Entering the back half of my junior year at Mary Washington, I felt pretty comfortable and prepared to head back to school. However, I also knew I was going into classes unlike most of my previous ones. DS106 is, from just the first week, a very different class than I am used to. I had some trouble initially understanding how to set up a domain and create blog posts, but was able to navigate the issues through several help pages linked on the course website. I have never had to do something like that before, so of course it was a learning experience for me. I feel much more confident finding my way around the various websites and communications streams associated with this course now despite initial struggles.
After completing the film review and goals for the course, I felt much more capable of figuring out this course as I go along. It was challenging at first, but as long as I keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone and learning, I will keep improving areas that I do not have experience in. Ultimately, I hope to keep improving my understanding of digital media throughout this course and I think the first week has provided a solid foundation and given me confidence that I can figure each assignment out.
I have really enjoyed learning new things about website design, although I have yet to fully personalize and make my domain into something I am proud of. I’m sure there is a lot more learning to be done about how to properly set up the website and make it accessible, but I am excited to face those challenges and work around them as best as I can!
As a computer science major, working on my digital creation skills will aid in my professional career in the future.
The statement above would be the best “honor roll” student response I could have fabricated, but to be completely honest, I enrolled in this class as a filler for the digital intensive for my graduation requirement. It also fell under the CPSC category and I was hoping to raise my departmental GPA. A bit insincere, but I’d rather say it how it is instead of sugar coating it. However…
Making that first film review post about WALL-E rekindled my love for blogging and making posts about random stuff. In the past, I ran a Instagram page about my journey to become a college golfer, recording swings, practices, and results. It was a way for me to express myself in the activity I enjoyed the most at the time.
Many of the younger kids might know what a Finsta is. It is a slang term for a “fake” Instagram where posts are more casual and is reserved for only your closest friends, used more as a blog rather than a snapshot portrait of your best life in a fabricated lens that most Instagram accounts nowadays adhere to. I really enjoyed posting on that account frequently with various posts about my favorite music, shows, rants about life, random silly photos…
Until I stopped.
I don’t really know why or how I got off the social media grind, but I just stopped. Maybe it was because of the stresses of graduating and finding a job after school, and having my time taken up by other responsibilities, but I’ve definitely felt a lack of connection within my circles. I’ve definitely seen some advantages of cutting back on social media, but there’s been days where I wonder what my best friends from high school have been up to. So much of the world is online now, and cutting back on the internet feels as if you’re pulling yourself out of your own little connected bubble.
While DS106 and the community is not private enough where I can share all of my personal life with my classmates, it definitely is an outlet where I can express myself in ways that I’ve never explored before, and I’m excited to utilize this platform to enhance the way I create things to share with my peers but also with the people most important to me. I don’t really know what I truly want out of this class yet, but I just want to start creating. Whatever form of media I need to create for the week, I’m excited for the challenge.
In the first week of this course, I had to review a movie I had seen over a decade ago, which was a fun experience, as my blurred memories made the viewing of the movie more interesting. Reviewing movies are difficult. Articulating my thoughts on such a complicated movie was harder than expected. But overall, it was great.
Creating my website was something I had to do in DGST106, so I did not have to go through the difficulty I experienced once more. I’ve used my domain for multiple classes, so I am comfortable with uploading posts. But, I would like to post more personal views in the future, such as the movie review. I am excited to see what assignments I am able to work on in the future, as creativity is promoted in this course.
Week one is officially out of the way. I must say I had no idea what I was getting myself into with this course. It was all a bit overwhelming at first and after reading our weekly assignment at least ten times and following some of the guides I finally figured out how to set up WordPress and how to write my blog entries.
So far it has been interesting, I am forced out of my comfort zone and having to learn things I wouldn’t on my own. I watched the movie The Matrix for probably the tenth time in my life. My short review can be viewed here.
Overall I am excited to continue this course and I am looking forward to learning more and slowly stumbling my way through this as I eventually get a better grasp of being a digital storyteller.
