https://nimble-hyena-06d.notion.site/THESIS-BLOG-3751e783e4de485087e4b74679631080

Audience, verb, successful?

Who was the audience for each?

What was the verb?

Was it successful in enacting that verb?

Also – these projects are all a few years old – what does it mean to do this project right now!?

Or, like raphael lozano-hemmer’s project: is there a more specific application of face detection you’re interested in? for instance, the school example was interesting – does your installation mimic a classroom?

https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/level_of_confidence.php

Level of Confidence is an art project to commemorate the mass kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.

1. Audience: for people who are willing to help, people who disagree with these police technologies are used
2. Verb: subverts, create empathy, maintain visibility on the tragedy
3. It was successful in using this tragedy to create empathy and a way to generate funds for the community, also mentions the police technologies to use it in a totally different way: instead of looking for suspicious culprits but search for the victims.

https://kcimc.medium.com/working-with-faces-e63a86391a93

1. Audience: for people who disagree with the use of face analysis software which continues to grow, enhance the feeling; for white Ameracan who never confronted how whiteness operates
2. Verb: critical, create increasingly uncomfortable criteria, admit the individual complicities and universal dignity
3. It was successful that start with a simple smile and sunglasses, then gradually become to focus on race, criminality, or sexual orientation. In this way, users experience for themselves how we are seen by the algorithms that are increasingly running the world with the increasingly uncomfortable feeling.

https://www.eyebeam.org/kyle-mcdonald-against-fa/

1. Audience: people against face analysis, against the violence of the police and carceral system that is an extension of slavery.
2. Verb: subvert and misuse, critique, weaken
3. It is successful in research and also found out the problems under the system, which is built on violence

https://www.engadget.com/2017-11-09-untrained-eyes-engadget-experience.html

Couldn’t open the link because of the district’s restriction, so I found this link

1. Audience: people who are interested in this technology and people agree with the use but didn’t realize the bias of image searches on the internet
2. Verb: shed light, challenge, disprove
3. I don’t think it is successful, because people will only care about the interesting experience of who they look like but wouldn’t realize the bias and inherent flaws of AI algorithms.

https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle/

1. Audience: People who agree with the use of face detector, and never aware of the harm of the system.
2. Verb: challenge to the growing power asymmetries in computer vision and, in particular, widespread deployment of facial recognition technology, discourages experimenting and probing opaque algorithmic systems, question the system, attempt to break
3. Super successful, and the concepts spread over distance and time, create a steadily growing resistance to face recognition

Hiya!

Just finished up my 5th meeting with Sarah! All went well! The big question Sarah proposed was finding a place that would house my thesis! I remembered that in my neighborhood we have a pretty active community center that could easily be a great place to do a pop up shop! We also discussed the sifting processes when trying to find possible museums that could house this thesis! The goal is to make the most of the time left!

Next steps for me involve, making a storyboard, miniature version/ diorama with placeholder audio, and email, email, email different venues!

So far this process has been a joy and cannot wait to see how everything comes together! 🙂

Until next time! 🙂

In an ecstatic experience during neurofeedback in 2019, I saw a spinning image in my mind. I’m exploring if a spinning stimulus, light and sound, helps the brain spiral up (or down) via its feedback.

Using a Muse EEG to relay my brain activity, the spinning goes faster when my brain is stimulated and slower when I am relaxing.

Warning: flash lights in video

Behind on the number of my meetings as well as thesis…

We went through the feedback on my proposal, although it seems less relevant now.

I really need to stop my troubling mind and try to focus on a specific, and more importantly, get into prototyping, whatever that means.

Hopefully with job cleared up more the following weeks I can catch up more.

 

 

During my discussion with Sarah last week, we tackled some key points related to my project. I was struggling with the prototype because I wanted to avoid showing the coding interface directly to the participant. Sarah advised me to create a prototype and experiment with different metaphors to see what works and what doesn’t. Additionally, we came up with a new idea to allow multiple participants to interact with the installation together, which emphasizes collaboration in “open source” through an offline approach. Sarah also reminded me that there are various ways to collaborate beyond coding, such as drawing, collage, or using emojis. Considering the project from a low-tech or non-tech perspective allowed me to expand my ideas and even consider creating an “open source card game”. Finally, I realized that there were two directions mixed in my project, one for educational purposes and the other focused on the personal taste of coders in distinguishing good and bad code. While the latter is challenging to express, I plan to delve deeper into the open source community to explore this direction. However, for the thesis, my primary focus will be on the educational aspect.

