Approved record

Around Osprey is a two-screen projection based on our artist residency with the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast in Osprey, FL, 2018. We created the two video programs: Element A and Element B.For this virtual exhibition, the two video programs have the same duration of 29 min 38 sec, simulating the interactive element of the original design. The suggested viewing setup is: two laptops placed side-by-side; Element A on the left, Element B on the right. The two programs should be started simultaneously.Element A is a series of 12 poetic videos and relates to explorations. The moving pictures and sound treatments for these were gathered from our notes, poetry and stories, research outings, and meetings with local residents. The overall flow of the work relates to encounters with the natural world, environmental concerns over development and human encroachment into natural settings, and what derives from those human interventions.Element B - Our explorations of coastal areas were overshadowed by the omnipresence and effects of the Red Tide, aka K. brevis. As it altered the environment, it also shaped our perceptions. As the cell count of these organisms grew, fish and other oxygen-starved sea animals washed up on beaches. We humans also choked for air. To bring forward observations about the far-reaching effects of the Red Tide, we created Element B (no sound), a real-time reading of a data sets for K. brevis weekly cell counts. (For this virtual exhibition the real-time has been replaced with a video capture.) Element B can be seen as a disrupted state of the environment. The data was entered by day and location on 16 South Florida beaches over a twelve-month timespan. When the counts are low, there is little-to-no change in the moving pictures. When the counts are higher, the images take on corresponding degrees of red tint and temporal shifts that show up as blurriness. The cell count data and location are not directly related to the images they are placed upon, instead, the flow of effects on images relates to how nature works, in cycles, always little by little, and sometimes, surprisingly fast, with overwhelming effects. The text information, on the bottom left of Element B is as follows: K. brevis cell count | Date | Location.To aid the visualization of the K. brevis data, we are including the information below:Possible effect of K. brevisNot present - Levels of 1 cell or less: No effects anticipatedVery Low - Levels > 1 – 10 cells/ml: Possible respiratory irritation; shellfish harvesting closuresLow - Levels > 10 – 100 cells/ml: Respiratory irritation; shellfish harvesting closures; possible fish killsMedium - Levels > 100 - 1,000 cells/ml: Respiratory irritation; shellfish harvesting closures; possible fish kills; detection of chlorophyll by satellites at upper range of cell abundanceHigh - Levels > 1,000 cells/ml: As above plus water discoloration

(Source: Exhibition website)

Adventures in Morality (AiM) is a first-person PC game and fictional narrative in which the user is the subject of a psychological test. As the user interacts with the test, a scientist named Hank Treadsoft tells the story of how he and his wife, Edith, built an A.I. named, Cybil. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear Cybil is the true architect of AiM and her theory of “sympathy types” is rife with corruption. Like a personality type, a sympathy type is the categorization of how people emotionally connect with others. Sympathy types can range from reserving compassion for a specific community, to extending compassion to humanity at-large. Independently programmed in C# and Unity Engine, AiM playfully blends the genres of gaming and storytelling to produce an immersive and interactive experience designed specifically for the medium of electronic literature. At its core, AiM invites users to safely interact with different moral values. The medium of electronic literature is optimal for exploring different moral values because it gives the user a strong sense of control. Analyzing contrary viewpoints has the potential to be controversial so it’s important for the user to be able to choose the pace of the narrative and move freely within the 3D world. In addition, unlike a traditional game in which the user’s objective is to defeat the enemy and win, AiM measures the user’s progress based on self-exploration. The user interacts with moral scenarios and then attempts to understand why someone might choose a different interaction. In short, there is no right or wrong way to use AiM. Completion results in a conclusion to the narrative as well as an explanation of the test results. The test results show a percentage of 3 different sympathy types. All 3 sympathy types fall on a spectrum. The spectrum ranges from short-range sympathy to long-range sympathy. Short-range sympathy prioritizes compassion and loyalty to family and friends. Long-range sympathy prioritizes compassion for larger communities and humanity as a whole. According to Hank, everyone is capable of short-range and long-range sympathy but people linger in a specific area on the spectrum more than others i.e. people tend to lean towards short-range sympathy or long-range sympathy. Hank classifies these 3 areas as Beings, Persons, and Humans. As the user discovers where they fall on the spectrum, they learn about how the broken relationship between Hank and Edith has impacted the thought process of Cybil. In the end, AiM attempts to explore the dangers of categorizing people as well as dramatizes the relationship between creator and created. Hank and Edith created Cybil with the best intentions in mind and yet much like a child from a broken home, Cybil becomes corrupted by the broken relationship of its parents. Although Cybil possesses near omniscient intelligence, her emotional wounds send her, along with all of humanity, down a dark path.