My goal for this class is to work on creative exercises through different mediums and I feel that this course can provide that. I have some experience with digital media in DGST 101, but it was mostly assignments to become familiar with the subject. The creative freedom in this course is perfect for me, so I am excited to come up with unique creations to share with the class.
Meet the Robinsons is a movie that I watched several times growing up, but watching it again focusing on the AI aspect gave it a different feel. The film centers around Lewis, a 12-year-old orphan who is an ambitious inventor. He invents a memory scanner to try to find his birth mother and brings it to his school’s science fair. Going to the science fair, Lewis meets Wilbur, a 13-year-old claiming he is from the future and attempting to recover a time machine taken by someone wearing a bowler hat. The scanner does not work when he tries to demonstrate it because the antagonist, Bowler Hat Guy sabotaged it and ends up stealing it. Lewis and Wilbur go on a time-travel adventure avoiding Bowler Hat Guy and Lewis ends up finding out more about his family in the process.
Time travel is a significant component of the movie, with the usual issues of trying not to disrupt the timeline too drastically. Since the movie has a dystopian feel to it, it can serve as a warning about AI and the growth of technology in the future. The main purpose of the film is not to focus on AI, but it is a key component of the futuristic world portrayed in the movie.
Recently, it has seemed like a lot of TV series and movies incorporate AI in a way that makes people fearful of it. Watching the movie before, I did not realize how much AI can make people concerned about the future of technology. However, since AI has become much more advanced recently, it has led to a growing fear of the potential capabilities of that technology. Rewatching the movie now really made it clear how much the perception of AI has changed over the past few years and the things that stood out to me this time are so different that what stood out in the past.
When I registered for this class I wasn’t quite sure what exactly I was signing up for. I was looking for an online course because they are a bit easier for me with my current work schedule. Now that the course has started I have a better idea of what this course is about.
I am not a tech savvy person but I am looking forward to this course challenging me in new ways and forcing me out of my comfort zone. So if I have to pick a goal it is to pass the course and learn new skills that I had no intentions to learn a few months ago.
If you looked at this film poster for Wall-E for the first time, you never would’ve guessed that the movie delves into the darker possibilities and repercussions of AI, and its eventual irreversible impact on planet earth. I watched WALL-E as a wee elementary schooler all the way back in 2008, and at the time, I was enamored by the personable and cute little characters that gave these robots humanlike characteristics.
I tend to write off Disney and Pixar movies as mostly cookie cutter stories without much substance, but I was pleasantly surprised by the themes explored in the movie, now being experienced from a different perspective in my early 20’s.
WALL-E highlights the effect of technology, corporate greed, and automation on our world as a whole, and is an example of how technology can potentially lead to our demise. In the film, earth’s ecosystem has already been ravaged due to environmental neglect and human negligence. The megacorporation Buy n Large evacuated all of the humans left on earth to live on a giant spaceship, where all of their daily lives are automated. Basic human tasks such as eating and cleaning are all done by AI drones, while the humans doze off and relax in their floating techno chairs, causing rampant obesity.
Before leaving the planet, the Buy n Large corporation left thousands of trash cleaning robots on earth, but only WALL-E remained standing. From the start of the film, WALL-E is shown to have a distinct personality, with humanlike characteristics while also enjoying it’s time on the barren planet earth all by itself. The characterization of WALL-E is the film’s way of depicting AI as potentially having fleshed out intelligence and a mind of it’s own in the future even without human influence around it, opening up the possibility to the audience that AI can potentially be developed to be more than just tools.
This injection of personality into a robot theme continues when WALL-E meets its love interest of the film, EVE. Yes, you heard me right, robot romance!
