Author Archives: paul bond

Talking Tech Noir, part deux

We’re working with a them of Tech Noir in ds106 this semester, and as I mentioned before, we can’t really expect the class to know what we’re talking about, so Jim and I recorded a half-hour discussion which hopefully brings some clarity. We discuss meanings, themes and history, where we are and where we may want to go.

We have a list of Tech Noir/Cyberpunk media to help people get familiar. Is there anything that should be added?

Tech Noir 106

Jim had talked about doing a Tech Noir themed course many years ago, and now we’re looking to revisit the idea. It feels appropriate to the times. I can’t expect everyone to be an aficionado of the genre though, so I’m thinking about ways to be expansive with it, to offer people more ways to connect. Incorporating cyberpunk is an obvious one. I also want to add Technopoly to bring a philosophical lens to the idea.
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“…a story, a tale we missed”

I was intrigued by Bryan Alexander’s book club proposal to read the Project 2025 document. Unfortunately I have too many summer projects competing for time and attention to participate meaningfully. But in the spirit of AI106 I have taken passages from the document and fed them to AI song generator Udio to make death metal tracks.

Restoring Limits

[Verse]
Ruling class, they slash and tear, they take away our rights
Centralize their power, far from American sights
Supra-national treaties bind us, never let us be
In the grip of bureaucrats, we lose our sovereignty

[Chorus]
Restoring limits, bring back the fight
Accountability, let’s make it right

Reclaiming Our Rights

[Verse]
Rulers climbing high, they can’t hear our cries
Treaties bind our hands, as the Constitution dies
Career pawns, unseen, they tighten the chains
Power games they play, and we’re the ones who pay

[Chorus]
Slash through the lies, expose their deceit
Tear down the walls, take back our streets
No backing down, we’ll stand and we’ll fight
United we’ll rise, reclaiming our rights

The prompt for these was:
Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and policymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing “experts,” to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State, heavy metal, death metal,

I’m not actually a death metal aficionado so I can’t give it a proper musical or lyrical critique. My guess is the site is mapping words and phrases to a statistical model of death metal lyrics to come up with the song, so I’m not surprised that “slash and tear” made it through. I think the songs get at a sense of the passage, while perhaps giving it more extreme coloration.

Challenge the Power

[Verse]
Restore our thinking to thrive
Establish truth, let it revive
No more interests’ clash, we’ll drive
Strength in analysis, we’ll arrive

[Chorus]
Challenge the power, break the flood
Independent minds, through the blood
Challenge the power, stand and fight
Free the thought, into the night

Revive the Mind

[Verse]
Restore the mind, eradicate the lie
Build a fortress, let the truth arise
Break the chains that bind, dismantle the guise
Return to the essence, intelligence revived

[Chorus]
Through the fire, through the night
Restore the truth, the guiding light
Break through walls, shatter might
In this battle, wisdom’s flight

This prompt was:
Restore DIE critical thinking. Establish mechanisms to restore analytic integrity and return to true intelligence-driven operations. The next Administration should eliminate the conflict of interest in the current customer-based model (in which the customer is always right) by enforcing time-tested procedures that guarantee independent analysis, even if it means challenging policymakers’ assumptions. The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security’s leadership role should be expanded to include providing analytic top-line views and improve DIE transparency by highlighting diverging views., heavy metal, death metal,

I was wondering how it would interpret DIE – as an acronym or the word die? But given the context maybe it didn’t know what to do with the word. Or maybe the whole passage just doesn’t compute. It looks like Udio picked up some words and ran off in its own direction.

Torch of Integrity

[Verse]
The USAGM’s a story, a tale we missed,
Of faith and hope in shadows kissed.
A chance to shine, in world’s eyes wide,
Lost in the dark, where ideals hide.

[Chorus]
Burn the torch of honest days,
Journalistic light must blaze.

Shadows of Promise

[Verse]
The promise was bright as the sun
But shadows darken, and now it’s gone
Unbiased truth we failed to keep
A chance lost deep, in silence we weep

[Chorus]
Lost opportunity, our ideals are torn
In the darkness, will we ever be reborn?

