1,485 research outputs found

    The Malthusian Paradox: performance in an alternate reality game

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    The Malthusian Paradox is a transmedia alternate reality game (ARG) created by artists Dominic Shaw and Adam Sporne played by 300 participants over three months. We explore the design of the game, which cast players as agents of a radical organisation attempting to uncover the truth behind a kidnapping and a sinister biotech corporation, and highlight how it redefined performative frames by blurring conventional performer and spectator roles in sometimes discomforting ways. Players participated in the game via a broad spectrum of interaction channels, including performative group spectacles and 1-to-1 engagements with game characters in public settings, making use of low- and high-tech physical and online artefacts including bespoke and third party websites. Players and game characters communicated via telephony and social media in both a designed and an ad-hoc manner. We reflect on the production and orchestration of the game, including the dynamic nature of the strong episodic narrative driven by professionally produced short films that attempted to respond to the actions of players; and the difficulty of designing for engagement across hybrid and temporally expansive performance space. We suggest that an ARG whose boundaries are necessarily unclear affords rich and emergent, but potentially unsanctioned and uncontrolled, opportunities for interactive performance, which raises significant challenges for design

    Software, objects and home space (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 35

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    Through a series of interrelated developments, software is imbuing everyday objects with capacities that allow them to do additional and new types of work. On the one hand, objects are remade and recast through interconnecting circuits of software that makes them machine-readable. On the other, objects are gaining calculative capacities and awareness of their environment that allow them to conduct their own work, with only intermittent human oversight, as part of diverse actant-networks. In the first part of the paper we examine the relationship between objects and software in detail, constructing a taxonomy of new types of coded objects. In the second part we explore how the technicity of coded objects is mobilised to transduce space by considering the various ways in which coded objects are reshaping home life in different domestic spaces

    Software, objects and home space (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 35

    Get PDF
    Through a series of interrelated developments, software is imbuing everyday objects with capacities that allow them to do additional and new types of work. On the one hand, objects are remade and recast through interconnecting circuits of software that makes them machine-readable. On the other, objects are gaining calculative capacities and awareness of their environment that allow them to conduct their own work, with only intermittent human oversight, as part of diverse actant-networks. In the first part of the paper we examine the relationship between objects and software in detail, constructing a taxonomy of new types of coded objects. In the second part we explore how the technicity of coded objects is mobilised to transduce space by considering the various ways in which coded objects are reshaping home life in different domestic spaces

    Location-based games:from screen to street

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    P for Politics D for Dialogue: Reflections on Participatory Design with Children and Animals

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    Participatory Design strives to open up the decision-making process and empower all those who may be affected by design. This is opposed to Design as a non-participatory process, in which the power to make decisions is vested in the hands of one group to the possible detriment of others. In this paper we interrogate the nature, possibilities and limitations of Participatory Design through the perspective of Child Computer Interaction (CCI) and Animal Computer Interaction (ACI). Due to the cognitive and communication characteristics, and to the social and legal status of their participants, researchers in these communities have to contend with and challenge existing notions of participation and design. Thus, their theories and practices provide a lens through which the nature and goals of Participatory Design can be examined with a view to facilitating the development of more inclusive participatory models and practices

    Expert views about missing AI narratives: is there an AI story crisis?

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    Stories are an important indicator of our vision of the future. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI), dominant stories are polarized between notions of threat and myopic solutionism. The central storytellers-big tech, popular media, and authors of science fiction-represent particular demographics and motivations. Many stories, and storytellers, are missing. This paper details the accounts of missing AI narratives by leading scholars from a range of disciplines interested in AI Futures. Participants focused on the gaps between dominant narratives and the untold stories of the capabilities, issues, and everyday realities of the technology. One participant proposed a "story crisis" in which these narratives compete to shape the public discourse on AI. Our findings indicate that dominant narratives distract and mislead public understandings and conceptions of AI. This suggests a need to pay closer attention to missing AI narratives. It is not simply about telling new stories, it is about listening to existing stories and asking what is wanted from AI. We call for realistic, nuanced, and inclusive stories, working with and for diverse voices, which consider (1) story-teller; (2) genre, and (3) communicative purpose. Such stories can then inspire the next generation of thinkers, technologists, and storytellers

    Pork, Place, and Planning

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    Driving vivid virtual environments from sensor networks

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    Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 89-95).The rise of ubiquitous sensing enables the harvesting of massive amounts of data from the physical world. This data is often used to drive the behavior of devices, but when presented to users, it is most commonly visualized quantitatively, as graphs and charts. Another approach for the representation of sensor network data presents the data within a rich, virtual environment. This thesis introduces the concept of Resynthesizing Reality through the construction of Doppelmarsh, the virtual counterpart of a real marsh located in Plymouth Massachusetts, where the Responsive Environments Group has deployed and maintained a network of environmental sensors. By freely exploring such environments, users gain a vivid, multi-modal, and experiential perspective into large, multi-dimensional datasets. We present a variety of approaches to manifesting data in "avatar landscape", including landscapes generated off live video, tinting frames in correspondence with temperature, or representing sensor history in the appearance and behavior of animals. The concept of virtual lenses is also introduced, which makes it easy to dynamically switch sensor-to-reality mapping from within virtual environments. In this thesis, we describe the implementation and design of Doppelmarsh, present techniques to visualize sensor data within virtual environments, and discuss potential applications for Resynthesizing Reality.by Don Derek Haddad.S.M
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