55 Falls / Ambient Assisted Living

<p dir="ltr">Background </p><p dir="ltr">55 Falls / Ambient Assisted Living examines the intersection of care, technology, and simulation in the age of machine learning. The work replays footage from a 2016 Belgian healthcare dataset—“High Quality Fall Simulation Data”—in which researchers at KU Leuven’s Advanced Integrated Sensing Lab perform staged falls to train fall-detection algorithms. Through this material, the project exposes the uncanny overlap of technical procedure and theatrical performance: scientists enacting imagined frailty for the machinic gaze. The work extends Machine Listening’s investigation into how datasets shape perception, knowledge, and power, asking what happens when gestures of care become data points and when bodies are rendered as predictive models for ageing, vulnerability, and mortality. </p><p dir="ltr">Contribution </p><p dir="ltr">Developed by Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker, Joel Stern), the two-channel video installation combines the original research footage with generative-AI re-creations of the same scenes. Musicians Lizzy Welsh (violin), Jessica Aszodi (voice), and Joel Stern (synthesiser) perform a live soundtrack for a film never intended for human viewing. The work work examines converging failures: the human inability to convincingly perform frailty and the machine’s inability to render it. These doubled inadequacies become a site for reflecting on embodiment, empathy, and the algorithmic mediation of care. </p><p dir="ltr">Significance</p><p dir="ltr">Presented in The Mourning After (RMIT Design Hub Gallery, 24 Jul – 20 Sep 2025, curated by Larissa Hjorth), 55 Falls contributed to a collective exploration of grief, ritual, and loss in a world reshaped by technology. The work reimagines care as both human relationship and technological abstraction, revealing how, in the algorithmic age, intimacy, dependency, and mortality are reconfigured when life itself becomes training data.</p>