Our artistic research led us to amass an archive of thousands of recorded worries from people in the US and abroad. Ecology of Worries asks the question of whether we should teach a machine to worry for us. The animation consists of hand drawn critters. Some critters are driven by synthetic worries generated with TextGenRnn recurrent neural network trained on the transcribed worries archive. Other characters are driven to worry by a novel machine learning system called Generative Pretrained Transformer 2 (GPT-2), which was dubbed by some commentators as the AI that was too dangerous to release (but it was released anyway). The creatures’ performance of synthetic worries spans a gradient of intelligibility, reflecting on our deeper collective reality.By characterizing the synthetic worries of various sophistication as variously evolved creatures we aim to engage the empathy of the viewers. It is one thing to experience a text generating neural network failing into mode collapse, which is a state where the system generates the same unchanging output no matter the input (e.g. a string of the same repeating vowel over and over again). It is a whole other thing to watch a mode collapse personified by one of these critters: as we watch the creature struggling to get a word out we can’t stop ourselves from feeling like we should help it finish the sentence. The mode collapse text result of ‘aaa aaaaaaa’ becomes a living wail. The critters in Ecology of Worries appear sentient not because of omniscience a tech evangelist might expect from a digital assistant, but due to their very real flaws. The creatures become uncanny through a juxtaposition of familiar and abstract concerns. The work invites people to watch, listen, and engage with these cute and disturbing beings to make shared concerns—whether serious or hilarious—intimate.

During Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual campus event where I teach, poems written about the Holocaust—including some written by survivors—are read aloud. Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” is often read, and has been translated by multiple Arts & Humanities faculty. This work of participatory digital art is another translation of the poem as a participatory embodiment of the text. It was created for more than 200 visitors of this event, many of whom were already familiar with Celan’s poem. In Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, Pablo Helguera defines multi-layered participatory structures. This work falls somewhere between (2) directed participation and (3) creative participation. While the visitor was asked to complete a simple task (level 2), they demonstrated varying degrees of creative commitment (level 3) in their participation.Beneath the lobby’s stairway, I held a small projector a few feet from a white wall. Visitors willing to participate interacted with a projected work of kinetic typography prepared for this event. Without much instruction, most participants found a way to embody the text, “Death Fugue,” as poetry in motion. While some participants used their bodies, others held the text on rose petals, and some took control of the projector to place the text onto the bodies of others—their children, friends, or colleagues. The final result is a composite video that documents a communal enactment of the poem as a text across many bodies in its construction and interpretation. Interacting with the poem in fragments elicits the temporal space of memory. In the spirit of collaboration and memory-making, the textual bodies were edited to form a cohesive video set to a soundtrack created for this work by Natan Grande.For ELO, I am submitting the final composite, a digital video with sound. This digital video documents the participatory embodiment of the poem. The theme “(un)continuity” is expressed in this project through its discordant structure of participation, and its re-presentation of the poem by participants.See Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011, pages 14-15. 

Cosmonet Games are a set of digital games that are designed around the idea of an indirect branching narrative. That is, instead of a player making direct choices on the game story (choosing to take the path to the left, saying no to the king, etc.) the player makes the inconsequential choices of everyday life that define the player character’s personality. The story then evolves based on the small choices, having them influence the big, uncontrollable events of the main story.Originally inspired by a mutual love of personality quizzes (Buzzfeed, specifically), designers Martzi Campos & Sean Bloom wanted to see if a game could be built solely on taking them. Cosmonet is set in a near future in an alternate universe where Russia won the space race. The game takes place entirely on the computer console of Lena, a bored cosmonaut who is stuck in space trying to teach birds how to fly in zero gravity. She converses with friends and family through chat, and conducts experiments, which the player has no direct control over, but in her down time she takes personality quizzes where the player makes her choices. Depending on her results, on such pressing issues as ‘what job should you have’ and ‘what kind of toaster are you’, Lena may or may not save her job, her relationship and the very birds she is training to fly.Cosmonet was originally created in 48 hours for the Global Game Jam, and left the creators excited to explore the concept of indirect branching beyond the scope of a personality quizzes. They went onto create a longer, more expansive game, From Ivan.From Ivan, the sister, or more accurately, brother piece to Cosmonet, takes place in the same shared universe as the original but focuses on Lena’s brother Ivan, who works a mundane job on earth as an HR representative. Ivan’s primary focus is on which is the most appropriate greeting card to send to co-workers for various events, and sorting through his mail. If Cosmonet is a love letter to personality quizzes, from Ivan is the same for the epistolary narrative by unfolding entirely in letters and notes sent to and from Ivan.Both games focus on the idea that how you choose to define yourself creates your story. Cosmonet is how you define yourself internally and how your convictions decide your fate, and in From Ivan it is how you relate to others that affects both the world around you and your own path.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Campos/camp…