Published on the Web (social network)

Machine Learning Breakfast Club

Summer School for Troubled Algorithms

A Netprov (Aug 5-12, 2019)

The Premise:

When machine-learning AI are not performing up to expectations, there’s only one remedy: summer school! In this netprov, you will ask for help and offer solutions in the virtual teachers’ lounge for a motley crew of teachers in a summer school for recalcitrant underperforming artificial intelligence.

A netprov in 3 turns.

Netprov is online collaborative narrative or the voluntary healing of necessary relationships.

MLBC was a week long netprov running (roughly) Aug 5-12 on a Google Group, which had its trial run in the 2019 DHSI taught by Astrid Ensslin and Davin Heckman.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/machine-learning-breakfast-club-netprov 

This was a lite summer netprov that you could play in about three turns. 

This idea came from an university project (2017) and thanks to the exchange students' program. 

This is an experiment of digital poetry written in 14 verses: it was asked to 10 people from 10 different countries to translate each of them from English to their mother tongue.

Every clips were recorded in different places in Bergen (NO).

The result is a multilingual digital poem about Bergen.

Cenzobot is a simple Twitter bot that tweets fragments from real historical censorship reviews of publications from the communist era, written by Polish censors between the 1940s and 1990s. Some of the censors were very skilled critics, often well educated, but other were people completely devoid of talent, especially the ones delegated to review books for children and young adults. Twitter, which today is one of the platforms most associated with digital censorship, was chosen as an appropriate tool to tweet censors’ voices. I came up with the idea to tweet fragments of censors’ reviews after the Twitter Bot Purge in February 2018. I expect that my cenzobot will also be purged by Twitter at some point. It is actually the goal of my work.

This project was inspired from the magic realist stories of Jorge Luis Borges, but the process is automated by a computer-generated bot that are posting poetry on twitter.

Digital Culture World Lecture Tour is an online, social network performance based around a fictionalized world tour. The piece presents fake billboards for various venues on the tour. 

You Suck at Photoshop is a series of tutorial videos on YouTube hosted by Donnie Hoyle. In the process of teaching Photoshop techniques, Hoyle's back story is revealed.

@bronxzooscobra is the Twitter account purportedly belonging to an Egyptian cobra from the Bronx Zoo.  In 2011, a cobra had escaped from the zoo, and this Twitter account emerged to document her adventures, capturing popular fascination and widespread notoriety. The cobra was subsequently caught and returned to captivity, but continues to tweet. 

Rob Wittig : "this project is, to me, the epitome of a single-voice netprov."

As interactive writing and digital art are relatively emerging fields there remains considerable research areas to explore. One of the most pressing is the examination of how to re-think, translate and remake older creative works into new cultural and language contexts. This work was create for BleuOrange in Canada. And is an entirely new work loosely based Jason Nelson's This is How You Will Die generative fiction,  rethinking all aspects of the work in a French context.

Working with translators, Ariane Savoieand Lisa Tronca at BleuOrange in Quebec, the work developed new methods for rethinking and translating everything about a digital writing artwork. Specifically examining how the images, the motion, the interface, the animation, the sounds, and the interactivity, as well as the words, have to be re-created.  So once those models and methods were developed, an entirely new work was created, based loosely on This is How You Will Die, which comprised of re-combining 15 different stories through an interactive game engine, as well as numerous additional sections, graphic and audio work.