The passage used here was:
The USAGM is a story of a lost opportunity both to help restore the world’s confidence in the promise and ideals of America and to set a high mark for journalistic integrity and unbiased reporting. , heavy metal, gothic metal,

These stayed a little more focused, probably because I only used one sentence as a prompt. So far, my intuitive feeling is that it is molding the inputs on a metal model. How would the character change if I made it dream pop or big band jazz? But I don’t think I want to go for an ironic tone here. A cut-up poetry approach might yield some interesting results. I could extract evocative or provocative phrases and put them together as prompts or use them as lyrics and see what the system does with them.

None of this gives any insight into Project 2025 or its relevance to education, but it is something of a pseudo-creative outlet.

Rustproofing

Yesterday’s Daily Create involved using one of the Photofunia effects to put text in rust. As usual, I did the most obvious thing and made a GIF from a verse of My My, Hey Hey. Maybe that’s only obvious to people of a certain demographic though. But since nothing exceeds like excess, I decided to do the whole song. I’m not sure if it was worth the effort. I like the idea in concept, but in practice it’s probably as tedious to watch as it was to make. A kinetic typography approach might have worked better, but definitely would have been a lot more work.

Photofunia has many interesting effects, some of which have shown up in Daily Creates before. What interests me is not so much the effects in themselves, but how they can be used as building blocks, and contribute to a bigger story. Not unlike our experiments in AI106 – we played with generative applications to make stuff, but where the course really succeeded was in what we made out of that stuff. They give you this but you make it that, to paraphrase a song of the past.

We’re creative because we care

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I asked Dr. Oblivion if digital storytelling students should continue to experiment with AI in making art, and got responses from both sides of him. Has he ever steered us wrong?

For our final final week, let us celebrate the creativity of the class. Consider these two prompts:

  • What is the best thing you saw in the course? Explain why it was good.
  • What was the best thing you made in the course? Explain what you got out of making it.

We at ds106 have had some legal threats from Aggressive Technologies, even as they profess to love us. So let’s frame our closing week as the Aggressive Technologies conference, where we will each do a brief video, less than two minutes, addressing the above prompts and making a case for why Aggressive Technologies should support ds106. You can do this using your character, or as yourself, or as someone else. You have total power, as our old friend Bob Ross would say. Have fun with it. Embed the video in a post and tag it ATconference. My plan is to put a menu link on the http://ds106.ai/ site that collects all the posts with the tag, so they will all be in one spot.

Scenes from the whale rapture

The other week one AI said that the internet was like “diving into a vast digital ocean where you can swim with majestic whales of knowledge or get caught in the undertow of clickbait and cat memes” and I asked another to visualize that metaphor. One of my colleagues was so enamored of the image that she asked it for a few more. This was the first of the collection that I saw:

It looks like there should be a story to go with the image. That might even be a good idea for a daily create. You could probably do that with any of them. Take this one:

I see a whale rapture while the planet bursts at its seams. It’s like an alternate version of Star Trek 4

And then there’s the cat riding the steampunk whale:

I wonder if he’s related to Dr. Ravioli? He looks like he might know everything too.

Mysteries abound. “Mwaa haa haa!”

a cartonn character laughing, Mwaa Haaa Haaa

I thought I’d bring together a few of the class projects. Some interesting things are going on. Mysteries abound.

Dr. Oblivion has some competition: https://cat-on-a-moped.com/uncategorized/final-video/ This was unexpected. Is Aggressive Technologies behind this? Is it connected to their lawyer’s threats? Is Dr. Oblivion the mole? So many questions…

Note the Doctor’s diabolic laughter embedded in the middle of Destiny’s great AI interview video. Is he giving us a warning, or inadvertently showing his hand? The whole video is worth a watch for the way it weaves a variety of viewpoints together.

We can also see Eisenhower, of the military-industrial complex fame, warn about Aggressive Technologies. Or has the president been hacked?

