60-212: Interactivity and Computation for Creative Practice
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Fall 2020 • Prof. Golan Levin
[My clips are taking hours to load… the official video will come soon.]
I’ve made a fictional story where a woman goes to a therapist and talks about how she sees hallucinations of “Nipples of Venus” everywhere she goes. I’m hoping that the hallucinations are a metaphor for the emotional baggage that people have trouble explaining through words.
I have two ideas in mind (but I’m heavily leaning towards the second direction.)
*https://64.media.tumblr.com/10308f3ede27cd42f511e30d3b5c6368/tumblr_pagpo5BILF1tf6696o1_500.gifv
Follow the mice
I created this sculpture using David O’Reilly’s Everything Consumable library and a single foot from free3d.com. I also used fabric textures from texturehaven.com.
I like how dynamic the composition turned out, as well as how the camera movement complements the shape of the overall sculpture. I wish the models looked more like soft sculptures, but I realized that adding a fabric texture isn’t enough to completely change the materiality of the given models.
1.Move player with boundaries
2. Launch projectile
3. Random animal selection
4. Spawn animals at intervals
5. Primitives
Ch.3 – Importing the house
Ch.4 – Carpet material
Ch.5 – Book prefabs
Ch.6 – Pool Probuilder
Ch.7 – Ball jump
Ch.8 – Player collisions (Player against the kitchen counter)
Ch.9 – Sound 
Ch.10 – Lighting
(After spending a long time trying to fix the “blue tint” on the render, I realized that I could use the provided exercise files to avoid the blue tint. Below is the file I started with before jumping into Ch.11.)
(I will complete the remainder of the course soon.)
Ross Goodwin’s project is an AI literary road trip, where he drives around a text generating model that writes a novel based on what it sees through a camera. Through his work, he posits that artificial intelligence assists creatives to produce artwork, rather than replace them, as humans find more ways to collaborate with the AI. I was fascinated by this work, as we often think of machine learning models as static tools, spitting out results based on existing datasets. For this project, however, the AI is, in some sense, ‘experiencing’ the data together with the human, bringing into question the degree of entity it has. His choice to drive the model around through the trip, rather than showing an hours long video clip and gps data, seems profound, and the resulting text is also pretty interesting.
I created a “rock, paper, scissors” model using this tool. While this was a lighthearted exercise, it revealed how training ML data requires human touch to be most successful. When my idea initially emerged, I instantly thought the images would look like stock photo representations of ‘rock, paper scissors’, where the silhouette of the signals are recognizable to a human eye. However, when training the model, I found myself using natural gestures of rock paper scissors, resulting in many unrecognizable gestures visually. This made sure that the model was more accurate when interacting with it on camera, which was perhaps not achievable if the model was just made of stock photo images of rock paper scissors.
The storytelling ability of this tool was really impressive. In example 1, I started a stereotypical love letter that ended up becoming an inundation of cringey confessions.
Dear love,
My good golly woman, I hope you’re doing well. I miss you the most on this cold winter day. I yearn for the touch of your hands and that warm smile upon your lips. I think about your face more and more these days. What are your plans for the day? Do you have a favorite park where you like to lay in the sun? Are you holding someone special in your arms? Do you get to sing praises to God and have that one-of-a-kind moment with Him today? What’s your joy today, my dear?
Oh Lord, I love you so much and I’m feeling so lonely. You always give me the strength to go on. Don’t let my spirit be broken today. My heart aches to just be
In example 2, I tried to challenge whether the tool can recognize gender neutral pronouns. While the story itself was quite convincing (except the random “ALSO READ: Want to attract a good man? Try this,” which probably came from an ad), the tool wasn’t able to maintain the “they/them” pronoun into the second paragraph.
Artbreeder was great to create rich imagery with endless possibilities. After some experimentations, I liked images that had realistic lighting with unconventional forms/textures. I felt a bit guilty while making the images though, as I felt like I had too much power creating impressive surrealist images only at the touch of a button.
