As someone who has spent a lot of time with my machines (both from work and leisure), the talk about synthetic psychology and lifelike machines makes me reflect about the current relationship between humans and their devices.
Can the keyboard, mouse, phone we own possess human-like emotions or even personality? I can see many meaningful possibilities and applications. Through such a lifelike companion device that we use daily like a keyboard, will the emotional attachment and expression coming from the devices help improve our mental health in the midst of controversies and loneliness we experience as an online citizen? Will this help us think twice with the words we type into the devices before making a hurtful remark about a stranger online? Will this make us cherish and appreciate the devices we own and create more fond memories while using them since using them has occupied a large chunk of our time anyway? Or can this create emotional devices where they could safeguard our usages of them from the most basic screen time to certain toxic content that we are seeing online?
If so, what are the ways our machines could be renovated or redesigned to express various emotions? One way I have been thinking about is inspired by the field of soft robotics or soft machines. Definitely an interesting area to explore for me and I wonder if this would provoke any thoughts or feelings from the rest of the class!
This is an example project that people did about emotionally expressive buttons:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3294109.3300991
I have been working on this artwork for several weeks. The idea is about balance and an eight-pointed star. I called it The Game of Life at the end, inspired by the things we talked about.\nThe pixels, or squares, in this textile work are not filled following the rules to Game of Life; the pattern is made on a square grid manually, consciously creating the eight-pointed star, so typical in many cultures and found in textile designs all over the World. Our ancestors did not know anything about computers or rules, and still, they used a grid in which they ”engraved” their symbols, assigning meaning to them and following special rules. The main idea was to explain the World to themselves and find the meaning of their existence; the second was for decoration or, for example, protection of their homes. And still I find it fascinating that similar patterns can be evoked by simple algorithms following logical rules.\n
The Game of Life
Digital / Jacquard woven piece
2023
Size: 135cm x 165cm
Materials: Wool, polyester, viscose
When I started making these patterned works and started to crochet (it was a simple hobby), I didn’t know that I would be attending SFPC and ultimately it would somehow correlate to the topics that we discussed. Even without knowing the connection between these two topics I had to follow strict rules while making crochet patterns, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get the final result. In the past I just used to blindly follow the rules applied to each pattern. But now I look at them from a different angle. Each piece(pixel) matters, and even if the single pattern would be lost/placed incorrectly, the whole project would collapse.
I was inspired by Helen’s homework from Week 1, especially the note “I would like to meet this character” - which I agree with and really made me laugh:
I decided that the rules I was going to apply to this image would be a poem by Adrienne Rich - this excerpt from An Atlas of the Difficult World. I copied Helen’s image onto a big piece of paper and wrote the words of the poem onto each cell; once I got to the bottom, I ran one line up the rightmost column of the image, just for fun. I treated indents as their own words.
Then I made up these rules:
(“period” is when the word ends with a period)
“Goya” refers to this Goya painting I like called “Saturn devouring his son”.
I implemented those rules and got this:
Here’s a more high-res version where you can really see Saturn devouring his son.
I wouldn’t say I’m wild about this result, but I enjoyed the process!
For my last homework, I was curious about modeling a simple ecosystem with a cellular automata. I used Nicky Case’s emoji sim, which was shared in the discord by Wiley. I was also inspired by Nay’s homework from Week 3, which created paths and occasional fires and floods. I played around with the sim and added rules to try to simulate carrying capacity in an ecosystem, which means that a given ecosystem can support some amount of “predators” (less) and “prey” (more) at a dynamic equilibrium, rather than the two being necessarily in competition. I also added plants that spawn or degenerate randomly in relation to the two animals; the plants also provide neighborhoods for breeding for the two animals. I am still experimenting (and have lost the rules a few times in the browser lol) but I liked this moment where the grass/trees formed pathways like a maze, and made a screen recording.\n
Eric Rannestad
Modified Helen - Week 1 HW
json
var ruleset = [1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1]
WIP photo of watercolor painting I’m working on that is part of this series. Planning to add a 1d CA ‘border’ across the bottom with a pen plotter.
Test from the plotter that I might add as a layer.
(inspired by Heather’s homework from week #1)
https://matchapandan.itch.io/slipping-green-furiously
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UeXTIivitiBGaG_OszO5DDLKqU2-Buzn/view?usp=sharing
https://editor.p5js.org/liamtsang/sketches/gpxdWD9Xv
I’m still working on my animation tool in the hopes I can take some of the rules others made in colorcode and splatycode and add an extra dimension to them with glyphs instead of colors, but my code is a mess and I need to refactor it (there’s two arrays of tiles right now, a shaded one that the program uses to do light-dark analysis for rotoscoping and a full glyph palette that I just added in, I need to fix how information about which palette is being used is recorded to each frame)
I’m also working on a series of scripts that scrapes my game project Grotto to make a book of maps. I’m interested in how early boxed computer games used books and other objects as a sort of copy protection & interactions between game and objects as a bridge between something infinitely reproducible and something physical. I wrote a little about that here:
https://wileywiggins.com/2023/04/05/feelies-as-metaphor-and-method.html\nI’m thinking now about some sort of geomancy, if its randomness came from a reproducible seed, as being a cypher that could connect a digital game to a physical installation.
In response to Nay- I am also really interested in communicative but semantically-nonsense texts. In my game I use markov chains to generate descriptions of rooms using different text corpuses. Here’s a room that has a poetic text description generated from Dungeons and Dragons room descriptions and descriptions of the most depressing Texas homes for sale on Zillow.com
\