Creative
Technology
Seminar:

ACM CHI

Week 1: Friday, Jan 21

Every year Association for Comuting Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) holds several conferences and awards "Best Paper" to the outstanding research in the field. As a practitioner in the field it is important to stay abreast with the current research, but more importantly - to understand the process of how the vast amounts of published research can be distilled to the most important papers - to the field and to your interests in it.

Reading:

• Virtual Objects in the Physical World: Relatedness and Psychological Ownership in Augmented Reality: Miaoqiong, Alan Amaya
• Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics: Hongming Li, Eric Schubert
• Life-Affirming Biosensing in Public: Sounding Heartbeats on a Red Bench: Zhiyan Wang, Blake Kos
• Adding Proprioceptive Feedback to Virtual Reality Experiences Using Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation: Yuwen Qianyue, Zheng Wang
• Email Makes You Sweat: Examining Email Interruptions and Stress Using Thermal Imaging: Shiyi Chen, Zhuoyu Li
• RadarNet: Efficient Gesture Recognition Technique Utilizing a Miniature Radar Sensor: Zeyu Wang, Fanxuan Zhu
• HoloDoc: Enabling Mixed Reality Workspaces that Harness Physical and Digital Content: Yue, Yining Gao
• Designing Menstrual Technologies with Adolescents: Yiran Mao, Noah Curtis
• Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships: Mario Santanilla, Guowei Lyu

Smart Cities/Control Structures

Guest: Adit Dhanushkodi

Week 2: Friday, Jan 28

Student leads: Zhuoyu Li, Hongming Li, Yue Xi, Noah Curtis

Reading:

• Unstable Label [project – read user manual and explore interfaces/tools], Adit Dhanushkodi.
• The City Is Not a Computer [article – read], Shannon Mattern.
• Post-It Note City [article – read], Shannon Mattern.
• White Collar Crime Risk Zones [project – explore], Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne and Francis Tseng.
• The Algorithmic Ecology: An Abolitionist Tool for Organizing Against Algorithms [article – read], Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals
• Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles [documentary – watch at least the first few minutes]
• Urban Omnibus' Digital Frictions

Bonus / Other / FYI:

• MIT Senseable City Lab
• How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables

Distributed Trust

Guest: Elise Co

Week 3: Friday, Feb 04

Student leads: Zoey Wang, Blake Kos, Miaoqiong Huang, Shiyi Chen

To read:

• The Third Web [article]
• Geraldine Juárez on NFTs & Ghosts [article]
• Nontechnical: What is ERC-721? [article]
• HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?” [article]
• What Critics Don’t Understand About NFTs [article]
• When N.F.T.s Invade an Art Town[article]

To browse:

• Web3 is going just great [project]
• The Crypto Syllabus Bibliography [archive]
• NFT Canon [archive]
• The Crypto Syllabus [archive]
• Objkt.com, OpenSea, fxhash [marketplaces]
• Feral File ["gallery"]
• Bitcoin Original Whitepaper
• Etherium Original Whitepaper

Kinship and Relationships

Guest: Robert Kett

Week 4: Friday, Feb 11

Student leads: Fanxuan Zhu, Eric Schubert, Zhiyan Wang, Mario Santanilla

To read:

• Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway [interview]
• Chapter 3: Sympoiesis from Haraway "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" [chapter]
• Principles of Descent and Alliance for Big Data by Bill Maure [article]
• Stefan Helmreich, Kinship in Hypertext [article]

To browse:

• Full Surrogacy Now [article]
• Social Networks of Mobile Money in Kenya [article]
• Kinship, Law and the Unexpected [book]
• Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram [article]
• Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions [articles]
• The Dividual by Joshua Simon [project]

Science and Design

Week 5: Friday, Feb 18

Instead of designing ways to eliminate bacteria and protect ourselves from germs, h​ow might we design to reintroduce microbes into our daily lives?​ In the future, how will we design for the microbial superorganism?

Student leads: Alan Amaya, Yining Gao, Yuwen Qianyue

To read:

• Roberts, E.F.S. (2014) “Petri Dish.” Somatosphere.
• Steven Johnson. (2006) The Ghost Map. Riverhead Books, New York. (Chapters 1&2)
• Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (1986) Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Touchstone Books, New York. (Introduction and Author’s Preface).
• Armstrong, R. (2012) “Little Green Cows.” Next Nature.
• Ginsberg, A.D. (2014) “Design as the Machines Come to Life” in Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature. The MIT Press.
• Didion, J. (1979) “Holy Water,” In The White Album, Simon and Schuster, New York.
• Ars Electronica's "about" page – Do PLEASE take some time to look around the Ars Electonica archive. It’s a great way to get a sense of the various ways artists and designers have created work about/with/through science and scientists. Note: some of the links to older materials are broken.

