Tag: ImmersiveS1

Round green shapes of varying sizes glow against the black background. The text reads, "Immersive."

Immersive #4: AI Dungeon

Liana Leave a comment

The ability to transport oneself into another world is an alluring prospect as it allows for people to explore choices and lifestyles that they typically wouldn’t be able to experience in the real world. As a result, people have found solace in immersing themselves in pre-existing worlds written by famous authors or in new worlds that revolve around decisions made within role-playing games. But, in order to have this imaginative experience, the work of worldbuilding must be done by someone else in the first place before others are allowed to enjoy it.

In order to bypass this requirement of human-touch, creators have begun to explore the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) within their works, creating unique AI-generated works that closely resemble those that have been made by a human hand. Therefore, it is to no surprise that programmer Nick Walton leveraged the power of AI and the appeal of interactive storytelling to develop AI Dungeon, a choose-your-own-adventure-type simulation.

Within AI Dungeon, players are able to select from a variety of different genres to establish the setting that they want their adventure to take place in, ranging from cyberpunk to apocalyptic, as well as the type of role they want to undertake in the setting. From here, AI Dungeon gives players a customized scenario from the options that they have chosen, and the story continues onwards in response to the inputs that the player provides afterwards.

An example of an AI Dungeon story
A Custom AI Dungeon Experience

Already writers have begun to take advantage of the unique story generation, creating their own works from AI Dungeon’s generated plot like Lady Emilia Stormbringer by Emily Bellavia. And as of now all rights of ownership of a specific AI Dungeon-created story belongs to the player who first produced the work in the program, enabling the creation of new published material and eliciting the joy of its players in experiencing a new adventure.

Ultimately, AI Dungeon presents a modern twist to choose-your-own-adventure stories with its constantly evolving prompt-based narrative that ensures that no two stories will ever be the same. But, for transparency purposes, it must be stated that prolonged-usage of AI Dungeon requires creating an account and perhaps even spending money if one chooses to use the “premium” version of the generator, a result of the immense memory usage that is required to host such an ambitious piece of software. Nevertheless, while the usage of AI still presents barriers in terms of accessibility, I believe that the application of AI to reinvigorate traditional methods of storytelling is an area that will continue to grow and will soon have wide-spread implications on how we perceive and define art and original content.

Experience AI Dungeon: HERE

Round green shapes of varying sizes glow against the black background. The text reads, "Immersive."

Immersive #2: Scarfolk Council

Liana Leave a comment

With the rise in popularity of horror films within the past decade, the desire to witness a new and haunting story for the first time has firmly rooted itself in mainstream consciousness due to the cleverly-crafted mixture of uncertainty and anxiety that keeps its audience on edge and in eager anticipation for the next scare. As a result, the horror genre has rapidly diverged into subcategories to consistently create fresh and frightening experiences across many different forms of media and on many different levels of intensity. One such divergence, occurring in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was the creation of hauntology, which originated from French philosopher Jacques Derrida who coined the phrase in his book Spectres of Marx when describing the tendency of Marxism to haunt Western society. However, hauntology has now evolved into a complicated and overarching term within popular culture to refer to situations in which elements of the past continue to persist in the present.

Thus, it is to no surprise that hauntology has swiftly manifested itself within the aesthetics of the past where anxiety, unease, and scrutiny was most prominent when one considers the eerie detachment that can come from reflecting upon the strange and dystopian-esq structures of the past. Inspired by these surreal memories and the imagery that it generated, writer and designer Richard Littler took it upon himself to create Scarfolk Council, an unsettling satirical blog about a fictional town called Scarfolk in northern England that has found itself trapped in the 1970s.

Poster labeled "gullibility is a disease & an indicator of crime" with a sheep on the cover with censored out eyes
The Gullibility Campaign (1976)

Through the Scarfolk Council blog, Littler used the aesthetics of the 1970s to create historical documents that turned the familiar and ordinary sights of British public information posters, product branding, photographs, and artifacts into a dark and dystopian reality that invoked similarities to the evocative writings of George Orwell. The intentional use of mundane objects from the time period that had long since faded from public memory allowed Littler to create an unnerving atmosphere around his work as viewers attempted to piece together fragments of the past, uncovering an alternate reality that was all too accurate and all too incorrect to be true with its implicative themes of surveillance, occultism, and civil rights and reminder to reread for more information.

 

Poster labeled "Illegal to gather in groups of one*" with a pink person standing behind a police do not cross line
Social-Distancing Laws (1970)

Ultimately, Scarfolk Council is a fictional creation that has cleverly twisted the aesthetics of the past into an alluring and unsettling reality that triggers indescribable emotions from our deepest memories. The expansion of the small town of Scarfolk into several books and an upcoming TV series along with its accidental features in official UK publications indicates the subtle power that unconventional applications of hauntology have over traditional productions within the horror genre. That’s why I believe that Scarfolk Council has successfully mastered the anxiety and unease of horror through its creative re-imagination of the past that draws upon the normalcy of its fake artifacts to tell an eerie and compelling narrative that illuminates concerning realities behind its satirical gaze.

Experience Scarfolk Council: HERE

Round green shapes of varying sizes glow against the black background. The text reads, "Immersive."

Immersive #1: Life In A Day 2020

Liana Leave a comment

In a world that’s constantly responding to unexpected events that seek to sow division and reap unrest, the challenge of creating unity and a shared understanding among nations, communities, and families grows exponentially by the day. Nevertheless, in light of all these differences, there is the fundamental experience of life that is shared amongst all of us, generating empathy and compassion to the struggles that each and every one of us faces in hopes of a brighter tomorrow: the beautiful nature of humanity.

However, it is all too often that these nuanced and lived experiences of our day-to-day lives get ignored for larger and louder occurrences in the media and on the internet. Wanting to draw attention back to the intricacies of our daily lives and create unity within an isolated world, filmmaker Kevin Macdonald partnered with Ridley Scott to create Life in a Day 2020, a crowd-sourced documentary that sought to capture the human experience on a global scale.

A sequel to Life in a Day 2010, Life in a Day 2020 was carefully cultivated from over 324,000 video submissions from 192 countries that were all filmed on a single day: July 25th, 2020. The end result was a moving film that brought together our fears, hopes, concerns, and aspirations for the past, present, and future.

In the film, we are first exposed to the night. The chirping of crickets intermixed with the humming of an ensemble creates an intimate tone that is soon expanded upon after the waxing of the moon. A woman gives birth and then another one after that. Together, we welcome the new lives that have been introduced into the world, and we welcome a new day. The narrative soon picks up in pace, tying together short clips of urban and rural life from all across the globe. We gain a sense of cohesiveness from the rawness of the lives that are shown to us. Nothing here is foreign or strange, only human.

“This is my way of projecting my inner self into the world. Most people get stuck with what they see in the mirror every day, but there’s so much more to the universe. We just have to be willing to go beyond what we know,” the narrator remarks as a drone slowly flies away from its operator to capture an entire mountain. And to this point, I must agree. We must learn to embrace exploration and new knowledge in order to recognize the authenticity of all of our experiences.

Given the abundance of rich insights into daily life that were featured within the film, I can only wonder what other stories were left out to be able to cultivate the compelling narrative that is Life in a Day 2020; who weren’t we able to hear from because of the limited capacity of the production team? Because of the technology barrier? Because of the scope of the project? Even with all of these lingering questions at the end of the film, I still believe that Life in a Day 2020 was successful in its endeavor to create an intimate understanding of what it was like to live all across the globe on that single day in the summer of 2020.

Watch Life in a Day 2020: HERE