In keeping with my interests in human to machine learning interaction and in how individuals' identities and personal narratives are shaped by those interactions, I decided to make a biometric scanning application (game?) that gives you your fortune based on the information it scans from you. My interest in algorithmic thinking and machine learning decision-making is manifesting as fortune telling projects because of the amount of predictive faith machine learning has culturally engendered: statistical pattern recognition as the new oracles, etc.…

When thinking of making my own poetic form I, in a fit of grandiose mania, decided that I would make my own form of generative epic poetry. Dactylic hexameter?… yes! Alliteration?… YES! Epithets?… YES YES!! Heroic narrative defining the moral values of my society?… YES YES YES!!! Well it didn’t really work out that well. The biggest problem is that narrative is really hard to pull off with generative and random-based methods.…

Here you can see the slides from my research presentation And here is my executive summary Reports, Research Papers, and Press Releases As a great resource for all of our classes' discussions on AI I want to point out first the AI Now annual report. AI Now Institute is a research institute (within NYU! we can go talk to them) focused on interdisciplinary research on the social impacts of AI.…

I’ve been working with my iMessage history in order to do a sentiment analysis over time. In doing so I decided to start trying to randomly generate new texts that would kind of sound like me, much like the kind of creepy post-death chatbot made by training a neural net on all of your messages. My results weren’t that… good, but there was enough structure there to hint at real language.…

In the first class I mentioned peñabots as an example of government social media manipulation. Rather than define them myself I’ll lean on the Wikipedia page definition: “the name given to what analysts believe to be a network of automated accounts on social media used by the Mexican government to spread pro-government propaganda and to marginalize dissenting opinions in social media”. Though not the first institutionally-organized trolling operation they stand apart for their sophistication, their effectiveness at shutting down oppositional organizing, and their use in a nominally non-authoritarian government (although one with a deep history of media manipulation).…

For my transcription exercise I wanted to pick something that was a) short enough so that I could transcribe the whole thing b) interesting enough that I wouldn’t mind listening to it over and over again c) spoken slowly enough that I would only have to pause and rewind ten seconds 500 times and not 1000. I’d recently watched to MacKenzie Wark’s edutainment video on Chantal Mouffe for DIS magazine (now just DIS?…

For my computational media final project I wanted to make a game about Cambridge Analytica and about the current cultural moment in data science and AI. I have seen the rise of the imperative to make one’s identity known and intelligible for collection online by various state and corporate actors as a sinister reach to further institutional control over the everyday, but I also think that the practice of psychographics is a silly pseudoscience.…

One of my favorite word games to play is to try to suss out the grey areas of meaning with seemingly well established words (e.g. what foot angle and distance of leaving the floor differentiates a ‘tap’ from a ‘step’, in what ways are the aesthetic associations of a crypt different from those of a mausoleum). Kind of a useless semiotics examing the edge case value of a word (how much mist on a misty morning differentiates a bog from a swamp).…

Inspired by the near extinct website guestbook and completely extinct methods of phone phreaking, I wanted to make something that felt as unfinished and wide open with potential as the “old” web of 1992 – 2001. Please participate: https://tinyurl.com/y7tvrusf Communication between users in this space is possible but only through “hacks” of the intended use. There is no security and everything can be seen.…

At this point I have gotten the basic Google home API working on my raspberry pi and have started manipulating the methods of interaction (changing the trigger word, changing the voices) and have started to work on building a specific Google home Action. Still to do is build the haunted dollhouse enclosure. Since the basic first interaction I want users to have with the haunted doll is to knock on the dollhouse door, I wanted to first set up a basic knock and open circuit.…