Fuguo's Media Space

Inspiration

Neural networks, a kind of machine learning model inspired by biological neural networks of animal brains.
Social media posts, and their utilization and monetization of user input and feedback.

Ideation

Inspired by the prevailing application of machine learning in social media, we wanted to build a physical installation to visualize the connection between user input (posts, reactions, user habits, ...) and social media output (personalized feeds and news, notifications, ...). By learning from players' reactions and appearance, the installation generates customized live visuals.

Wildweb installation sketch. We designed the installation to be attached to a surface, such as a wall or a table.

We designed the physical computing element to resemble a flower powered by electricity and programming, symbolizing the technological manipulation of the surrounding environment and nature.

Design and Implementation

Mechainal Flowers

Tree of Growth image 1 — Welded frames of the mechanical flower.

Tree of Growth image 2 — Optic fibres in bunches were carefully polised by sand paper and connected to LEDs.

Tree of Growth image 3 — Organza cut into petal shapes.

Tree of Growth image 4 — Assembled mechanical flowers powered by Arduino.

Live Visuals

I designed and programmed the live visuals in Max MSP, hydra, and RiTa.js (a p5.js library for natural language generation).

The installation's digital projection consists of live visuals filtered by a Hydra program and a text paragraph generated with RiTa.js functions, just like a social media post. Each time the player presses a button on the installation, a new post is generated with new visuals and a new paragraph. By consuming user input, the installation generates a potentially endless amount of content.