning with a light, humorous tone, Cyan Bae orchestrates the performance of several almost playful experiments, interviews, and protocols used to train AI to recognise emotions and micro-expressions. Participants are asked to react and perform emotions, revealing the strange and theatrical nature of translating human expressions into data for machine learning. Welcome to Set blurs the boundary between experiment and performance, using Bae's reenactments to reveal the artificiality behind technologies that claim to decode human emotion and micro-expressions. Yet the film does not dismiss this artificiality as untruthful, as these theatrical performances ultimately become valuable datasets for governmental bodies.

The initially amusing facade of these reenactments slips, as the film reminds us of the economic and political purpose of these data sets, to create AI systems to be sold to nation-states for automated surveillance. What first appears to be playful and quirky exercises for machine learning is revealed to be part of a larger apparatus through which states observe us.

LA