WiFi’s questions are dressed in the vernacular of captive portals, web forms, ad cookie requests, chat boxes, CAPTCHAs, and other trappings/annoyances of the contemporary mobile web. The bodiless WiFi tries on all of the visual materials available to it as it works to understand the player. Confused by dozens of competing dictionary definitions, paradoxes of choice, concerns of moral responsibility, and the possibility of a deterministic universe, WiFi confronts the player directly with the realities of free will and freedom.

Free WiFi is a work in progress. Estimated completion date: early 2023.

User-facing AR is typically deployed on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram to create amusing or attractive selfies to be shared with friends and followers. But Find Yourselfie encourages players to pull their faces in unusual and perhaps uncomfortable ways to find and solve a collection of dreamlike, interactive visual metaphors. As players put on these absurd mediated performances, Find Yourselfie surfaces how facial expressions can both indicate behavioral intent and actively influence an expresser’s emotions.

Find Yourselfie is a work in progress. Estimated completion date: 2024.

Who? is a work in progress. Estimated completion date: January 2023.

Full paper available at:
https://journal-doi.org/10.731/pcbi.1007742/

It has some surprises!

The play is not publicly available, but I wrote an essay about the project that became its own project! It’s titled “I Wrote a Participatory Play For My Friends And All You Get Is This ________ Essay”,

Download now for Firefox and Chrome.

A Whole Different Ball Game: Playing Through 60 Years of Sports Video Games presents a selection of more than 40 playable sports video games spanning the last six decades, examining the complex relationships between game, sport, media, and culture. Despite the widespread prevalence of video games today, sports are still the games that Americans most regularly encounter, whether on television, via apparel and other consumer goods, or through play, including organized leagues and pickup games. Video game developers leverage this familiarity by producing some of the highest grossing titles on the market. The most lucrative professional sports leagues—NFL, NBA, FIFA, MLB, and NHL—are closely involved in the annual production of games that simulate the rules, rosters, and visual experiences of their play and, just as important, their televised spectacle.

Thousands of video games over the industry’s 60-year history have adapted these and dozens of other sports, sometimes exaggerating or elaborating on their familiar elements. The exhibition considers what it means for full-body sports to be transposed to screens and controllers in the service of realism, who is or isn’t represented in sports video games, the ways broadcast sports and video games reflect one another, and the primacy of statistics in professional sports and sports simulators. The exhibition also considers how video games have recently become sports themselves, creating passionate communities and cultures of competition that were once only the domain of sports.

(Based on a photo booth created in 2013 with Reid Bingham and Sean McIntyre.)

These new forms are the result of an accelerated genre-making process, made possible by the pervasiveness of affordable cameras and network connections, the staggering number of new voices this technology has enabled to produce and distribute video outside traditional mainstream methods, and the new ways by which we actively engage with this media. The history of internet video includes a long list of now-defunct but significant technologies and communities, but today these encounters are dominated by YouTube, alongside platforms and apps including Facebook, Twitch, Snapchat, and Instagram.

The new genres of online video respond directly to our contemporary moment, speaking to the possibility of the niche audience, the internet’s capacity for rapid feedback, and humankind’s vast diversity of taste. They are less concerned with legacy narrative forms than with urgently responding to matters of intimacy, identity, agency, our capacity to understand enormous volumes of information, and the nature of truth. That these new forms vary markedly from those of the past requires a close examination of online video on its own terms.

For various reasons (distrust of companies and governments, shifting communities, the generally toxic and bad faith nature of online discourse) I mainly opt out of social media these days, but I’ve accepted that much of the world still operates on these platforms, so I’ve been working on ways to participate in them on my own terms.

Many of my friends and acquaintances use Instagram (and expect others to use it) to casually keep tabs on their communities. By not participating, I have seen relationships fade away, which is a bummer. I regularly snap photos with my pocket device, but I’ve resisted investing any time into a new photo platform since I gave up on Flickr. Plus, I’ve seen how people can live their lives to perform for their social feeds, and I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m tempted to go down that path.

So I wrote Autogram, which keeps my friends posted on my life while handling all the decision-making. Plus, since this all goes through a machine vision algorithm that pretty arbitrarily selects and captions the photos, I also get to make fun of the whole Instagramming endeavor.

Running on a Raspberry Pi, Multicaptions displays fullscreen video (up to full HD) while simultaneously processing and displaying subtitles in one or more selectable languages on a separate graphic LCD or VFD display. It is an affordable, easy-to-build, easy-to-maintain, open source project using completely off-the-shelf hardware.

Multicaptions is inspired by Figaro System’s Simultext (known as “Met Titles” at the NYC Metropolitan Opera).

The GIF Elevator features newly commissioned GIFs by six artists, animators, and illustrators who represent some of the most important and influential GIF makers working today and whose practices represent a sample of the extraordinary breadth and diversity of the contemporary GIF. Each artist has created four original GIFs that will be presented as two-month installations on the walls and ceiling of the Museum’s elevator, an exhibition environment that offers a unique and intimate encounter with the work.

The following items were on the menu: avocado toast, a Bagel Store rainbow bagel, Black Tap milkshakes, a Dominique Ansel Bakery cronut, an original Four Loko, a Manila Social Club $100 24-karat gold donut, 3 cans of La Croix, and Vinnie’s pizza-topped pizza.