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Oct 27·edited Oct 27Liked by Spencer Chang

I'm finding myself drawn more and more to creating interactive art with technology and code. Whenever I'm looking for a new project, I definitely think a lot about the concepts you talk about on this blog.

The weekend before last, a friend and I participated in the same hackathon where we made the "Dreamages" project that I showed you before. I believe you may also enjoy this one. It touches on several concepts in this post, such as encouraging participants to adopt a frame of mind not normally experienced with most visual art (spirituality.)

I will preface what I'm about to say in the next paragraph with "It was a hackathon project so it's nowhere near as refined as we wanted it as it was made in about 36 hours tops."

It also directly uses your concept of a NFC coin to allow the "art installation" to follow the participant home, as it were. I don't think I can put links directly into this comment (and with good reason.) so if you search "the shrine tadhack" on youtube, you should be able to find it quickly. If not, let me know. Enjoy my overly dramatic acting (I'm the hooded one.)

A description of what we were going for, rather than what we managed to accomplish in the short amount of time given is here:

github com/PockyBum522/pockybum522-hackathons/tree/main/2024-10-TadHackGlobal

(I'll attempt to sanitize the link enough to get it into this comment. We'll see if it works.)

In concept, we wanted to incorporate a few key points:

(I'll refer to 'the person experiencing the art' as 'the parishioner' for a lot of these.)

- The person experiencing the art should have interesting visualizations projected into the art that were awe-inspiring. (Something else you've posted about.)

- This experience should attempt to give them a feeling of awe and/or spirituality, though as we call it "The Shrine at the Temple of Computing" no mention of religion is made beyond that, allowing for a religiously agnostic experience. (I'm an atheist, for example.)

- A ritual is then involved, where the person experiencing the art is then asked to offer their coin and say a prayer. (Although we don't refer to it as a prayer, because of my previous point.)

- Each coin has a NFC tag pre-programmed with a URL in it. The altar in The Shrine has a NFC reader under it that can tell what URL is on the coin. When the parishioner speaks when prompted, the code saves the URL so that it can later upload what they said to that specific URL.

- The code then asks chatGPT what the three most emotionally charged words were in the "prayer" that they said, and in a finished version of the project, it would likely show those three with a somewhat ethereal visual effect as well as change the projected lighting to match the mood of what they said.

- The parishioner would then be asked to take their coin, and after having experienced The Shrine, someone (in a real installation, a docent) would explain to them that they shouldn't do it right now, but later, when they feel the time is right, they should tap the coin to the back of their phone.

- As stated before, the code saves the URL on the coin. When the parishioner finished speaking their prayer and the code finished sentiment analysis, etc, the code uploads a webpage generated to contain their spoken words, as well as visual effects on that page that match the overall sentiment of what they said, and likely something interesting done with the three most emotionally charged words we got.

(Side note, as I don't like throwing the term AI around anywhere near as much as the VCs do, we wouldn't mention that it uses chatGPT in an actual installation. You'd simply see the three words show up, and if you thought really hard about it, you might notice there's visual effects based on the sentiment of your words.)

- The objective is to try and give the parishioner a new frame of mind for the experience as if they were someone performing an actual religious ritual in a temple of technology. Ideally, the visual effects, the fact that their own words are used in the experience, and the ritual of offering the coin and then being about to reflect on your words later using it would give the viewer a feeling of having a spiritual experience. Even if it doesn't accomplish that, though, giving them a new frame of mind as a parishioner in a theoretical temple of technology or computing is enough for us as the creator of said art.

We're going to work to refine it and put more time into it. There were several ideas we just didn't have time to implement to make the experience more streamlined and 'magical' and if you're interested I'll happily let you know when we have an update to show.

TL;DR: Thank you for everything you post. It has been wonderfully inspiring.

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Sep 30Liked by Spencer Chang

I was quite taken with the trampolines in Copenhagen next to the canal. People who were once walking expressionless are suddenly jumping up and down with a huge smile!

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ohhh thats a wonderful intervention

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