Event Blog #3: Hammer museum

For one of my events, I visited the Hammer Museum, where I watched Ed Atkin's short film Even Pricks. His film is part of the Hammer Museum's "This is the End" exhibit, which featured other films by fellow artists Loretta Fahrenholz and Tommy Hartung. Going into the film screening, I read that the artists used unusual narrative techniques to illustrate themes related to unhappiness and strangeness. 

After watching Even Pricks once, I was extremely confused. In fact, after watching it over and over again (luckily, it's only eight minutes long), I was still really confused! Atkin's storytelling is definitely unconventional. Instead of a plot, Atkins bombards the viewer with a series of pastel, saturated images of every day objects. The most frequently recurring object was a hand with the thumb sticking out. At first, the thumb was pointing up, representing happiness, but as the film progressed, the thumb changed positions and shapes. In one notable segment, the thumb deflated like a balloon would, leaving just the skin to dangle over the rest of the hand. It reminded me of when someone is putting on a persona for the public eye, but comes home and just completely relaxes. In other images, the thumb was rotated sideways, pressing into belly buttons, ears, and eyes. This reminded me of our biotech unit. Even though Atkins didn’t’ manipulate physical human bodies for Even Pricks, he manipulated the images on screen to inspire discomfort and curiosity from his audience.

The only face that is shown in Even Pricks is that of a chimpanzee. It speaks to the viewers, although most of the speech is seemingly random quotes. I interpreted this as Atkins stripping down humans to emotions, and elevating monkeys to talking, cognizant beings. I’m not really sure what he means by this, but perhaps he’s bringing up the question of what it means to be fully cognizant, especially in the face of depression.

Event #2: Google I/O

Last Thursday and Friday, I had the opportunity to attend Google I/O, which is Google's annual conference for developers and designers. As part of the conference, I saw several new products and launches, learn more about new tools that I can use as a software engineer, and attend workshops on design for tech. There was one product discussed in the keynote that I thought was particularly relevant to the course: Google Now on Tap.

Now on Tap is a more advanced version of Google Now, which is an automated mobile assistant brings users relevant information like appointment reminders, traffic information and navigation to frequently visited locations, sports scores from favorite teams, and more. Now on Tap will extend this functionality, with the goal of surfacing the exact information a user is searching for without the user having to actually type in a search query. To accomplish this, Google utilizes artificial neural networks that are several layers deep. Like biological neural networks, these networks can take in several different inputs to reach a single output. The deeper the networks, the more powerful they are, which is why Google Now is so useful.

Listening to the speakers talk about these neural networks reminded me of our Neuroscience + Art unit. Computer scientists are able to use the research of neuroscientists to create these machines that behave very much as if they had human brains. I can press a button on my phone, ask it a question, and receive an answer, as if we were having a conversation. As Google's neural networks get deeper, and its knowledge graph gets larger, these machines will become smarter and more human-like. At some point, we'll have to really re-evaluate what it means to be alive and cognisant. Perhaps this will be a future paradigm shift!

The following video contains the entire keynote speech. To watch from when Google Now on Tap was announced, start at 48:26!

The following are some pictures I took at I/O!

They served us carbonated strawberries at the after party!

Every so often, they make different themed Android figurines.

This mini exhibit was really cool! They set up a bunch of phones/tablets of different sizes and put an Android character on each one. Each character played an instrument, so it was like an orchestra/choir of Androids.