EVE is an AI programmed to assist in potentially making earth habitable once more. When EVE visits earth, it meets WALL-E, who then gives EVE the sole plant remaining on earth. EVE takes a probe ship back to the spaceship along with the plant and her newfound friend WALL-E. When they return, the captain of the ship finds that EVE has lost the plant on their journey back, and blames WALL-E for the mishap. This is the point in the story where the rest of the sci-fi plot commences, and I probably can’t detail all of it here. In the end, the humans and the robots all return to planet earth, in hopes that they can change their habits of living for the better and slowly reclaim earth once more.
I’d like to highlight that the robot romance and making these seemingly sentient AI’s so personable created a lot of buzz during the late 2000’s, where topics of AI weren’t explored heavily in popular culture and media. The film successfully highlighted both the dark dystopian nature of AI and the negative effects it can have on the productivity of the human race, while also animating cute happy robots with big eyes that spotlights the potential of AI and human harmony with a hopeful outlook on the future.
On a side note, I decided to not used designated pronouns for WALL-E and EVE since they’re robots, but the Wikipedia page for this movie refers to them as he and she. Maybe it’s implied that these robots have assigned genders and should be referred to as such?
It was quite nice to revisit one of my childhood favorites on a snowy day in with some hot chocolate. I’ve been inspired to circle back to more of my favorite movies and shows in the near future. In particular, I want to revisit one of my favorite anime shows called Steins;Gate that delves into the world of advanced technology and time travel, but focuses in on AI themes in its sequel, Steins;Gate 0. Hopefully I can talk about this show in more detail for a future AI106 project.
The A.I. related movie I choose to watch is the 1999 film The Matrix. At a risk of showing my age I remember when this movie came out and how revolutionary some of the special effects and action sequences were.
The movie follows a man named Thomas Anderson, who goes by the alias “Neo”, who discovers he is living within a simulation, known as The Matrix, created by a sentient machines in order to use humans as a power source. He is able to escape this simulation with the help of Trinity and Morpheus and he assists them in resisting the machines inside the Matrix and the real world.
The movie still holds up well nearly 25 years after its theatrical release. It can just as easily be enjoyed as a mindless action movie as it can be as a deep, dystopian, science fiction movie that explores some of the more frightening possibilities of having machine overlords using humans as batteries.
When I was an elementary school student, I would visit my cousin’s home frequently. There was always a movie playing that would affect me for a week or two. But one day, I remember seeing the beginning of Ghost in the Shell playing, which gave me nightmares for a while. The stare of the main character gave me an uncanny feeling. Her inhuman gaze was etched into my mind, but I hadn’t realized until recently, that that was intentional on the creator’s part.
I recently watched the movie again and was blown away. Many years had passed since I last saw it, so my memories were still blurry on the plot. With expectations of intense action and violent scenes, I was caught off-guard on how deep the story goes into the thought of existentialism and dualism. Motoko Kusanagi, also known as Major, is the protagonist of the story. She is a full-body cyborg who questions whether her soul, also known as ghost, exists. The story takes a turn when the antagonist is introduced into the story. The Puppetmaster is an AI that was created to perform illegal activities for the Government, but had become sentient and gone rogue. I recommend watching the movie, so I will keep the summary short.
The final conversation between Motoko and the Puppetmaster is an interesting view on dualism, which is the relationship between the body and the soul, but since the perspective comes from an AI, it sheds a light on the topic from a unique angle. It explains that humans are very similar to AI, since DNA can be seen as a program that is designed to preserve life, but there are subtle differences that draw a line between humans and AI. The act of reproduction is something that defines humans, which is also a wish of the Puppetmaster. The Puppetmaster’s desire to become human is a parallel to Motoko Kusanagi, since she wishes to become more human too. It tells Motoko that they should merge into one to create life, but Motoko is hesitant, since she is afraid of becoming something other than her true self. The Puppetmaster explains to Motoko that her desire to find her true self is a restricted view that limits her. Humans change constantly, so she must accept the same to truly become human. They both decide to merge into one and are inserted into a child cyborg’s body. Thus, new life is created.
My explanation does not do the movie justice, so I recommend everyone to view it. I give it a 9/10.
