Outcome outline

Moving forward I’ve begun to outline an outcome. I find setting out rules is beneficial for when I start making experiments. It keeps me from going in circles and just means I start producing things. I think limitations sometimes inspire greater creativity. For example the innovation of text based adventure games working with the technological limitations of the time. It makes you to strive against the barriers and push everything to a greater degree that you wouldn’t do otherwise if you had complete free reign.

Below are some scans of my notebook where start to think about the merging of my three research strands and how I can use what I’ve learned from them to infer some visual experimentation.

Looking at my research strands: media archaeology, digital sustainability and the more conceptual “interpersonal digital”, I created a Venn diagram to draw the commonalities. At their core they look at man’s relationship with technology which I’ve narrowed down to how we interact with computers -how we’ve interacted with them in the past and how we will interact with them in the future and what effect this will have on us. I want to question the sustainability of technologies such as AI and re contextualise something such as this which can be quite threatening in an approachable fashion. I want people to be able to interact with this and infer their own thumbprint onto my work, as AI does within our digital ecosystem. I want to create a balance and I want this balance to be multifaceted, to shift and work in response to different factors.

I was instantly drawn to Text-based adventure games not only for their interesting graphic style which is in itself a visualisation of the state of technology at the time but also because to me it is an example of a digital interaction in its purest form. It’s sitting down and having a conversation with a computer. Without the internet there isn’t this notion of extreme connectivity. It is an escape. You work with the computer to facilitate this escapist fantasy world around you. It’s a really pure balance and one that I think is the essence of digital sustainability which we need to channel today and going forward into the future. This stripping down of how we interact with the digital to text and image means we can implement so much more of ourselves. “It’s a virtual reality that exists in words”. For being technologically limited it is in a way so much more advanced because it facilitates this. Nowadays we have no control over our digital environment. It’s almost become cyclical as technological development has come so far that virtual reality has improved to the point where we can trick our senses into believing we are somewhere we are not.

It all clicked when I created this narrative using my surreal walk across a floodplain as a basis for my inspiration. It became a starting point for my own text-based adventure narrative that has imaginative and fantastic elements in it, aided by the use of AI which takes this even further.

I want to go about this with a generative design approach which I think is very fitting when working within a digital environment. Everything within the digital is coded, you hand over information which is translated by the digital coding language. I’ve loved exploring this idea of creating conditions but then handing something other for another being to interact with and mould – in this case the computer. Within the game context, this is taken further as after its development – the player infers the interaction. It also means it’s a unique interaction making it all the more interpersonal. The practice of media archaeology also buys into this approach. Combining the old and new. Framing an advanced technology – AI within the text-based adventure games of the 70s and 80s. The identity of both change as they work off each other. It is a multi-lateral response – man and machine, old and new. I love how Sougwen Chung works with machines. In her work with AI driven robots both parties comprise their lines to work with one another, neither is dominant. Abstractions to the human interference when introduced to the machine are welcomed and the miscommunication is celebrated.

I want to use old and new in my working method. I will use my Macintosh 2si to create and infer elements of my design through replication or utilisation of the technology. I feel this is an authentic way to draw from digital design of the past. John Maeda talks about the universality of the digital – it’s all code. I wonder if there would be a way to run my text-based adventure game on my Macintosh. In a way this is implementing AI a modern technology into this computer from the 90s when such a thing was never feasible. I will embrace the technical difficulties and document the experience, I will be able to draw from the attempt and thinking regardless. I also want to see how the analogue could infer the digital perhaps through the bridges such as faxing and photocopying. I originally took the photos of Portmeadow digitally, I wonder what the effect of taking them on film and then adding these layers of distortion through the digital would be.

Through this project I’m also learning about writing narratives – telling stories, creating pacing, establishing tone and moments of tension. It’s an exercise in a different kind of creativity. I’ve learnt not to neglect alternative forms of media to infer my understanding of the subject matter such as video games. I’ve looked at (and played) “Zork”, “Proteus”, “LSD Dream Emulator” and “Journey” to explore how a narrative can be told as we interact directly with it.

Screenshot from “Journey”

I’ve never been much of a gamer but it’s definitely good to inform my practice and research the wider digital sphere. Marcus said that in general we should adopt a playful approach to graphics. Through creating a game I hope to invoke this sense of play both in my method an in my outcome.