meh-Reading01

4. The Critical Engineer looks beyond the "awe of implementation" to determine methods of influence and their specific effects.

I resonate with this tenet a lot especially because we are in a time when we are surrounded by more and more technology. We often hear about how technology advancement brings positive change to their daily life, but fails to realize the possible negative consequences of our abuse of the technology.

One great example is the rise of big data and machine learning. The rise of extremism recent year could be seen as a direct but highly ignored consequence of such comfort. When AI knows our political preferences and only caters to our preferences, we are pushed more and more to the extreme and thus an invisible wall is created that stop us from hearing different voices. While big data and machine learning brings more personalization to our daily life and create a much more effortless living environment, we are at the same time more and more confined in our comfort zone.

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Sword Experience is an art installation piece by Red Paper Heart studio, inspired by the HBO series, Game of Thrones. They were asked to convey Arya Stark's journey in becoming an assassin. To create the piece they created custom graphics engine, written in the C++ framework Cinder, blends both 2d and 3d visual elements which are then masked by the user's own photo. The final artwork is then uploaded to a server and available for sharing the moment a user steps off stage.

This interactive game really inspires me because it not only maintain a high artistic craftsmanship but also creates a world that remains true to the original story. As commercial interactive ins is becoming more and more popular, the criteria in the field should be more about what quality can we achieve from and what meaning can we assign to the interactive technology. This piece successfully tells a very poetic story through very simple interaction.

Link: https://redpaperheart.com/work/swordexperience