Some people used Gooey.ai to do the lip-syncing, like in this debate between the doctor and Isaiah Beacon. It is good when people note which tools they’re using, and even better when they link to them and explain the ins and outs of the process. I wonder what the competition between Isaiah Beacon University and Oblivion University would be like? Is there a connection between Dr. Forges and Isaiah Beacon? Hmmm….

This video of the hacker getting hacked is another one worth checking out. Note the various techniques used to keep it moving and hold our interest – different voices, the use of titles and clips, and the underlying sound effects. It builds on an earlier story and ends on an ominous note suggesting more to come, while still holding together as a complete story in itself.

Final project: “A robot uprising would be a bonus”

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I asked Dr. Oblivion for his thoughts on the final project. I don’t know how helpful they are though. So here are the final project details:

  • You have the option of doing the final project individually or as a group project. If you do it as a group project, each group member needs to blog about it.
  • Your project should showcase the multiple digital media skills you have developed over the semester. It could take the form of a post or a subdomain with embedded media, or a complex video incorporating audio production and design, or something else if you have a different idea.
  • Potential final project prompts:
    • Aggressive Technologies vs ds106. See the visit from AT’s legal counsel. How should we respond, individually or as a group? The idea of pitting the class against its own creation has a sort of Frankenstein or Utron appeal to me. What do you think? ds106 takes no guff from corporate lawyers.
    • Characters and Aggressive Technologies. Bring some of the story threads the class has developed over the past several weeks to a conclusion. You might build upon the radio show project, or go in a different direction. This concept has good potential for collaboration because you could develop intersecting or interrelated storylines and work remotely and asynchronously. It would be interesting to see how many stories we could get to intersect, or even connect tangentially.
    • Analysis of pros & cons of artificial intelligence based on course experiences. What can we do with AI? What should we do with AI? What would Dr. Oblivion do? In spite of that last question, this would be an option to take a serious approach to issues of artificial intelligence. Has AI helped you be more creative in ds106, or has it felt more like a cheat or a crutch? Perhaps a little of both?
  • As with everything else in ds106, you have a great deal of freedom as to how you interpret these prompts and execute the project.
  • One of the things that makes ds106 what we know and love is the student input. Perhaps you find the above prompts lacking. Do you have ideas for final project prompts? It should be something that builds upon what we’ve been doing, involves the use of a variety of digital media, and gives people room for creative exploration. Feel free to post ideas, thoughts or questions in the #finalprojects channel in Discord. Take advantage of this if you’re looking for collaborators as well, or if you have questions about the assignment.
  • Project size: You want the project to showcase what you can accomplish with digital media. It is a two-week project, so it should represent a fair amount of work. Your write-ups for each week should detail the thought processes and effort that go into the project. Ideally it should be something that you will want to archive and show off to family, friends, and future generations.

Timeline

Due Friday, 4/19, by midnight: a weekly summary outlining your project and detailing the work done so far. It would be a good idea to post one or two progress updates during the week, to share ideas and get feedback from the class, and to prevent procrastination.

Due Friday, 4/26: the finished project and a weekly summary reflecting on the work and your creative process, and describing how well it represents what you have learned over the semester. The project and the summary could be separate posts or they could be included in one – whichever works better for your project. Again it would be a good idea to post a progress report during the week.

Daily Creates

Daily Creates are optional for these two weeks.

“Happy surfing.”

For today’s Daily Create, we were to build on the classic “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon. I wondered how Dr. Oblivion would respond to the query:

Then, in my infinite laziness curiosity, I asked the same of ChatGPT. It gave me a bland list, so I asked it if it could express the ideas in humorous metaphors. That didn’t turn out much better, but it did suggest that the internet was like “diving into a vast digital ocean where you can swim with majestic whales of knowledge or get caught in the undertow of clickbait and cat memes.” The underwater cat concept had potential, so I asked Copilot to draw me a picture.

an underwater scene of whales swimming over a seabed og cats on computers

They both brought up cats. It occurred to me afterwards that cats are highly correlated with dogs as well as the web, so maybe I should have expected that. Perhaps those cats also represent the digital overlords that the doctor warned us about.