For Google I/O 2018, MoDa focused on AR, machine learning, and our increasingly troubling relationship with personal devices. Ferris and Hollenbach from UCLA's Conditional Studio tackled the computer's supposed ability to learn—that marketing promise that masks something less magical and more concerning. Haraldsson showed how AR might work as cinema rather than as corporate utility, while Freeka Tet transformed phones from consumption devices into instruments and interfaces that actually required something from their users.
All this happened using Google's own technologies—Pixel phones, Firebase, ARCore, GAN—but stripped of their promotional narrative. The work showed how these systems could be infiltrated and redirected, inviting the audience to recognize both their familiar contours and their unexplored possibilities.
Kate Hollenbach and Adam Ferriss with the UCLA Arts Conditional Studio - Los Angeles
The UCLA Arts Conditional Studio focuses on the intersections of software with art, politics, and everyday life. In this investigation, software can indicate everything from source code, networks, and UI patterns, to objects, ways of thinking, and practices of creation. They present two new pieces expanding on their "Impure Functions" series - i.e functions that re-contextualize their inputs. Kate Hollenbach piece plays with our relationship to data and how it can be correlated to a person's behavior, both as an individual and as part of a group, in essence creating data "portraits". Adam Ferris' interpretation combines Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and computer vision to create new faces for attendees based on a corpus of facial imagery fed to the network, pushing Machine Learning's potential to both learn and create.
Harald Haraldsson - New York
Harald is an Icelandic artist based out of New York, currently a resident at Cornell Tech's "Connected Experiences Lab". Harald holds master's degree in computer engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is presenting "Platform", which is part of an ongoing exploration into mobile computational filmmaking. A single continuous take captured with a custom mobile application, it combines perspectives and human/digital presence in a geometric rendition of an urban "derive"
Freeka Tet - New York/Los Angeles
Freeka Tet is a highly multidisciplinary artist, using a variety of skills to develop commentary on our digital behaviors through a variety of media.
His new piece, “Uncanny Valley”, is a combination of mobile development, machine learning, web scraping, digital sound processing, 3d scanning and game engine development. It is a intense blend of the physical and digital through an unusual interactive system, inviting visitors to "scratch" a Pixel 2 phone to control a series of soundtracks composed by Freeka. The user interaction manipulates a surreal visual collage, living somewhere between AR videogame and collage. Freeka will soon be releasing a record that will be available on the Play and App stores and that can only be heard when a phone running the app spins on a turntable.