All Projects Content

Introduction

Chimeria: Gatekeeper is a playable interactive conversational scenario, authored using the Chimeria Platform It uses a cognitive science-grounded model of social category membership to customize how conversational narratives unfold. Conversations between characters are important aspects of many videogames. However, most such conversational interactions in videogames are quite limited in how they take into account the identities of those characters. Conversation in videogames typically varies, if at all, based only on one aspect of the character such as an NPC referring to the character by race, class, or a gendered pronoun. Chimeria: Gatekeeper is an application of the Chimeria Platform, which seeks to developing conversational narratives that addresses such limitations.    

The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs is a polymorphic poem first implemented in a non-interactive form as the initial deployment of the Alloy algorithm for generative purposes within another system. It has been subsequently updated with each iteration of GRIOT and it provides a good example for tracing through the execution of an interactive polymorphic poem. As stated above, this polypoem is a commentary on racial politics, the limitations of simplistic binary views of social identity, and the need for more contingent, dynamic models of social identity. The dynamic nature of social identity is also reflected in the way the program produces different poems with different novel metaphors each time it is run. This LISP program draws on a set of theme domains such as skin, angels, demons, Europe, and Africa, given as sets of axioms.

The following example and discussion illustrate the interactive nature of this polypoem. It also recapitulates and extends the discussion of GRIOT architecture and formal description of text generation described above. After processing a user input keyword such as "Europe" entered at a ">" prompt, the first line could be:

her tale began when she was infected with white female-itis

or

she began her days looking in the mirror at her own pale-skinned death-figure face

Memory, Reverie Machine (MRM) is a text-based computational narrative system that is informed by stream of consciousness literature, cognitive linguistic theory of blending and analogy, artificial intelligence research and conventions of Interactive Fiction (IF). The system generates stories in which the main character shifts dynamically along a scale between a user-controlled avatar with low intentionality and an autonomous non-player character with high intentionality. Built on Harrell's GRIOT system that algorithmically controls the semantic hooks for interpreting system through blending, MRM adds a new degree of dynamic discourse structuring in order to create the appearance of dynamic intentionality and system agency.

The Generative Visual Renku project presents a new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art. Calligraphic iconic illustrations are composed by the system with both visual and conceptual constrains in response to user actions into a fanciful topography articulating the nuanced interplay between organic (natural or hand-created) and modular (mass-produced or consumerist) artifacts that saturate our lives.

Artists' Statement

Since the industrial age, modularity has revolutionized our everyday lives. For the sake of efficiency and optimization, things and activities were shaped into mass-produced interchangeable units, including our furniture, our dwelling places, our commuting, our consumptions, our entertainments, and our identities. In consumerist societies, modularity always lies at the center, whereas the complements are just scattered peripheries. Life is a journey back and forth between clustered majorities and isolated minorities.