Author: ilovit

ilovit-arsculpture

The Concept is to add Groucho glasses to the portraits in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Portraits, especially older portraits of rich people, tend to be very posh and stuffy. Groucho glasses instantly turn them silly, especially if they raise their eyebrows at you.

I didn't get the AR working in time. I made some nice Groucho Glasses though:

Edit: AR kinda working. Enough to make the following documentation:

It still doesn't totally work.

The Augmented Faces only works with the front facing camera - the video is achieved with camera trickery. I futzed for a long time with image targets, but I couldn't get the glasses to line up with the portraits consistently. I then found that the easiest way to get results was to detect faces in the portraits, but that can only be used with the selfie camera: not a good state of things for an AR that you want to point at things other than yourself.

ilovit-sansal-justaline

AR Scavenger Hunt

Our app is meant to be experienced by going out in the world and looking for all of the smiley faces positioned in various locations. Even if a location with AR lines is found, the smiley face might only be visible from a different angle, perspective, or altitude, and requires some creativity in searching for them.

ilovit-SituatedEye

https://editor.p5js.org/ilovit/sketches/vbDYcAqf7-(you have to train it yourself when you start)

I created a game where the player is protecting themselves from some unknown entities that are trying to gain passage through the window. The game state is communicated to the player entirely through audio, while they interact with the game solely by opening and closing the window.

The player will periodically hear a whistling noise, indicating an oncoming assailant. If they close the window in time, the assailant will be stopped with a crash. If they fail to close it in time, the room will become a bit more "stuffy" - indicated by a static noise in the background (this is effectively player health). If the window remains closed, the room also becomes slowly stuffier, while an open window will let the air out. There is currently no lose condition. The static noise just becomes loud and annoying.

I think the basic interaction is fun, but various variables aren't tuned quite right. My original intent was to have the play sitting down doing something else, and then have to get up to open and close the window every once in a while, but I couldn't figure out a good way of encouraging the player to sit down (one thought is that this game is to be played while trying to do other things), and the sound that indicates an imminent assailant is too short for someone to get up and close the window in time. I should also have some kind of instructions for the player explaining how the whole thing works.

ilovit – MLtoedipping

Pix2Pix

I tried to make a dog cat.

It's interesting how tiny gestures can greatly affect the certainty of the resulting image, and what it interprets as negative or positive space. I tried pretty hard to get it to interpret lines as certain things

GANPaint

It took me a little while to figure out that the painting here can only really alter an already existing element so that it becomes something else, and not really create new elements in most cases.  It's also interesting how the generated fields always seem more flat than the original image.

ArtBreeder

General:

Portraits:

The set of portraits to crossbreed with are almost all really attractive people. It is kinda hard to make a portrait without beautiful eyes. The genetic metaphor is apt - you can almost guess what parts of each image are the result of what "ancestor."

Infinite Patterns by Alexander Mordvintsev

GPT-2

Eight years ago, when I was studying to convert but hadn't yet been to the mikveh, I experienced Simchat Torah for the first time. I had successfully 《reconciled​ to God. That's all the conversion I have to tell. I was on Shabbat observing the service with an older Jewish friend and he mentioned that he would be joining us the next day. When I entered the service, I sat in the front row as the rabbi took our seats. As he began his service, I saw him and, after a moment, I was shocked. Instead of holding the Torah over his head and repeating the name of the Lord, as a Hasid or Rabbi would do, he placed it in front of him over his right hip and the congregation began to pray. I looked at him. I thought to myself, This is a Hasidic man. What is he doing. I didn't know how to respond because it was completely unfamiliar. I said to myself that I just wasn't prepared to be a Hasid, to be surrounded by Orthodox people, to have a large group

"No, Shirley!" I cried as she began to climb over the bed and then started into the chair again.

"If it is too much trouble don't say anything," she said, still sounding like Shirley.

"I may not want to," I promised, "but I can't help it, can I?"

"Yes," she said, and I was quite sure she sounded disappointed.

