Artificial Being is an Augmented Reality poem that tries to embody the idea of plurality of experience, inspired by Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges. Haraway critiques the notion of a single, objective truth and proposes instead a model of “situated,” plural, and accountable knowledge.
By opening the web-viewer (in the link from the QR code) and pointing it at the poem, an AR layer is added to the text and you invite a different viewpoint into being. Reading the poem through a device, radically changes the perspective of the poem, providing a diametrically different truth than the original text.
Artificial Being is a continuation of my exploration of our collective troubled relationship with our machines. It’s an attempt to mitigate the inherent tension between the relentless efficiency of modern technological systems and the softer qualities of being alive in this world. In critical reflections, I’m looking for pathways to come to terms with the technology that increasingly imposes itself on us.
The poem is completely human-authored. The main challenge in compiling the text was to create one flow in which two perspectives on AI are represented – the dystopian doom-scenario and the ‘machine as savory’ version – in an attempt to assess the human condition that allows us to keep these conflicting states in our minds, simultaneously.
Look at Artificial Being here!
Technical details: The prototype of the AR viewer is based on AR.js and Three.js, both open source javascript libraries licensed under the MIT License for open source software.
Practical concerns: the viewer is a prototype, so it might need a try or two before it hooks on to the marker and displays the AR layer properly. If the AR layer does not appear, try pointing the device somewhere else entirely and then return to the screen with the marker. The font of the AR-layer should match the screen font, if that’s not the case, the best thing to do is to reload the web page and try again.