1.4 More Than Human
Tracks
Track 4
Monday, June 24, 2024 |
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM |
Plaza P8 |
Speaker
Miss Danlu Fei
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
FP: "Benefit Game: Alien Seaweed Swarms"–Real-time Gamification of Digital Seaweed Ecology
11:00 AM - 11:25 AMAbstract
"Benefit Game: Alien Seaweed Swarms" combines artificial life art and interactive game with installation to explore the impact of human activity on fragile seaweed ecosystems. The project aims to promote ecological consciousness by creating a balance in digital seaweed ecologies. Inspired by the real species "Laminaria saccharina", the author employs Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning technology to generate variations of virtual seaweeds and symbiotic fungi. The audience can explore the consequences of human activities through gameplay and observe the ecosystem's feedback on the benefits and risks of seaweed aquaculture. This Benefit Game offers dynamic and real-time responsive artificial seaweed ecosystems for an interactive experience that enhances ecological consciousness.
Biography
Danlu Fei is a game developer and researcher. She owns a bachelor degree in Computer Science - Computer game. She worked as a gameplay programmer intern at several well-known game companies, including Ubisoft, Behaviour Interactive, and Netease.
She is pursuing her Ph.D degree in Computational Media and Arts (CMA) at HKUST. Her research interest is mainly around procedural content generation (PCG) in games, especially AI-based PCG.
Dr Andrew Burrell
Senior Lecturer, Visual Communication
University of Technology Sydney
FP: overGround:underStory — More-than-human Storytelling with Silicon and Carbon Kin
11:25 AM - 11:50 AMAbstract
This paper focuses on “overGround:underStory”, an ongoing series of experiments exploring the role of creative and speculative design and media art practice in understanding the uses and implications of established and emerging technologies within broader, more-than-human ecologies. It investigates more-than-human storytelling by positioning the creative practitioner as storyteller, medium or demiurge—an intermediary in a wider network. It looks to materials, methods, and contexts to seek an understanding of broader ecological networks in which we are all implicated—these networks being both physical and digital in nature. Ultimately, this paper is part of an ongoing exploration of material practices that attempt to decenter the practitioner while at the same time remaining ethically and morally answerable to the outcomes.
Biography
Andrew Burrell is a practice-based researcher and educator exploring virtual and digitally mediated environments as a site for the construction, experience, and exploration of memory as narrative. Their ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual environments. Andrew's networked projects in virtual and augmented environments have received international recognition. Andrew uses creative practice to research and understand the complexities of emerging and speculative technologies and is particularly interested in how these are implicated in more-than-human ecologies.
None Jimi DePriest
Masters of Fine Arts Student
The University of Western Australia
FP: Quadrupedal Robots as Extensions of Canine Racial Violence
11:50 AM - 12:15 PMAbstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and political implications of emerging quadrupedal robot models designed for use by the military and police in connection to the historical use of biological police dogs as tools of state sanctioned racial oppression. The intent is not to reinforce conceptual parallels between biological dogs and technology which merely imitates the quadrupedal motility found in the canine form, but to critically analyse the rampant zoomorphism found in rhetorical efforts which seek to induce both fear and empathy in the public's perception of autonomous robots engineered to extend neoliberal state power. This paper aims to undress the conflation of biological dogs with biomimetic autonomous robots in the context of the bio/techno epistemic procedures used to condition these inhuman agents to perpetuate discriminatory racist practices among others. I argue that the endeavour to assimilate quadrupedal robots into police forces through their perceptual alignment with biological K9 units positions them in a historical continuum of racist state violence that they cannot be dissociated from. I will delineate the converging ideological and material circumstances encompassing the neoliberal motivation to develop quadrupedal robots in addition to training biological canines to be instruments of state oppression.
Biography
Jimi DePriest is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher with a background in Anthropology and socialist organizing. Their work involves conducting Marxist and Anti Imperialist analyses of military technologies by examining the historical trajectories and socioeconomic conditions that led to their development. Jimi's emerging artistic practice is informed by their research and employs tactical media methodologies to create DIY robotic forms and political films.
Session chair
Kate Genevieve
University of Sussex
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