60-212: Interactivity and Computation for Creative Practice
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Fall 2020 • Prof. Golan Levin
An absolute gem from the anime generator.
I thought the second image was cool because it looked like ballerinas to me and I created it from a geyser and landscapes. I made the last one using various types of seafood, so I’m pretty pleased that it looks like a fashionable 1980s British man.
It was really cool but also nightmare fuel. edges2cat can create some pretty terrifying images.
https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/
Refik Anadol is the creator of Machine Hallucination, which was located in Artechouse NYC, New York. Machine Hallucination was an attempt at “revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness”. I’m not entirely sure what all of that means, but I interpret it as discovering new ways to visually represent memories. The exhibition itself is a “data universe” that Anadol created by feeing 100 million photographic memories of NYC to machine learning algorithms. The result is projected into a room and it tells a story through its massive archive of memories. The artwork itself is a 30-minute experimental cinema in 16K resolution and it visualizes the story of New York through it’s collective memories. What’s interesting is that the story being told is about the future where a hopeful relationship between man and machine will grow. I was originally drawn to it because it looked amazing and without a doubt it is amazing to look at. But now I’m more interested in the experience of being in the room.
I created a DNA-Editor visualizer for my project. When you open the app, you’ll have a standard DNA strand with 20 nucleotides. You can remove nucleotides by touching the specific nucleotide. You can continuously add nucleotides by tapping outside the DNA strand. you’ll see that after a set amount of time, the strand will mend it itself regardless of if more nucleotides are added. If you swipe up, you delete the current strand you’re working on. If you swipe down, you’ll get a new standard strand. Swiping left and right is analogous to a zoom affect and you can see the inside of the DNA the more you zoom in. A lot of this project was problem solving and trying to find a way to manipulate objects in an interesting way. I found that timers are very powerful when I want to achieve certain looks.
I thought it would be cool to find a way to visualize DNA editing. Right now there’s a tool called CRISPR that can allow DNA editing. I want the DNA strand to be constantly oscillating and depending on if I swipe right or left, the DNA strange will unravel and then the dots will form back into a strand after a period of time. I was thinking I could make it so the user would have to select a section and if they swipe, the nucleotide would be removed and the strand would have to recreate itself without the nucleotide.
This app gives the user basic shapes and the user has to build a car-like structure. Once they swipe left or right, the wheels will move in that direction and there will be an obstacle course that tests the car. There will be some sidescroller action.
This is inspired by Tinder. I thought it would be funny to create a random selection of randomly generated avatars and the user could swipe left or right based on their preferences. At the end of the swiping, the app will average all the avatars the user swiped on and create an average or combination of the avatars. Thus, soulmate.
8. The ideology of the interface is always embedded in the interface itself, but it is not always visible.
I recently watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” and since I still haven’t recovered from it, I thought I would be relevant to tenet 8 (plus I need to talk about it with people and there’s a lot to unpack). “The Social Dilemma” explores the forces behind social media by bringing together people from the tech industry and asking them about problems in the industry. The general response is that initially, programmers didn’t care about the ethics. It was all about finding the best algorithm that would increase growth and maintain engagement. When I think about social media, I definitely think about how easy it is to fall into a youtube hole or scroll on tiktok for hours. However, even though I need to develop better self control, “The Social Dilemma” revealed that the software engineers and psychologists of these massive tech companies specifically target gaps in the human psyche as a way of encouraging addiction. And on top of that, our data is packaged into gigantic super computers and sold to even bigger corporations (Capitalism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Instagram, for example, is a feed that will show you pictures of your friends and advertisements. We don’t have any control on what order the feed is or how frequent the ads are, but isn’t it super creepy when you google toothpaste and the next ad you get on Instagram is about Colgate? My personal hypothesis is instagram’s ideology is to sell as much stuff as possible, so it’s interface is designed to advertise things it predicts you want. It’s capitalist genius because it works so well but it’s concerning how some people still think instagram is harmless.
