Course Title

Latent Spaces & Permissionless Dreams

Course Description

What’s that Reality in the Future?

The philosophical and artistic part of the course is a blend of visually rich lecture-seminars that delve into the intersection of intermedia art, philosophy of technology and speculative design research. The explored narratives are based on recent discourse within the field of philosophy of technology and acknowledgement of fundamental challenges that life on earth faces in the era of the so-called, fourth industrial revolution. We’re going to explore AI as a technology of automation and algorithmic cognition, peer-to-peer computation systems, new networked infrastructures and mixed realities. We will address some topics in purely technical terms, while others through the lens of socio-humanitarian studies, derivative aesthetics, epistemic challenges posed by synthetic forms of knowledge production and, of course, design questions that these technological projections pose in both near and far futures. It is important to recognise the scale of impact of the current state of computational advancements not only on every aspect of how the world is built, but also on how it is studied. We will be exercising recognition and prediction of the trends and challenges to come, that will be central to artistic & design research. Students will be invited to look at AI, Web3 & MR both through the lenses of speculative design and practical knowledge in order to learn work with these technologies within their individual, group, commissioned or self-initiated practices.

Finally, your speculative design will be showcased as an academic pictorial with artwork. While there are no strict rules for the artwork form, it's better to focus more on speculative practice rather than investing too much effort into exhibition production. Consider using mediums like novels, AIGC, or mixed reality devices (like Vision Pro) to depict future mixed realities.

Keywords

Speculative Design, Philosophy of Technology (AI, XR, Web3), Technological Pluralisms, Mixed Realities

Course Objectives

• Gain knowledge about core research topics addressing ongoing and future technological conditions.
• Learning to approach any computationally specific project in critically reflexive ways is a skill that directly correlates with the quality and sustainability of any related design or artistic project.

Teaching Team

• Main Lecturers: Egor Kraft and Botao Amber Hu
• Teaching Assistant: Zhe Chen

Course Dates

• June 17 - July 5, 2024

Calendar

Check our Google Calendar

Invite us for Consultation:

Here is our calendar ID: 1ef8a9a58f7e7eaf83950ec69e584c6d75405c26a5bb95a2539459aafb734564@group.calendar.google.com

Syllabus

Kraft:

• Lecture 0: What's Speculative Design?

• Lecture 1. The Work of Art in the Age of Automation

• Lecture 2. Designing towards organological (tech as organ rather then tech as the other)

• Lecture 3. New materiality. Silicon. The next Intelligence. (an opposite approach to the above)

• Lecture 4. Human centric design & Beyond human Centrism. (where we don't make tech to be like us, but instead we try and learn from it to see beyond what were able to normally see)

• Lecture 5. Aesthetics of AI: Latent Spaces. Aethetics of Robotics: Uncanny Valley. Aethetics of Web3: Memecoinomy

• Lecture 6. Systemic Biases. Avoidable Dystopias.

• Lecture 7. Algorithmic Generator vs Discriminator. Art & Design Ecosytem.

• Lecture 8. Feedback Loops & Cybernetics. Feedback Loops & Conceptual Epistemics

• Lecture 9. Cellular Automata

• Lecture 10. Corrupt Ontologies, Resolution Reality Degradation, Echo Chambers & Data Cannibalism

• Lecture 11. Topology of Ai & Computing Systems, Infrastructure & Logistics

• Lecture 12. Intelligent Planet. Solaris. Planetary Scale Computation

• Lecture 13. Automation as Ecology. Automation Automates Autonomy

• Lecture 14. Cosmotechnics. Technological Pluralisms

• Lecture 15. Web3 Ecologies. Consensus. Incentivisation.

• Workshop 1: Workshop on Speculative Matrix

Amber:

• Lecture 1. Towards Speculative Realities
• Lecture 2: Towards Permissionless Realities
• Lecture 3: Towards Intercorporeal Realities
• Workshop 1: Workshop on Black Mirror Writing Room
• Workshop 2: Workshop on Generating Speculative Media Art
• Workshop 3: Workshop on Merging Mixed Realities
• Workshop 4: Workshop on AI and Afterlife
• Tutorial 1: Workshop on How to write a Pictorial / Paper for your artwork?

Reading List

• Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Yuk Hui. Art and Cosmotechnics
• Lev Manovich. AI Aesthetics.
• Egor Kraft and Ekaterina Kormilitsyna. On Content Aware and Other Case-Studies: Historical Investigations at Blazing Ultra Resolution
• Lev Manovich. Towards General Artistic Intelligence
• Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
• Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. Anatomy of an AI System
• Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play
• Erik Lintunen. Latent Spaces: The High-Dimensional Infosphere
• Venkatesh Rao. On the Design of Escaped Realities

Designer & Artist Reference

Amber's Lecture 1. Towards Speculative Realities

• Superstudio, "The Continuous Monument: On the River, project (Perspective)", 1969
• NEOM, "The Line"
• Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, "A/B Design Manifesto", 2009
• Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, "Faraday Chair", 1995
• Takram, "Shenu: Hydrolemic System", 2016
• Elliott P. Montgomery, "An Unresolvable Mapping of Speculative Design"
• SpeculativeEDU, "Dunne & Raby: Designers need to recognise their limitations and work with them"
• Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, "United Micro Kingdoms: A Design Fiction", https://unitedmicrokingdoms.org/, 2013
• Takram, https://www.takram.com
• Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby, https://dunneandraby.co.uk/
• Sputniko!, https://sputniko.com/
• Choy Ka Fai, https://digicult.it/news/choy-ka-fai-body-memory-speculations/
• nonhuman nonsense, https://nonhuman-nonsense.com/
• nonhuman nonsense, "The Pink Chicken Project"
• Thomas Thwaites, "Becoming a Goat"
• Jiabao Li, https://jiabaoli.org
• Neri Oxman, https://oxman.com/
• Ian Cheng, http://iancheng.com/
• Ian Cheng: An Emissaries Guide to Worlding (2018)

Amber's Lecture 2. Towards Speculative Realities

• Apple, ART Walk

Amber's Tutorial 1: Workshop on How to write a Pictorial / Paper for your artwork?

• Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research" (June 6, 1995)
• Sebastian Deterding, How to write a good CHI paper (that might just get accepted)
• Tools for Paper
  • Google Scholar
  • Semantic Scholar
  • Overleaf
  • Zotero
  • Anna Archieve

Workshop

• Workshop 1: Black Mirror Writer Room. by Amber. Jun 20, 2024.
• Workshop 2: Speculative Matrix Exercise. by Kraft. Jun 19, 2024.
• Workshop 3: Speculative Media Art. by Rem Rungu Lin (Guest). Jun 21, 2024.

Final Project

Your speculative design will be showcased as an academic pictorial with artwork. We strongly advise you to use the InDesign template to compose your Pictorial.

Propose your idea on the Github discussion. Please comment each other's topic. It's fun. https://github.com/realitydeslab/playshop-summer-2024/discussions/categories/proposal

• Stage 1: Proposal + Initial Lit Review. Due: Jun 26, 2024.
• Stage 2: Proposal 2 + Related Works and Idea Iteration. Due: Jun 27, 2024.
• Stage 3: Final Proposal. Due: Jun 28, 2024.
• Stage 4: Final Exhibition. Due: July 5, 2024.

Template for Pictorials: Template for ACM DIS Pictorial Template for ACM TEI Pictorial

Video

• Deadline 1: Tue 13:00

1. Tagline: 25 words
2. Video clip scenario/prompt for a 15 seconds video clip.
3. A keyframe image (could be made in stable diffusion, runway, dalle)

• Deadline 2: Wed 18:00

1. 15s LumaAI Generated Trailer with AI-Generated Voice Over Beginning with your keyframe and ending with next presenter's keyframe
2. Short Paper (IN ACM TEI Pictorial Format) At least 1300 words / at least 2 papers (excl. reference). Abstract: 100 words.
3. Digital Artefact: Video (1min max) / Image / 3D Model (USD format)

Potential Future Venue

TEI 2025: ACM Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction

Call for Pictorials. Due: July 25, 2024.

Examples:

• Fiona Bell, Joshua Coffie, and Mirela Alistar. 2024. Bio-Digital Calendar: Attuning to Nonhuman Temporalities for Multispecies Understanding.
• Oliver Child, Ollie Hanton, Colin Kellett, Matt Sutton, Bruce Drinkwater, and Mike Fraser. 2024. Tangible Explorations of Sonolithography.
• Çağlar Genç, Velvet Spors, Oğuz 'Oz Buruk, Mattia Thibault, Leland Masek, and Juho Hamari. 2024. Envisioning Transhuman Communication Research: Speculative Human Augmentation Technologies and Fictional Abstracts.
• Lea Albaugh, Jesse T Gonzalez, and Scott E Hudson. 2024. Tensions and Resolutions in Hybrid Basketry: Joining 3D Printing and Handweaving.
• Elzelinde Van Doleweerd, and Miguel Bruns Alonso. 2023. The Creation of a Holistic Interactive Dining Experience with Shape-Changing Food Materials at Restaurant Alchemist.
• Mafalda Gamboa. 2023. My Body, My Baby, and Everything Else: An Autoethnographic Illustrated Portfolio of Intra-Actions in Pregnancy and Childbirth.
• Dianya Mia Hua, Jeffrey Bardzell, and Shaowen Bardzell. 2023. Embodied Embroidery: Somaesthetic Interaction Design for Women’s Masturbation.
• Karen Anne Cochrane, Kristina Mah, Anna Ståhl, Claudia Núñez-Pacheco, Madeline Balaam, Naseem Ahmadpour, and Lian Loke. 2022. Body Maps: A Generative Tool for Soma-based Design.
• Rikke Hagensby Jensen, Enrique Encinas, and Dimitrios Raptis. 2022. Spicing It Up: From Ubiquitous Devices to Tangible Things Through Provocation.
• Iddo Yehoshua Wald and Oren Zuckerman. 2021. Magnetform: A Shape-change Display Toolkit for Material-oriented Designers.
• Sangwon Jung, Ruowei Xiao, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, and Juho Hamari. 2021. Designing Gaming Wearables: From Participatory Design to Concept Creation.
• Sara Nabil and David Kirk. 2021. Decoraction: a Catalogue for Interactive Home Decor of the Nearest-Future.

AHs 2025: Augmented Humans

Call for Pictorials. Due: Jan, 2025.

Archive.

DIS 2025: ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems

Call for Pictorials. Due: Jan 2025.

• The Tuning of Materials: A Designer’s Journey (DIS ’16)
• Designing for an other Home: Expanding and Speculating on Different Forms of Domestic Life (DIS ’18)
• Sensing Kirigami (DIS ’19)
• Designing with Intimate Materials and Movements: Making “Menarche Bits” (DIS ’20)
• Entangled Reflections on Designing with Leaky Breastfeeding Bodies (DIS ’21)
• Spooky Technology: The ethereal and otherworldly as a resource for design (DIS ’22)
• Tactful Feminist Sensing: Designing for Touching Vaginal Fluids (DIS ‘23)

C&C 2025: ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition

Call for Pictorials. Due: Jan, 2025.