Contemplating the Conceptual Framework of my Sabbatical project
After an intense first week spend at ACCAD, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at The Ohio State University, I am sitting in my hotel room with time to reflect on my process and goals.
The initial concept for my sabbatical project was based on an old idea, namely Ulikeme (or You Like Me) which commented on the pursuit of likes on social media but also reflected on the search for kinship on the internet (are you like me?) Visually the project leans on the test conducted for Ulikeme, but the focus is different. Evolved if you like. I am wondering if it needs yet another update.
The current framework is related to the concept of Surveillance Capitalism, the term for the data mining economic structure from the 2019 book by Shoshana Zuboff. If the service is free you are the product.
Early morning MoCap session with undergraduate dancer Vivian Corey
Using motion capture I already acquired great data of human motion. This is one of my goals visiting ACCAD: to learn how to incorporate motion capture into my creative process. The recording was supervised, and co-directed, by Vita Berezina-Blackburn and the motion provided by undergraduate dancer Vivian Corey. For the VR experience I plan to build using this data, I do need to contrast this human motion with other movements. In general I was thinking noise, but what if (some of) the other motion is AI generated?
Inviting Gestures - Midjourney
In the ideation phase of the project I started using AI image generators, out of curiosity whether that is a valuable technique, or mainly prove to be a distraction. Though the resulting images were never quite what I was looking for, they did help focus the visual design for the project. Some even inspired me to rethink some of the focus of my project. Did the fact that these AI image generators produced mainly hands when prompted with “inviting gestures” have an advantage over the Google image search also giving me many images of hands? The jury is still out.
When my friend Miho Aoki recently proposed to do a presentation on the use of AI in visual arts courses, I jumped on it and joined her for a presentation we gave for the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee’s 2023 Winter SOIREE. The rapid development in AI image generation was already on my radar, this presentation put it front and center. So now I am beginning to wonder if some AI should maybe be included in my sabbatical project. Or suggest AI is being used, give the illusion of an underlying AI. If a system behaves in a way that can not, by a human, be distinguished from AI, is the system then artificially intelligent?
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