satire

Ring™ Log is an experiment in speculative surveillance.

Amazon's Ring™ doorbells are motion-activated high definition surveillance cameras. Once triggered, Ring™ cameras transmit video to the Ring™ app and Ring™ servers, where the video footage is preserved for future viewing.

What happens when Amazon begins using AI object detection to identify, categorize, and report what the Ring™ camera sees?

Imagine a year from now, Halloween night, October 31, 2020. What would Ring™ see? What would Ring™ report? And what happens when the program fails, as programs always do?

“How To Rob A Bank” is a love story in five parts. The story focuses on the misadventures of a young and inexperienced bank robber and his female accomplice. The entire work is revealed through the main characters’ use of their iPhones and the searches, texts, apps, imagery, animations, audio, and functions that appear on their iPhones. 

Sherwood Rise is the world's first augmented novel. It's an Augmented Reality (AR) transmedia interactive graphic novel/ game, told over 4 days through a range of media and formats: printed newspapers, AR on mobile phones, emails, hacker websites, blogs, sound, music, graphic novels and illustrations.

Inspired by the current financial crisis, and the Occupy movement, the story is based on the traditional Robin Hood tale. The traditional tale of peasant revolt and dissent is brought up to date, and adapted for AR and transmedia. In our adaptation, austerity is imposed on the poor by a privileged elite, but resisted by a gang of hacker outlaw terrorists called the 'Merry Men'.

Each day you receive a newspaper (via email) which you interact with via AR. Your interaction (how much you support the establishment or the Merry Men) updates a database, which then determines the version of newspaper you receive the next day. My intention was to make a physical book interactive, and in this way explore the future of the book.

The project explores the future of the book and transmedia storytelling:

• It's a story told in a range of media on multiple platforms
• It expands a traditional printed story, adds additional layers of story through AR
• It adds augmented digital artefacts onto a printed story.

The objectives of the project are:

• To add virtual elements to the real world page by combining mobile device/ new media technology and the book
• To use mobile device based AR and transmedia, in novel and artistic ways to expand a narrative
• In creative and artistic ways to raise awareness and stimulate thought about financial fraud, corruption, austerity, politics
• To produce a book which is part static and part dynamic, and altered by the reader's behaviour
• To challenge power relations of news using AR.

My research interests for this project included:

• AR activism, challenging authority, privilege and power
• The politics of AR and storytelling/ news, contested content, critiquing ways that news is reported, revealing the "truth"
• Aesthetic, artistic, cultural and sociopolitical uses of AR and transmedia stories
• Revealing hidden stories within a fiction
• Many voices in a story - simultaneous multiple viewpoints
• Documenting the process and experience of designing, adapting and building a transmedia story from the ground up
• The reader experience - reading and navigating an AR transmedia book, moving from paper to screen, the disjointed reading experience
• Exploring aesthetic possibilities of AR, graphic novels and illustrations on mobile devices.

Sherwood Rise - the story begins here
Please note that since the AR software "Junaio" is no longer available (since 2015), then the project doesn't run anymore.

This was a research collaboration between Dave Miller (concept, code and drawings) and Dave Moorhead (screenwriter). This was a post-doc research project funded by the University of Bedfordshire, as part of the UNESCO Future of the Book project.

American Psycho is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by Patrick Bateman, a serial killer and businessman. Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, he earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

(Source: Wikipedia, Amazon description)

Multiplicity
1. A large number or great variety
2. The state of being multiple

Complicity
1. The fact or condition of being an accomplice, esp in a criminal act

multi.com.plicity is a twenty-first century translation of Guy de Maupassant's short story Mes vingt-cinq jours (My Twenty-Five Days), originally published in 1885, and translated into English by Albert M.C. McMaster, A.E. Henderson, Mme. Quesada et al.

multi.com.plicity takes de Maupassant's story and reimagines it, changing a health resort in 19th century France to a laboratory complex in an unspecified future, and inhabiting the story with nameless clones and technology. In this way the story eschews the notion of a literal translation in favour of a temporal and situational carrying across of de Maupassant's tale, with multiple layers of perception as realised through randomised image and video layers.

Épigrammes created by Jean-Pierre Balpe in 1997 and published in DOC(K)S/ alire 10 is a text generator that formulates epigrams or short satirical writings. These satirical writings use sarcasm and irony to show truths of human beings, or rather, delicate truths that are normally private. The role of the viewer is to examine the generated fragments and to find the links within the text. The viewer always has his/her own history that contributes to the sense of the text. Therefore, the viewer is never naïve, and, according to Balpe, each time that the viewer reads the work, he/she sees a new text that provides the opportunity for a new meaning. Each short epigram describes or speaks of a different situation for one or several characters, and these small anecdotes show thematic coherences. The women in the epigrams swear and gossip about the superiority of women, creating a satirical, often sarcastic, theme of the higher morality of women that is proven or established with a false assurance by the feminine characters. One epigram says : “Evelyne glose, Evelyn jase tout le temps, Ses compétences sont reconnues de tous, Tout un chacun déclarerait ses mérites, et proclamerait sa supériorité…” In the epigrams with masculine characters, the text offers a different tone that consists of the use of satire and sarcasm in a pejorative sense, which is also often vulgar. A strong coherence of theme is not evident between the two sexes, but, one could say that the characters show the faults and the traits of humanity according to Balpe. The repetition of phrases and forms in the epigrams also adds a thematic and structural coherence. In the two epigrams that follow, the structures repeat and follow a formula found in the other epigrams. The formula consist of a name, then an ellipsis (that suggests the elimination of information), and then three lines (with the same general sense and format), followed by an ellipsis and an expression or a proverb. « Zoé… Zoé jure que la femme est l’avenir de l’homme, Elle l’assure, elle le promet Le souvenir n’est jamais certain … La douleur embellit l’écrevisse. » « Guillaume… Evelyne dit : la femme est l’avenir de l’homme, Il l’affirme, il le répète Rien n’est sûr à qui se souvient… A toute chose sa saison. » The phrase that repeats itself, « la femme est l’avenir de l’homme », references a verse in « Le Fou d’Elsa » by the poet Louis Aragon. This use of phrases as repeating scriptions, as well as structural forms, is a mark of a generator, but Balpe uses repetition to give an impression of coherence that supports the interpretation of the theme. Balpe strongly uses satire in the words of the generator that shows the two sexes in a pejorative sense. The text comments on humanity and life with an underlying dark tone: « La vie n’est pas un long fleuve tranquille ».

Drive a thousand miles from the left/right coasts and you reach the sporadically populated plains, the supposed heart of the United States. But this flatland organ is sick and leaking, the young are fleeing, and consumerism, the addiction to purchase, has replaced the pride of working the land, growing crops and communities. And exploring these small American towns, reaching into the houses and malls and streets, is a modern harvest. This interactive digital poem harvest those objects from the living room gardens, the acres of shopping centers, picks the gaudy attachments of our lived environments. Through five sections, the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the garage and the mall, readers can harvest these modern croplands, the trinkets and objects filling our surroundings. And in the heart of the US, “to purchase” replaces “to create”, a crippling harvest of plastic and ceramic. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)

Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise is an art/ poetry/ adventuring game, a playland for exploring our ever-present desire for constant and over-blown rewards. Our worlds (digital and breathing) are filled with needless and unearned praise, we are built to love exploding trophies for fifth place. This art/poetry game satisfies your compliment addiction by celebrating your walking/ jumping/ falling through strange and wondrous anatomical lands.Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise is a 2013 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

(Source: Turbulence)