To browse:

• https://ars.electronica.art/festival/en/archive/

Bonus read/browse:

• Paxson, H. & Helmreich, S. (2013). “The Perils and Promises of Microbial Abundance: Novel Natures and Model Ecosystems, from Artisanal Cheese to Alien Seas.” Social Studies of Science.
• Catts, O. and Cass, G. (2008) “Labs Shut Open: A Biotech Handson Workshop for Artists.” in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, da Costa, B. and Philip, K. eds. The MIT Press.
• Pollan, M. (2013) “Some of my Best Friends are Germs.” The New York Times.
• http://artsci.ucla.edu/art-sci-events-symposia
• http://artsci.ucla.edu/art-sci-events-workshops

AI and Design

Week 6: Friday, Feb 25

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Student leads: Guowei Lyu, Yiran Mao, Zeyu Wang

Read, watch, listen

• Hiring by Machine case study
• Jake Elwes' The Zizi Show
• Slaughterbots
• This Program Can Give AI a Sense of Ethics—Sometimes
• Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy Ethics
• Nvidia Canvas & We tried [...] using Nvidia Canvas
• Debashis Sinha's Machine Learning and Sound work

Browse

• IBM's Design for AI
• Designing the User Experience of Machine Learning Systems (symposium)
• NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design
• Stop Killer Robots
• Coded Bias
• The Rise of AI Fighter Pilots
• More case ctudies from Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics research collaboration
• (Posthuman) Feminist AI Projects: Bits & Bytes [MDP alums!]
• Prototyping Ways of Prototyping AI [MDP faculty!]
• Can a Machine Learn to Write for the New Yorker?
• AI Copywriting

Bonus

• Install Nvidia Canvas and try it out if you can (PC w/ Nvidia RTX graphics card required)
• Joyce Carol Oates's Notes on Failure

Week 7: REVIEW WEEK - NO CLASS

Creative Technology and Personal Practice

Week 8: Friday, March 11

Student Leads:Miaoqiong, Yiran, Yue, Fanxuan, Yining, Hongming

Structure

3 slides for 5 minutes.10 minutes group discussion. 15 min total.

Send the slides and the 1-2 sentence response to Ben and Maxim on Tuesday before the Friday presentation for check-in and review. We’ll respond with notes by the end of day Wednesday.

Three prompts for 3 slides

• - How does the process of making or building prototypes influence your creative decisions? Be specific, give examples. What is your main go-to tech? How have you tried to avoid it?
• - How has your relationship with contemporary technology changed in the last one year? Have you developed new interests, new fears, found new tools? Lost interest or hope in some technology that was previously on your mind?
• - How did you fake the things you couldn’t build? How did you build the things you couldn’t fake?

Prompts for the discussion

• Who’s work should they check out? Which project specifically and why?
• Which book or article should they read?
• Which tool should they try? Which tool should they avoid?
• What kind of prototypes should they try to make?
• How can they make things easier for themselves? How can they make them more complicated?

Creative Technology and Personal Practice

Week 9: Friday, March 18

Student Leads:Shiyi, Zhiyan, Noah, Alan, Blake, Guowei

Structure

3 slides for 5 minutes.10 minutes group discussion. 15 min total.

Send the slides and the 1-2 sentence response to Ben and Maxim on Tuesday before the Friday presentation for check-in and review. We’ll respond with notes by the end of day Wednesday.

Three prompts for 3 slides

• - How does the process of making or building prototypes influence your creative decisions? Be specific, give examples. What is your main go-to tech? How have you tried to avoid it?
• - How has your relationship with contemporary technology changed in the last one year? Have you developed new interests, new fears, found new tools? Lost interest or hope in some technology that was previously on your mind?
• - How did you fake the things you couldn’t build? How did you build the things you couldn’t fake?

Prompts for the discussion

• Who’s work should they check out? Which project specifically and why?
• Which book or article should they read?
• Which tool should they try? Which tool should they avoid?
• What kind of prototypes should they try to make?
• How can they make things easier for themselves? How can they make them more complicated?

Creative Technology and Personal Practice

Week 10: Friday, March 25

Student Leads:Mario, Zhuoyu, Zheng, Zeyu, Qianyue, Eric

Structure

3 slides for 5 minutes.10 minutes group discussion. 15 min total.

Send the slides and the 1-2 sentence response to Ben and Maxim on Tuesday before the Friday presentation for check-in and review. We’ll respond with notes by the end of day Wednesday.

Three prompts for 3 slides

• - How does the process of making or building prototypes influence your creative decisions? Be specific, give examples. What is your main go-to tech? How have you tried to avoid it?
• - How has your relationship with contemporary technology changed in the last one year? Have you developed new interests, new fears, found new tools? Lost interest or hope in some technology that was previously on your mind?
• - How did you fake the things you couldn’t build? How did you build the things you couldn’t fake?

Prompts for the discussion

• Who’s work should they check out? Which project specifically and why?
• Which book or article should they read?
• Which tool should they try? Which tool should they avoid?
• What kind of prototypes should they try to make?
• How can they make things easier for themselves? How can they make them more complicated?