Dissertation Consult
This week’s consultation focused on refining the clarity and coherence of my dissertation proposal. Andreas provided positive feedback on the overall writing style, structure, and integration of research, while highlighting areas that require sharper definition, particularly around objectives, terminology, and conceptual framing.
Feedback Breakdown
Research Question and Objectives
My research has three modes of inquiry and each serves a different function, but are connected by the same overarching research question.
⑴ Experiment
These are early explorations such as quick studies or prototypes
that has helped me to investigate ideas conceptually and materially. It explores possibilities,
generate data, and understand the research question experientially.
⑵ Data-Driven Visualisation
This stage interprets or maps the insights from
the experiments into visual forms. It's where the translation of abstract algorithmic precesses
into perceivable, aesthetic outcomes begin. The aim is to reveal patterns, relationships, and
phenomenas behind algorithmic identity in a visible and comprehensive way.
⑶ Interative Prototypes
These are the final artefaces or installations that
embody the findings and allow audiences to engage directly. They extend the visualisations into
a participatory or immersive format which merges the research with digital exhibition design.
The purpose is to invite reflection, participation, and dialogue to test how the insights
function in real-time interaction.
Refining Research Question
• The research question should be overarching and broad enough to encompass all three parts.
•
The objectives are to answer the research question.
• The actions from the objectives are how
they are being fufilled, showing the methodology in motion.
• Each action should loop back to
answer or refine the research question.
• Current objectives can be less vague and more
explicit. It should be functional, actionable, and aligned to the methods.
About Exhibition
Another World Is Possible
This week, we went on a field trip to ArtScience Museum. The exhibition "Another World Is Possible" shares about how we imagine the future. At a time when dystopian visions dominate popular culture, bringing together over 100 exhibits shaped instead by resilience, creativity, and hope.
Unfolding across seven chapters, it explores the practice of world-building across cinema, design, architecture, and literature. Drawing from Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and Asian perspectives, the exhibition presents diverse ways of envisioning the future, forming an aesthetic of tomorrow that is luminous, organic, and alive with possibility.
Chapter 1: We are Authors of the End
For more than a century, cinema and television have shaped how we imagine the future. Many iconic films gave form to that anxiety of the future as something to fear, including Metropolis (1927), to Blade Runner (1982), to The Matrix (1999). The future on screen was dominated by the ominous rise of machine intelligence, the breakdown of societal order, and a planet scarred by ecological collapse. Dystopia became the default, a shared visual language that was dark, seductive, and hard to unlearn.
The montage presents scenes of collapse, control, and catastrophe drawn from decades of cinema and television. Presented in sequence, they reveal a visual vocabulary that has been absorbed into public consciousness. The repetition of dystopian images has narrowed our capacity to see otherwise.
Thoughts
I was struck by how seamlessly sound, light, and spatial design came together to evoke this as a living, responsive entity. The sense of a listening environment, one that perceives, processes, and reacts... I felt that it deeply aligned with my research on algorithmic identities. Much like the algorithms that constantly observe and adjust our digital experiences, Halid's work embodied a system that learns from its audience in real time.
The lighting further amplified this dialogue, casting the space as both intimate and futuristic. It was almost like a consciousness that remembers. I found this particularly resonant with my exploration of how algorithmic systems construct identity through feedback loops. Here, the audience became the data, and the environment became the algorithm, together forming a living spectacle of perception, response, and self-awareness.
Chapter 3: It Begins with Freedom
This chapter introduces Afrofuturism, a cultural movement that places the experiences, histories, and futures of the African diaspora at the centre of speculative thought. Afrofuturism asks what the future might look like when shaped by the values of cultural memory, spiritual depth, and self-determination.
There is a radical cosmology that reverberates through the works in the gallery. This film by Shiro Fujioka is about an interdimensional tribe that uses sound to move through time, space, and Black futures.
Thoughts
Beyond the content of the film, the exhibition design itself heightened the sense of immersion: the projection dominated an entire wall, surrounded by generous negative space that isolated the viewer's focus. The minimal setup: darkened lighting, spatial stillness, and enveloping sound, invited contemplation which positioned the film almost as a portal rather than a screen.
Fujioka's film drew me in with the visuals and soundscape. However, there was no mention anywhere that AI was used as a creative tool. This absense raised a lingering question for me: when artists use AI as a creative tool, should its involvement be made transparent within the exhibition context? I felt conflicted.
Chapter 4: Silk, Spice, a Punk Paradise
This generative art installation, a conceptual machine, delves into the asemic essence of Daoist 'Cloud seals', positing them as a bridge for communication between humanity and the spiritual realm. By compiling a collection of 'Cloud Seals' from Daoist scriptures and employing a fine-tuned generative AI, the installation crafts unique talismans. These talismans, intentionally devoid of concrete pictorial meaning, embody Ong's aspiration for a spiritual dialogue, with his created data and software serving as a machine-expressed missive to the spiritual world.
Ong compels us to reconsider the conventional view of machines as solely utilitarian, fast, and efficient. He probes the potential for machines to act as intermediaries between humanity and the spiritual domain. This provocative question leads him to the rich traditions of Daoist writing, wherein characters are imbued with profound spiritual power, functioning as channels for divine communion. Within Daoist esoteric practices, written texts transcend their informational role, becoming sacred directives capable of connecting the human and the spiritual realms.
