small thoughts on AI & smart design
A 5 minute panel presentation for the WSA Smart Design for the Future conference, 20/4/22, organised by Dr Yuanyuan Yin. Full details on the conference more…
analogue ai animal activity
Animal AI and A-Life ideas by level 1 Games Design & Art students: non-digital modelling of social behaviour, ecosystems and resources, sensing, movement and conflict. In response to this talk, and this brief: With materials to hand, model an AI animal mechanic in a board game or card game. Don’t design the whole game, just […] more…
artificial animals games intelligence
A lecture for year 1 BA Games Design & Art, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton more…
Building a creative AI Lab
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robot zoo
Our Creative AI in the Robot Zoo room at the University of Southampton Hands-on Humanities Day, Saturday 20th November 2021. AI and robots are set to play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. Will they be human-like in appearance or intelligence, or quite different from us – more like toys, pets, and other […] more…
Surviving the Singularity
Please go here: http://www.microethology.net/robot-zoo/ more…
chatbots in the gallery
Earlier this year we ran a Web Science Institute-funded pilot project called ‘Chatbots in the Gallery.’ The project team, Dr Sarah Hayden, Samantha Schäfer, Lesia Tkacz and myself explored the use of conversational agents or chatbot applications in an art gallery setting. Building on the SIAH-funded ‘Towards a Creative AI Lab’ project (Sam, Lesia and myself), […] more…
ethology of AI
What are the implications of taking the animality of AI and A-Life entities as real and not metaphorical or symbolic? This question in turn demands ontological questions of the synthetic animal itself: what kinds of speciation gives rise to it, what habitats and what kinds of behaviour shape its existence, and how might the status […] more…
not not animals
Does it make any sense to consider virtual animals as animal in any serious way? Both the naturalistically-rendered wolves of Legend of Zelda: the breath of the wild and the chatty anthropomorphised citizens of the Animal Crossing games are inorganic abstractions, assemblages of animated drawings, behavioural algorithms and audio clips. Their material substrates – digital/electronic […] more…
game | death | worlds
I compiled this sometime in the mid-2000s, as a curated list for Furtherfield. Riffing on gameworlds and lifeworlds, it resonates nicely with my current writing, but with a morbid twist… a study of the materiality and imaginary of artificial life in which most of the links and projects, and hence their animate entities, are now […] more…
one or several artificial wolves
Link encounters a group of animals on a green, grassy hillside, beautifully animated in the rich landscape. Large birds, and a wild boar, promise meat if successfully hunted. As the player-avatar approaches, carefully, to within range of his bow and arrow he spots a wolf tracking a wide A* path through the immediate environment. Proximity […] more…
Animal Crossing and utopia in a time of crisis
Note: the conversation that triggered this short piece has contributed to an article by Samuel Horti in the New Statesman. The release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons on March 20th 2020 has proved a remarkable moment of serendipity for both Nintendo and old fans and new players of the Animal Crossing games. Characterised by […] more…
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