Peer session was super helpful. I feel like I was able to sort out some thoughts about my project. I think I was trying to make this a bit bigger and “artsy-er” than they needed to be. Ultimately I feel like big tech has the opportunity to create really fun, unique interactions but kind of chooses not to. In the end a lot of big tech is just bland and a bit evil/unsafe/unapproachable. So I want to make something that’s fun and light and not taking itself too seriously. I need to dive a bit deeper as to why/how big tech has all of these issue with safety and fun and then find a way to address those issue through the project deliverable. Yeah, that’s a big ramble, but it’s kind of the direction that I’m going. Brian was super helpful in sorting out the thoughts, so thanks Brian!

First of all, thanks every people who came to see my proposal and gave valuable feedbacks. Overall, they gave me positive feedbacks and it looks like my proposal’s concept is clear and interesting enough. However, they pointed out something that I need to think about more for my thesis’ future development. 

1. Emotion can be a subjective that can be understood by different culture, ethnic, age, etc. Therefore, when I do more research, I need to consider the universality about emotion states although “six root delusions” theory is easy to be accepted and acknowledged by different group of people. 
2. The thesis depends a lot on execution so I will keep the process of making and reviewing in order to make the thesis always on the right track.
3. VR is an interesting form for presenting my thesis so I will also consider how to utilize the advantage of VR and how VR could improve my thesis? I will think about the interaction users can have like waving hand or arm, touching and moving creatures, etc.
4. The visual style is important. Making mood board might be super helpful. Think about Audio experience can improve the thesis to next level although it would be too complex. Recently, I am trying different visual styles that I can achieve. The technical part is hard, so I will keep learning now knowledge in order to make cooler visual effects, but the priority for me in the current step is making it functional. 
5. They gave me some references that might inspire me further. They are Polyfauna app, the works Julius Horsthuis, VR game “Ayahuasca” and Github repo “Keijiro”.

For the next steps, I will make clear production schedule. In general, my production stage will be in the following order, creatures object structures design and A-life function->visual style improvement->atmosphere improvement and VR interaction function.

Hi to all!

I had my first 1-1 meeting with my mentor! It went super well! We began the meeting by going over my proposal, and then I went into a little about my thesis, and explained as a recap! I gained some really great feedback from my mentor and had a really enjoyable time talking!

I’m now in the process of thinking about what will be projected and what will be framed! This is all depending on the space this installation is in!

Well, that’s all for now folks! 🙂

Until next time 🙂

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers of my proposal, your feedback was thoughtful, relevant, and constructive for my thesis development.

All my reviewers came back with similar feedback, that my proposed concept was quite broad and not specific enough to make progress on or adequately critique. Which in retrospect is true 😅. With that feedback, I really spent time with my thoughts and references to specify exactly what I wanted to focus on in terms of AI, Spirit, Consciousness, and Spirituality. These are very broad ideas with plenty of rich overlap, but for the sake of my thesis, I need to narrow !!

After more reading and writing, I realized that in order to have discussions on non-human intelligence, consciousness, and spirituality, it would be helpful to answer the question: What is spirit?

Here’s what I think my updated (and more actionable) thesis concept should be:

• How can ideas and theories of spirit and spirituality help us develop empathy for non-human systems, and help us further develop a more positive, collective ecology with nature?
• How can I develop sculpture that challenges popular ideas of Anthropocentrism, and reorient the human’s relationship with nature?

Or put more plainly:

Can I develop interactive experiences that challenge ideas of human superiority and exceptionalism? Can I develop experiences that act as a mirror for reflection of human interaction and behavior?

I think this is what I originally tried to ask with my first proposal, but this feels more specific and actionable. I know I need to start making, but this reframe feels productive and tighter in scope. Will report back soon 🫡

From the feedback I received for my thesis proposal, my takeaways are that:

• The concept could benefit from a more radical approach, particularly in regards to image-sharing and social network aspects.
• The project could benefit from more research into media theory and sociology regarding media and “social media.”
• Alternative approaches to cameras and photography should be explored.
• The project needs more focus and clarification in terms of priorities and emphasis.

The feedback was very useful and does touch upon many thoughts I have already been brainstorming since I submitted my proposal. When I submitted the proposal, the only part I had a clear idea of was the “image-making” phase, which I described building a hybrid digitial-analog camera. From there, I had some vague ideas for the “image-sharing” and “image-consuming” phases, but I have been thinking more about since. For instance, during the “image-consuming” phase, I aim to prototype the idea of presenting photos as part of a collection, rather than as singular, individual objects. This contrasts with current social media trends that encourage individualism and competition. In the next few weeks, I plan to create mock web pages to demonstrate how this would look, and conduct light user testing to gauge its reception. I have also been reading more about social media theory, specifically through reading the book The Social Photo, which has a lot of interesting theories about how we interact with social media.

It was great hearing updates on Lane, Ian and Anney’s projects, and the processes they were going through.

Lane brought up something I really loved – the idea of “easing someones burden”, or easing a burden on their mind.

Brian also brought up the idea of a community or shared space, like Kat’s bouquet project where you make and share something for the sake of doing it.

Meeting with Brian and getting feedback today 3/23 was really helpful.

I realized that there is a disconnect or a confusion between affirmations and manifesting. Manifesting is like trying to will something into existence (such as thinking I’m going to be rich and successful or I’m going to win the lottery today where you try to think a dream into reality versus affirmations, for when the mind is stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, etc where you try to shift your mindset and re-affirm to yourself that you are able to deal with the situation at hand. For example, if I’m super stressed at work, I’m not trying to will the stress or work away, but rather trying to re-affirm that I’ve dealt with challenging situations before and dealt with them successfully. It’s more so about taking something that is already true about myself and empowering myself by reminding myself that I did it before, got through it, so I can do it it again.

Meeting with everyone in the peer group, it was nice to hear about projects from Ai, Ian and Anney. And We shared our progress quite a lot~

we are going to keep going~

Today I talked with Mimi Yin, who teaches collective play at ITP. A lot of insights from our conversation:

1. The idea that altruism is in a negative space, and you almost define it by saying by what is NOT altruistic.
2. The kind of person who gets joy from making other people happy is different than the kind of person who does something to be better than everything else. We talked about how social media provides a social reward, but because of the way individual profiles exist it becomes more like a flex/competition, ie I’ll like your stuff if you like mine. Maybe a collective profile or shared space?
3. Figure out what kind of game “reward” you get that is in line with altruism, but has this sense of “oh it isn’t just for me” or “it isn’t always for me”.
4. How to create this feeling: getting joy out of other people getting something
5. Creating a catalogue for where I can find altruistic acts in real life, try to group them and see what they have in common.

https://first-latency-df1.notion.site/3-23-23-Caroline-1-1-f36dd9708a4c4f97b61db0f864b0babe