Thoughts
This is my favourite piece of work from the entire exhibition. Ong's work was the most outstanding, and it impressed me with its ability to turn code/data into something poetic and ritualistic. The seals don't carry literal meaning but evoke spiritual, symbolic resonance. That transformation from algorithmic logic into symbolic form is neat. The conceptual layering is rich as he draws from Daoist traditions of writing as sacred/spiritual communication, and posits that machines and code can act as mediators or translators of that. It also subtly critiques modern machine logic (efficiency, speed, abstraction) by re-introducing a slower, mediative machine practice oriented toward nature, spirit, ritual.
Given my focus on how algorithms, data systems and media design can help construct identity, perception and experience, this piece from Ong offers multiple rich points of relevance:
⑴ Visibility / Invisibility of the System
The installation makes visible the
machinery, the plotter, the material, the custom software; but also evokes something invisible
(the spiritual realm, cloud seals, algorithmic logic). This duality is important for my work on
exhibition design because it makes me question: how do we design experiences where the
algorithmic component is perceptible yet not overt, where the viewer senses there's a system
at
work, without being overwhelmed by the technical?
⑵ Reflection on Agency and Authorship
The talismans are generated by a
machine guided by data and code... so.. Who is the author? What identity is being
produced? This links
directly to my concern about algorithmic identities: who or what constructs them, how
transparent is the process, what agency remains with the human, what does the machine
contribute?
Chapter 5: From Console to Cosmos
BARC is a multiplayer arcade shooter game where players must scan barcodes in both the virtual and physical world to complete different objectives. Players take on the role of a warehouse employee equipped with a magical barcode scanner. Game tasks are delivered to the player via a receipt printer in the real world, and players must manage the onslaught of virtual agents and torrent of physical receipts to complete their shift It invites collaboration and playful resistance to standard game mechanics.
It plays a part in inviting players to become co-creators of new worlds, exercising agency, shaping outcomes, and taking responsibility. Each player becomes both inhabitant and guardian of a possible future.
Thoughts
This is an insightful case for the research's Digital Exhibition Design pillar. It fits into the framework of translating invisible algorithmic systems into visible, participatory, and sensory experiences. It creates immersive and interactive in-person experiences using digital technologies to present content and tell a story.
⑴ Marking AI Tangible through Embodied Interaction
• Embodied metaphors
(gesture, sound, motion, or form) to help audiences feel the invisible relationship, instead of
just reading about it.
• Front-end visual and textual interface evokes a sense of response.
⑵ Relationship Between Human, Machine, and Environment
The game positions the
robot, human, and AI as mutually responsive agents, not separate entities, but part of one
dynamic system. There is a system mapping: frontend ↔ backend ↔ user input.
ArtScience Museum Laboratory
Quick, Draw! by Google
is an online game where a neural network tries to
guess what the user is drawing, acting like an AI pictionary. Players are given a prompt to draw
an object, and as they draw, the AI attempts to identify it in real-time using its training on
millions of other users' doodles. This game was developed to be an accessible and fun way to
explore how machine learning works and to collect a massive dataset of drawings for future
research.
This large-scale collection contributed by participants worldwide contains drawings stored as time series of pencil positions (strokes) rather than bitmap images. It has the X/Y coordinates and timing information of each stroke that is stored. Each drawing is tagged with metadata such as the drawing category, IP address, AI recognition. The files are in NDJSON format.
JSON vs NDJSON
I was quite curious about what NDJSON was since the format that I am familiar with is JSON. After researching about the difference between both, I've learnt that JSON is a single, self-contained unit (object or arrray). It requires parsing of the entire file. There are API responses for single entities. However, NDJSON contains multiple independent JSON objects, each on a new line. It is parsed line by line and processes incrementally. NDJSON is better suited for large datasets and streaming data.
Thoughts & Relevance to Research
This activity is simple, yet it reveals an example of how user interaction feeds algorithmic learning. The game invites players to sketch prompts in seconds while the neutral network attempts to identify each drawing in real-time. What appears playful is actually a massive data-collection mechanism. Each drawing becomes a part of the growing dataset which now contains over 50 million sketches used to train machine-learning models to recognise shapes, gestures, and patterns. This connects directly to my research on algorithmic identities: users unknowingly contribute fragments of their behaviour, style, and cognition to a collective data body that algorithms learn from and refine. The game visualises how everyday participation, something as innocent as a doodle, can become a part of datafication in action. It demonstrates both the creative and extractive dimensions of human-machine interaction.
Atelier Workshop: AxiDraw
In this week's atelier workshop, we experimented with the AxiDraw plotter. It translates digital designs into precise, physical drawings. What fascinated me was how this process bridged the gap between screen-based code and tangible form, revealing the tactile potential of expression. The AxiDraw made visible what is often hidden: the slow, delibrate movement of a machine intepreting human input. This translation from the digital to physical not only reintroduces materiality into computational work, but also raises questions: how does the algorithmic authorship shift when the output gains physical presence? This experiment of making highlighted the poetic tension between control and unpredictability, where both the human and the machine leave traces in the final work.
Reflection
This week's experience made me think deeply about how the machine can act not just as a tool, but as an expressive collaborator. Across the works encountered, Cloud Scripts, Quick, Draw!, to AxiDraw workshop, the participant became both the creator and data source. Their gestures are interpreted, translated, and archived by machines. There was an interesting relationship that I took notice of: the human provides intent, but the machine gives it form, sometimes even unpredictability.
This raised questions central to my research: if machines can now "draw", "listen" and "respond", where does human expression end, and algorithmic interpretation begin? The process revealed how every mark or input becomes data, and how expression today is also increasingly co-authored by systems that learn from us. It reminded me that to "draw with machines" is also to negotiate control, authorship, and identity within a shared algorithmic space.