Sitting there, staring at the empty window and the uninviting sunlight, Shirley sighed.

"Why, why, it's so nice out here!" she protested. "This is our house, after all, and our people, our house! I don't know what to do any more! I feel so empty like this."

"No," I insisted. "This is not our house... it's not my house."

"Oh, of course it is!" she cried. "You don't know what it means to stay on good ground. You have to! But it's time you did."

Google AI Experiments

It rarely correctly guesses what you're drawing. You start to notice after a little while what the typical graphical representation of the thing being drawn seems to be. Sometimes it's not the image I have in my head of the thing.

https://magenta.tensorflow.org/assets/sketch_rnn_demo/index.html

ilovit-LookingOutwards04

Unfit Bits

Tega Brain and Surya Mattu - 2015

http://www.unfitbits.com/

The artists analyzed fitbits to figure out how to easily fake fitbit data without having to actually exercise, publishing the methods they came up with. This project does so many things at once: it gives you (potentially) practical ways to resist fitbits, it's really funny, and the objects are actually really beautiful. The website presents the work as a parody of lifestyle products. That kind of shtick, while kinda funny, I find a little distracting. I think the humor of the solution is best in the physical objects. I would also like if instead they published how-to guides on creating your own unfit bits.

The work might be drawing from "readymades" like Man Ray's Object To Be Destroyed and Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel. It also is part of a long tradition of finding exploits in technology to circumvent the ways it is used to restrict us. There are lots of other people coming up with ways to trick surveillance technology (some of which we looked at in class): https://ahprojects.com/hyperface/ https://cvdazzle.com/

ilovit-CriticalInterface

"10. The interface uses metaphors that create illusions: I am free, I can go back, I have unlimited memory, I am anonymous, I am popular, I am creative, it's free, it's neutral, it is simple, it is universal. Beware of illusions!"
"Imagine your desktop is a kitchen, a garden, a hospital, a computer. Now, imagine it using no metaphor"
"Don't delete your bookmarks history after watching porn. It's useless, Google always remembers."

This articulates really well something that makes me really uncomfortable about interacting with the digital world. All the illusions! The way search history is organized like a journal - date, time, where you went - so it seems like you can just tear out a page and throw it out. How you "paint" with Photoshop, "type" with Word. The more that digital environments become the dominant frame of reference, the more elusive the metaphors become: interfaces become metaphors for interfaces. I like especially the idea of using our own metaphors for our interfaces, although it's hard to keep up.

 

ilovit-Body

My original idea was to create a scene that does something really cool when you close your eyes, but when you open your eyes again, it goes away. It is, however, difficult to make something really cool so I went with something silly instead.

Finding a way to consistently detect closed eyes required a lot of troubleshooting. First I tried using machine learning paired with the second template for face tracking (BRFv4) to detect the difference between someone's eyes open and closed, but the difference wasn't great enough to be legible to the computer. Also that template lagged a ton. Then I found a way that someone had done it online computationally. I tried this first on BRFv4, but that didn't work. The face points were too rigid to react to eye movements. Finally, when I used the computational method on the clmTracker I was able to detect closed eyes consistently enough.

I'm happy with the final product, although there are ways it could be more. The static image could react subtly to the viewer before they close their eyes, the whole conceit could be more immersive.

https://editor.p5js.org/ilovit/sketches/hHoobmOSv

ilovit-LookingOutwards03

Rain Room, 2012Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass

"Rain Room" is an installation where artificial rain is falling from the ceiling throughout the room, but when the viewer steps into the rain, a gap opens up around them so that they remain dry. The effect is achieved with cameras that track the 3D location of the viewers.

The sheer size of the installation and the power of the interaction with it is bound to create a strong effect. While I can't really experience it from behind my computer screen, even imagining what it would feel like to be in that room is affecting: being surrounded by the rain but not being able to touch it, the frustration of hanging a carrot in front of your face. Also realizing the imaginary experience of being in the middle of the rain and staying dry is cool in itself.

https://www.random-international.com/rain-room-2012