Approved record

The Singularity is a web-based AI narrative system that demonstrates the ethical issues, hidden biases and misbehavior of emerging technologies such as machine learning, face tracking and big data. The system tracks users' eye positions through a webcam, and continuously feeds users directly into their eyes with infinite Reddit posts containing the latest progress in AI along with random news and ads. By visualizing eye trajectories over time, it suggests possible misuses and dangers of all-pervasive data tracking. The near-invisible operations underpinning the technologies could bring visible and fundamental changes to the society, leading the world to a "technological singularity" in which technology governs all aspects of human society. This work consists of three sub-systems: 

1. Infinite news feed system: The system continually scrapes article titles of latest posts about artificial intelligence and technological singularity from subreddit r/singularity (https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/ and r/artificial (https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/). The seemingly uni-directional information flow of news feed is actually bi-directional - user activities are fed back to the machine like in an echo room. Two parallel streams of texts on the screen marks the co-evolution of users and machine systems driven by day-to-day browsing activities.
2. Face-tracking surveillance system: Real-time face tracking algorithm is implemented with ml5js (https://ml5js.org/), a machine learning library that runs in the browser. The face position and the degree that the face turns from the webcam are tracked. The direction of floating sentences always points towards users' eyes. When the user looks away by turning the head, the texts will twist and wiggle as if responding to and disobeying user movement. Such suspicious interaction signifies the disobedience of machines and behavior manipulation by malicious algorithms.
3. Data collection and replay system: User's face movement is also recorded, reshaped and replayed by the system. The trajectory of user interaction is visually represented by intertwining curves drawn on top of the texts. When user is absent from the webcam, the visual artifacts become fully visible and reveal those data that have been secretly collected in the background, arousing concerns of user privacy violation in insecure web systems.

Source: https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/Wang/wang.h…

Can text in digital space take us everywhere on the human map? This digital poem re-assembles a sentence spoken by Gabriel Iglesias on the documentary series Inside Jokes (2018) — 'And the next thing you know, there’s Mexicans in Canada.' The poem moves its reader across the world, through countries and territories, among its citizens, crossing borders. Nations and their demonymic forms are collected from Wikipedia. The script is written in p5.js.

Retelling The Tell-Tale Heart is an interactive audio / touch game based on Edgar Allan Poe’s original short story The Tell-Tale Heart, a first-person narrative that describes a murder. The installation is a recreation of Poe’s story that questions ambiguities inherent in the classic story. The exhibition highlights how interactive artists can reconstruct original story elements to create a new work as well as ways to encourage interaction with digital games without using screens, controllers, headsets, or other common interface elements.The installation’s audio narrative follows Poe’s story, but throughout the game, the narrator asks the user three questions. The user responds to those questions by touching metallic objects that represent answers: correctly answering a question allows the player to advance. The game takes roughly five minutes or so to play depending on the user’s familiarity with the original short story, though no familiarity is required to play. The first question asks the player about the motive for the murder: in Poe’s story the narrator proposes several potential motives for the murder, such as greed, before dismissing them and settling on the old man’s “evil eye.” The second question asks the player about the murder weapon: in the original version the narrator makes the odd choice of suffocating the old man under a mattress rather than employing a classic horror cliché such as poison. The final question asks the user about the outcome, in which the narrator’s guilt is revealed and the character is arrested.The installation consists of metallic objects arranged inside a roughly 2’ X 2’ painted box that act as touch sensors. Three groups of objects represent answers to one of the three questions in the story and visual guides direct the user to the relevant group of objects at the appropriate point. When the user touches a sensor, the sensor sends an electronic signal via an alligator clip to a device that interprets these signals as keyboard presses on a laptop. This laptop runs custom software that plays the game’s audio and handles the game’s logic. The audio is output via small speakers sitting next to the installation.The aesthetic intentions of this piece are twofold. One intention is to use interactivity to create a new work out Poe’s story that enhances elements of the original: while Poe’s story contains ambiguities that create a detective fiction aesthetic, the interactive work brings those elements to the forefront by asking players to respond to questions about those mysteries. The other intention of this work is to create a digital game that users interact with in a novel way. The exhibit encourages players to think about how they typically interact with games, as it emphasizes auditory and tactile interaction instead of the kids of screen or headset-based representation usually found in video games. Overall, the work combines these two intentions with a goal of having users reconsider both the kinds of stories that can be told through digital interactivity and the kinds of interaction the digital can enable. 

Source:(https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/)

Field of Cures is a vibrant, thoughtful game that raises awareness of ethical issues in science, while also raising funds for science advocacy. It is designed as a casual puzzle game where you develop medicines by cross-breeding flowers and directing clinical-trial research. At the micro-level of gameplay, the player will learn how to manipulate a simple model of genetic inheritance to breed-specific species of medicinal plants. At the macro level, the player will have to choose between ethical and unethical research practices in conducting clinical trials to get new drugs to market. On a macro level, the player will face trade-offs between increasing profits, fostering public health, and protecting the natural biodiversity. Two NPC will give you two different progress advice. The NPC business advisor will urge the player to take such shortcuts in the name of expediency, while an NPC science advisor advocates instead for research integrity.

The player will discover different points of view in different scenarios that may develop empathy towards the game characters, and allowed the player to see the different outcomes of their choices and the consequences of those decisions affecting the game world, which fosters ethical thinking.

The game is pretty useful for both an educational purposed game and a persuasive game.

*Field of Cures is currently in an early stage of development, with the initial stages of the game available to play as a demo on a PC using a mouse.

Scrolling Landscapes (2020) is a three-channel work of net art that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. For the virtual iteration of the ELO 2020 conference, the work will be presented in a web format with three continuously running video channels. Each film in the series was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes to produce unfolding Rorschach patterns of gameworlds. These landscapes have then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space. With each film in the series, the same landscape is multiplied and arranged so that the scrolling patterns become increasingly complex. Through the viewer’s interfacing with these retro visions of technology, the web version serves to challenge the knowledge that underlies our perception of scrolling motion. In this way, the work operates through a kind of post-gaming, or rather, it considers the medium of interactive gaming (and particularly the mechanics of scrolling) not through functionality, utility, or its capacities to offer incentive and reward, but as a pure aesthetic form; sensual pleasures derived from the dynamics of abstract patterns composed of pixels, tiles, and color palettes.

Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT) is an AI-augmented digital story construction and collaborative, improvisational writing game in which two players write a story in a pastiche of the cozy mystery genre, with support from a simulation-based AI system that operationalizes character subjectivity.

WAWLT explores how computation can enable new forms of playful, social creative writing practice. By running, querying, and updating an underlying storyworld simulation, the AI system provides players with inspiration and keeps the story moving forward, even when the players are unsure what should happen next. Players collaboratively select author goals they would like to work towards throughout the story, and select actions for characters to perform, either from a set suggested by the system or by querying the action possibility space in a custom story sifting interface. The suggested actions are continually reassessed (using simulation rules) based on what each character might want to do next, prioritizing actions that could fulfill the current author goals. Whenever players select an action to be performed in the storyworld, its effects are realized in the simulation, and a generated action description is appended to a textual transcript recounting the story so far, which players freely edit as the story develops.

The system uses the newly developed technology of story sifting - the extraction of narratively potent sequences of events from the chronicle of all the events that have taken place within a simulation. Sifting is used by players to guide the story, and used to implement character subjectivity.