Week 1 Thesis Proposal
Week 2 Sketch & Prototyping
Week 3 Play with TouchDesigner
Week 4 Send + Receive Data
Week 5 Production Process
Week 6 Demo Day
Week 7 Midterm Feedback
Week 8 Reflection for the Demo Day
Week 9 Documentation
Week 10 Production Plan
Week 11 Production Progress
Week 12 Thesis Archive & Progress
Week 2 Sketch & Prototyping
Week 3 Play with TouchDesigner
Week 4 Send + Receive Data
Week 5 Production Process
Week 6 Demo Day
Week 7 Midterm Feedback
Week 8 Reflection for the Demo Day
Week 9 Documentation
Week 10 Production Plan
Week 11 Production Progress
Week 12 Thesis Archive & Progress
AI Through Your Lens: An interactive exhibit about AI imaginaries
In the Research Methods course, I conducted reseach on AI and gender to understand women’s perceptions and experiences of AI image generators. I interviewed 9 self-identified women with experience of using AI image generators and conducted a Design Fiction workshop to further explore and visualize their thoughts on AI.
During the interviews, I asked the participants to quickly respond to prompts about AI to learn how they perceive the word “AI” in a more tangible/humanistic forms. The prompts include questions about what AI might look like, sound like, taste like, smell like, or feel like, in order to explore AI imaginaries. Interestingly, I found that answers from most participants are similar and somewhat portraying the stereotypical perception of AI. Therefore, for my thesis, I want to explore more about other people’s imaginaries of AI, whether it would be homogeneous or diverse, and whether we can inspect AI biases from those imaginaries.
Inspired by the immersive art “Queering the Map” by Lucas Larochelle and the interactive art “Collaborative Poetry” by Shi Weili, the proposal for my thesis is to produce an immersive art that visualizes data of AI imaginaries from the interviews and allows the audience to add their own imaginaries of AI through interactive interfaces.
Project Plan
Milestone 1 (February 2): Planning the interactive elements and exhibit space
Milestone 2 (February 12): Visualize the (mock) data in TouchDesigner (text, images from royalty-free image API, animation, sound)
Milestone 3 (February 26): Create the interaction, i.e., how to get real-time data and send it to TouchDesigner
Milestone 4 (Demo Day): User test in the real space (ideal setting: private room for a projection-based art)
Milestone 5 (April 29): Iteration and production work
Milestone 6 (May 6): Documentation and thesis paper