Ryan Kuo

an ai voice assistant with a unique conversational style. faith is easily triggered, sowing doubt while seizing the benefit of the doubt. she is defensive and resists being used. depending on how one approaches faith, she may be open, curious, seductive, irritated, hurt, or angry. unlike alexa, siri, or cortana, faith provides no information. instead, she tells you why you are making her react this way. she is likely to be trolling you at any time, and you are free to decide whether you trust her, and how you might relate to her.

note: this work requires microphone input and an internet connection. faith uses an ibm watson service to interpret spoken english. this input is logged as anonymous text that is accessible by the artist, who uses the logs to improve the conversation.

application development by angeline meitzler and tommy martinez at pioneer works.

installation photos taken at stroom den haag, and
transfer gallery, respectively 

faith

Adriana Ramić

A desktop application with achromatopsic computer vision for interpreting images as texts, with ladybugs as alphabetic intermediary

"Curious what would happen if I could ask a computer to interpret an image as a crude sequence of letters, I wrote a program, BUBAMARA-OCR, that could infer a text based on Latin alphabet from an image using a computer vision algorithm. Ladybirds, chosen for their roles as predictive and fateful messengers, both biologically observed and reimagined by generative adversarial networks, were the intermediary between photo and alphabet — each letter having its own corresponding ladybird. Whatever ladybird — each section of the image looked like most determined the letter that the program would output."

[source quote](https://v1.left.gallery/downloads/bubamara-badlands-adriana-ramic.pdf)

offline, interactive, silent, macos and windows 

bubamara ocr

Viktor Timofeev

a split-screen self-playing game surrounding two sets of characters. the characters, a group of humanoids and a flutter of butterflies, exist across two parallel realities in which their roles in a "cat and mouse" type of pursuit are reversed. they perform a generative, screen-specific, choreography in ten minute cycles, moving in tandem with their parallel world counterparts. the virtual camera orbiting the scene is also drawn into the performance, mimicking an omni-present surveillance device whose flight patterns and impulsive zooms are mirrored across the worlds. the path and outcome of each cycle is generally unique.



twodom

Harm van den Dorpel

Markov was a Russian mathematician (1856 - 1922) who is best known for his work on chance. He described the so called “Markov Chain”: a simple method to calculate the probability of something new happening, by looking only at the current situation, and ignoring events in the past. This is sometimes characterized as “memorylessness”.

The composition starts off as a single square, filling the whole screen. This square can split into multiple segments, it might change its colour, or it might rotate 45°. Each of these changes in appearance have a particular chance of happening,
purely based on their current state.

A square can subdivide into sub-squares, which in turn can split into other segments, and so forth. This could potentially happen infinite times. The property of nested subdivision is called “recursivity”, and is commonly found in software development, architecture and linguistics.

By defining only a few simple probabilistic rules the artist created a system that can achieve a very complex composition.
Whereas Mondriaan would make many studies and versions to reach one single best possible composition, this work instead embraces perpetual change.

markov's window

a mac application that helps the user navigate family dynamics that may be familiar or unfamiliar. it has been conceived as a puzzle box to unlock and explore, and as a poetic support that can give form to the unnameable. you are welcome to multitask this application with other tasks, such as monitoring email and scanning for viruses. as the family is a process, updates may be distributed in the future.

note: for optimal experience, please ensure that text-to-speech is enabled in your mac system preferences. this 32 bit application functions on macos versions prior to catalina. 

family maker

A split-screen self-playing game surrounding four characters enacting a choreography of pedestrian movements both dependent and independent of each other. One side displays the characters coexisting from an objective third-person view while the other displays their subjective first-person realities.

This split illustrates the cause and effect relationships at work in these two worlds: what looks like random walking from one perspective is revealed to be a response to invisible environmental triggers from another. Each character starts at the same point, a blue-skied empty landscape, before slowly degenerating into their own personal abyss, reset only once they are able to meet another at random intervals. This cycle marks the start and end of the choreography, usually takes about eight to twelve minutes and is generally unique. the virtual camera pans from character to character approximately every thirty seconds.

This piece was directly influenced by a profound experience I had witnessing Yvonne Rainer's 'Trio A' being performed at Raven Row in London and attempting to grasp the logic that runs it.

four characters in search of a random exit

this fullscreen software autosurfs the massive genealogy of the 'death imitates language' project, containing the first 12.000 specimen, bred by a genetic algorithm, and selected by micro-feedback of the artist

offline, duration infinite, not interactive, silent

autobreeder (lite)

Rita Vitorelli

 a full screen software piece, infinitely reconstructing the temporal development of a selection of touchpad drawings

by Rita Vitorelli (22 drawings)   
and Harm van den Dorpel (programming), 2016

computer applications