Year 2017 |
Categories Mixed Reality Artificial Intelligence UX Design |
Research Project Animistic Collaborators in Mixed Reality |
These AI agents operate as a collective, utilizing plurality to their advantage. They collaborate with art curators by generating various cultural, historical, and formal connections around the work from their database, leading to new discoveries and threads of inquiry.
The knowledge creation of the AI collaborators is based on the idea that information is embedded with a system and is non-linear.
The AI collaborators are designed with these ideas in mind: networked knowledge, non-linearity, and free (but relevant) association.
A curator typically has extensive knowledge of a period or area of work, and is in charge of the institution's collection. They also often assume other knowledge-sharing and engagement roles such as public speaking and writing. In other words, they are the cultural mediators between art, artists, and audience/context.
Hypertext Swarm is designed for an art curator in an speculative future context, where mixed reality and artificial intelligence are seamlessly integrated into everyday work.
The curator is preparing herself for a new show based on the existing collection of the institution. As she browses the current show, she notices a standalone sculpture in the middle of the gallery space, and wants to use that work as inspiration for the next show. Given that she is still in the brainstorming stages, she enlists the help of the Hypertext Swarm through her AR device.
(The Hypertext Swarm is by no means performing the work of the curator, but is, in a sense, conversing with her through idea generation.)
Hypertext Swarm is designed with future AI functionality in mind, but is a "wizard-of-oz'ed" version of what a true AI-enabled project could be. With that in mind, I had to seek workarounds in code that could create similar behaviors as an AI.
Specifically, I needed to be able to allow the swarm agents to swim around an artwork, which means they needed to: 1. recognize boundaries of artwork surface, 2. autonomously swim around this boundary, and 3. determine their own radius of movement.
This is a test of code I adapted from a script of fish swimming in an aquarium:
This working prototype was created in Unity for the HTC VIVE as a proof of concept. Ideally, this would function in augmented reality so that the curator can view both the real artwork and the digital scan and interface simultaneously.
To demonstrate potential functionality, for this prototype I collected some references and notes relevant to this particular sculpture, Suzanne. For instance, relevant sources include "primitivism" as a theme, followed by examples of primitivism by modern artists like Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin, as well as other visual parallels like the Venus of Willendorf.