data collection

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…

Góngora Word Toys is a collection of digital poems that explicitly engage with the work of Spanish Baroque poet, Luis de Góngora. The collection includes five interactive poems, each engaging with a different aspect of Góngora's poem Soledades: "Dedicatoria espiral" (Spiral Dedication), "En breve espacio mucha primavera" (A Lot of Spring in a Little Space), "El llanto del peregrino" (The Pilgrim's Cry)," Delicias del Parnaso" (Delicacies of the Parnassus) and "El arte de cetrería" (The Art of Falconry). 

Composed in 1613, Góngora's Soledades is a long silva poem about the wonderings of an anonymous castaway after his ship wrecks in an island. Soledades is paradigmatic for its difficult grammatical structures and the over-abundance of erudite and mythological allusions and references. The poem stresses rhythm, and rejoices in the opacity of Baroque language. Similarly, Gache's digital take on Góngora's work underscores the plasticity of language and its ability to create complex structures. 

The first poem, "Dedicatoria espiral" relocates the rhythm and rhetorical intricacy in Soledades’ dedication to the Duque de Béjar by transforming the verses into a moving spiral that turns clockwise or counterclockwise depending on where the reader places the cursor. The display of the text is altered by reader movements. 

"En breve espacio poca primavera" takes on a hypertextual form where text blossoms like flowers. Every time the reader activates a link, new windows pop up filling up the space on the screen, masking meaning like baroque "culteranismo." 

"Delicias del Parnaso" is a multi-option game poem, where the reader needs to choose between possible verses to complete Góngora's poem. Selection becomes reading technique. 

"El llanto del peregrino" is also a game poem. Along with the avatar, the reader moves around the new environment and walks in between words using the keyboard arrow keys. The poem works like a platform game based on spatial navigation. 

Finally, "El arte de la cetrería" presents eight birds (those appearing in Góngora's poem) all talking through mechanical voice processors. The final cacophony makes listening of the individual voices impossible, again underscoring the overall form of the piece and the mechanics of language and writing.

Author statement: 

En el período barroco, el equilibrado mundo clásico deja lugar a un mundo inestable, descentrado, escondido tras el abigarramiento de los signos. El Góngora de las Soledades ha sido comparado incluso con el astrónomo Kepler y la órbita elíptica de la Tierra con las elipsis gongorinas del lenguaje. Siguiendo su trabajo con los Wordtoys, Belén Gache nos presenta los Gongora Wordtoys (Soledades) basados en la obra del poeta español. Se tratade 5 poemas digitales interactivos (Dedicatoria espiral, En breve espacio mucha primavera, El llanto del peregrino, Delicias del Parnaso y El arte de cetrería), que remiten a un universo barroco de espirales, pliegues y laberintos del lenguaje. 

From the Electronic Literature Directory 

On January 12th, 2017 there were 113983 files on Piotr Marecki's laptop. This digital work is an attempt to lift them one by one – which takes several minutes. The work was first presented as a wild demo during the Synchrony/Recursion demoparty (NYC–Montreal, 27th–29th January 2017) and was not voted last in the competition.

RIMA (twitter stream http://twitter.com/squidsilo) is a performance installation and digital media work that conceptually addresses strategies for survival by way of poetically re-framing the facts behind the effects of solitary confinement and isolation into a fictional present/future. Notions around stimulus and memory are played out through the performers movement within the physical space (proximity, sound, touch) and the data collection of distinct environmental changes (cold, hot, light, dark), which trigger strategically placed sensors collated by a computer program. This in turn dispatches a relational virtual text stream delivered to a live webpage and/or twitter feed (twitter fiction). The overall effect is a mimic of real-time thoughts, responses and actions, which over time slowly build into a fictional narrative somewhere between an indistinct present and a sci-fi future. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)