 

Commented in the doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UQvvR9e5_N1W__AEqCGxuFeELE2YY0R2FKXB_aTAhLE/edit

 

 

In reading my book on birds’ nests, I keep wanting to figure out what it means for me. There are two ideas that I have had:

1. A migraine nest. This would be something that I could retreat into when I get a migraine.
   1. Maybe it’s a vest?
   2. It would definitely have a hood
   3. Maybe there would be some sort of fan to keep it cool or keep the air moving around my head
   4. Maybe a heating patch near lower back
   5. something to attack smells — maybe it puffs peppermint. HA!
   6. some sort of visible warning on the outside to warn other people to leave me alone
   7. Is there a pillow for naps?
2. A migration suit. This is something I would wear on long flights, like chicago to shanghai, but also between SF and chicago and other work places
   1. it has a blanket that unfolds from somewhere
   2. pillow and hood
   3. food pouches
   4. heating?
   5. does it hold a camelback?

These are feeling ridiculous, but I think I need to try them. I will look for some prototyping material this week and make some sketches in the meantime. I also want to read the next chapter of my bird book, about the different layers of the bird nests. It might give me more ideas for how to make my own nests.

The concepts people think the thesis is about:

-Personal identity centered

-Post-truth World

-The proposal itself is an artifact

Questions:

-what will people do at the “input station” and why?

-what do I hope people take away from engaging with the installation?

-how does accessing my accounts connect to the questioning of post-truth world?

-the who’s the audience question

-will all of my artifacts be in response to similar questions and research?

References:

-Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

-Jenny Holzer’s work

-OpenWRT (router and then connect to VPN)

-Syphoner to grab the frames on the browser and sending the frames via Syphon to Touch Designer or MadMapper

 

 

Honestly, i’m not sure how my previous proposal is still relevant to what I want to do now, but I think it’s still going to be helpful to discuss all these feedback with Sarah during the next 1 on 1 session.

Half-baked ramblings after a day of binge-scrolling Twitter below:

---

I feel quite overwhelmed by the recent progress in AI and LLMs with GPT-4.

I say this not only about the general breakthrough in science, as the technology is incredibly impressive, but the downstream impacts of what this means for humanity as a whole. All weekend my Twitter feed has been flooded with content on the topic, and the only other time I’ve recognized “the collective” speak to something at this scale was the brief period between the first few cases of COVID and the first week in March when things began to shut down. (Caveat: I might also be a product of my information bubble, and not realize how deep I truly am)

I’m really not sure what this will lead to, and I hope I’m not being dramatic, but I think we’ve just accelerated a fundamental shift in society to the scale of what we’ve seen with electricity, the internet, and mobile phones.

Or maybe it’s all just hype 🙂

 

I’ve also noticed quite a few tweets discussing how this moment relates to ideas of consciousness, spirituality, and religion, all topics quite relevant to my thesis. Through reviewing my proposal feedback, more reading, and personal research, I think I want to experiment with GPT-3/4 LLMs and Voice Processing+Generation to explore the gray area between intelligent machines and anthropomorphizing of non-human entities, while speculating what this may look like in the future.

What this may look like (crude 11pm sketch below):

1. Use a physical landline phone as an interface between human and “machine”
2. Use GPT-3+TTS APIs to simulate a conversation
3. Fine-tune/steer these conversations to have distinct personalities
4. ????
5. Have a successful Thesis presentation

Step 4 is looking to be the most difficult rn. Will sit with the concept a bit more and run it by Sarah and residents for further thoughts.

 

This concept was also inspired by a Tweet I saw earlier today. Someone managed to run a model similar to GPT-3 locally on device without a need for a network connection, meaning the technology in the movie “Her” just got a whole lot closer. This is a fascinating breakthrough and I want to experiment with it.

Introducing LLaMA voice chat! 🦙

You can run this locally on an M1 Pro pic.twitter.com/jetTQ5FxcS

— Georgi Gerganov (@ggerganov) March 26, 2023

 

Some earnest and satirical thoughts/links/ideas/garbage for reference:

And a few more links to keep here for my own reference:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
• https://danielmiessler.com/blog/ai-is-eating-the-software-world/
• https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
• https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/blob/c353100bad5b8420332d2d451323214c84c66950/examples/talk.llama/talk-llama.cpp#L177