I was quite thoroughly stumped for the entirety of this week. Ideation and brainstorming for the design aspect of the project had come to a standstill, and I was also focused on my readings for my research proposal. Despite having done some experimentations over the past few weeks, that did little other than build an additional layer of understanding for the technology. After a quick chat with my supervisor-Andreas, I was motivated to return to my ideation session so that I could collect and build a visual moodboard for myself and Andreas to reference.

I looked at several more projects and briefly reflected on each of them, including how they might help drive my theme. I was on the lookout for any aspects of the project, from its final execution to its core technical concepts. It was through this that I was able to draft even more ideas, one of which I finally latched on (the one marked with the star in the image below).

I then went on to sketch out some of these ideas as a means of visualising how they might come to work. Satisfied with my progress for the week, I concluded this session by further filtering down all projects I’ve selected as inspiration from both this ideation session and the one in week 2, and compiled it into a printed moodboard.

Later in the week, we were also given a sharing by two A.I. researchers. I was enthusiastic for their sharing, and while there were definitely some notable takeaways, I felt the sharing ultimately fell short. Much of what they covered were things that I had already learnt in my own readings (like the benefits of an LLM or issues like hallucination) and likewise for the way they were answering their questions (oddly politically correct answers only).

While overall still a valuable insight as it was a chance to look into some of their processes as “A.I. artists”, it definitely fell short of my expectations. It was odd. Because while one would have assumed that as professional practitioners, they would have less arbitrary decisions made in their project. However, when questioned by myself and other peers in the call, some of the replies they were giving were extremely generic.

One takeaway I did have however, was the importance of aesthetics in a project like those showcased. Their projects, were somewhat similar in essence to the idea I had finally latched on. This definitely gives me something to think about as I start the development for this idea next week.