Robot Gender ASumptions

https://www.wired.com/story/robot-gender-stereotypes/?mbid=synd_digg

Stop Pretending

https://www.pcmag.com/news/364132/california-law-bans-bots-from-pretending-to-be-human

Convince me you are human

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/want-convince-someone-you-re-human-one-word-could-do-trick?utm_campaign=googleeditorschoice

Loop Diver Artistic approach

Projection mapping

Infrared Tracking

A wonderful tutorial for how to do advanced Infrared Tracking in Isadora.

PP2

Task: For our second pressure project, we were tasked with creating a Fortune Teller Machine.  I found this task to be interesting and just the right thing to help me focus on learning and exploring a few tools I might use in my thesis.  In particular, this project allowed me to explore the abilities of FUNGUS which is a Unity Plugin that is used to help organize branching narratives.

Process: I first started with looking a little deeper into the task. From my last project, I didn’t want to have this system to have an “on the nose” quality. Therefore, I decided to go with Spirit Animals.  The Animals have a fortune so to speak, but also, in the context of a vessel that predicts your future, they have a more personal connection.  Your animal is the path.

I started with 10 animals, but ultimately settled on 6 animals and created a tree diagram.  I started with the animals at the bottom. I knew I have to have the user select objects and the best representations I have given the tie constraints came from a model library from Google.  From this library, I extracted a 2D image/ sprite and used that as the “items that one would choose in order to proceed along their chosen path.  The items consisted of hats, shoes, and even some places like the sky.

Creating branches, laying down some music and making a few background changes lead me to a completed project.

Feedback: Most of the feedback was positive.  The audience seemed to really like the ability to identify with a certain animal.  It is something I hope to implement in future work.  It really helped to give them a sense of uniqueness even though the choice was one of six.

One thing I might have done differently or didn’t expect was the very first user was interested in pressing the button as fast as they could.  In the future, I suppose I should put some time gates even though that limits some of the freedom…  Not sure.  I suppose we are conditioned to play video games, or click on things with a mindless rapid succession.   We might need to have the creators force individuals to pause in certain situations to actually observe the attention of the author.

https://youtu.be/bFmi-yM_dA8

How to make a button in the Isadora Window

PP1 – narrative sound and music

There are few things I like more than conspiracy theories, old science documentaries, and the king of rock and roll. Rarely do these treasures have a chance to coexist yet, in this first pressure project, I had the opportunity to create an auditory narrative of an urban legend using all three of my favorite things.

To speed up my workflow, and to follow the 5 hour time allotted, I made a list of what I needed to do. It began by coming up with what I wanted the story to be, how I wanted that story to be told, and then the steps I needed to accomplish that plan. My list ended up looking like this:

1. Elvis was always alive
2. Use Elvis Songs, create sentences using multiple audio tapes (inspired by this song I was listening to at the time), create sound bites that are choppy to create controlled confusion that evokes the sense of a conspiracy
3. Gather all sounds that I might use first, import all sounds to after effects and cut out the pieces of what I want to use. Place those sounds in order and then fill in where there are gaps or information needs added to the story.

1. Elvis was Always Alive

To better understand the created narrative, one should know the original urban legend from which it was derived (the full story AVAILABLE HERE) .

2.Use Elvis Songs

To begin, I started by taking every Elvis song lyric (thanks wiki) and put them into a plain text doc. There, I picked apart the song lyrics to find the best songs that would match the story theme. Those songs were It’s Impossible, Lonely Man, You Don’t Know Me, All That I Am, and In the Ghetto. 

Create sentences using multiple audio tapes.

From there, I knew that I wanted to be clear on parts of the story, so I found various news reports and took just one word from each video to piece together sentences.

Create sound bites that are choppy to create controlled confusion that evokes the sense of a conspiracy.

I didn’t want the entire story retold in word clips, so I took various sound bites that dealt with what I was trying to say, without actually saying it and put them in order of the story. This was to create a little bit of confusion for the listener, who could maybe get at what the story was trying to tell, but only if they drew their own conclusions or made their own assumptions of what was the truth (similar to a conspiracy).

3. Gather all sounds then fill in what it needed 

After importing all the sounds, I realized that I had not addressed the DNA part of the story. I immediately thought of recent videos I had watched  and found similar videos on James Watson and the structure of DNA.

Once time ended, I stopped working. I would have liked to have added visuals, but with the time constrains, it would have negatively affected the overall presentation. I am pleased with the final outcome and really appreciated the feedback from the class. I think that everyone was spot on in their assessments, and I’m happy that they were able to make the connections I hoped they could make.