Twice, again:

the turning point cycle

An installation presenting a series of interconnected screen-based outcomes from the ongoing experimental creative project Twice, again. This series brings into play notions of remembering and forgetting (and what it might mean for an evolving fictional character to remember and forget) and combines both live-generated, interactive, and pre-recorded material in a cycle that reveals aspects of the characters and their internal world models.

The image above shows work in progress annotating and generating text ad images from the original 2010 text, "Again".

This experimental practice is ongoing, and the outcomes presented here are indicative.

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"Reanbar is here"

A large-scale screen-based work that provides a central focus of the installation. Its audio track fills the space — often overpowering other audio tracks (an alternate headphone version of the installation can be offered depending on the setup of the exhibition and audio requirements). The spoken word of this piece is created from text generated by the custom machine learning model trained on the original "Again" text. The imagery is a 3D environment abstracted via a process of working with a Neural Radiance Field trained on sub-optimal images derived from cinematic originals and representing part of the inner world models of the characters.

direct youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAdneuINoug

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"moments of clarity"

A series of smaller screens are mounted to the walls in the exhibition space. One of these is a conversation that is being generated live between two characters from the original narrative. It is activated when it recognises a face looking at it.

direct youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBP6aIoEI_E

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"remembered and forgotten:

A screen leaning against the wall below moments of clarity shows a slowly scrolling text that is constantly updating with the current state of what each character can remember about their conversation and their world model. A QR code links to a website that scrolls all of what the characters have once known, but have now forgotten — accessible on a visitor's own mobile device.

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"fragments of an internal world model"

Neural Radiance Field generated 3D worlds, as virtual environments, that are representational of aspects of the characters' internal world models. There are a number of these screens, and they play a series of worlds over the cycle.

direct youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM9JqmQU15c

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"non-canonical texts"

A series of text fragments generated throughout the experimental processes of this project are presented, slowly updating on a number of screens. These are "pulled" from a server which is kept updated by the artists on an ongoing manner. These texts are hand-curated and typeset with "meta-data" that indicates their position place in the larger narrative world.

In this project, the fictional is built from both my own imagination, as well as the combined imaginary of the data that various machine learning models have been trained on, which in many cases is a large proportion of human knowledge existing on the internet, as well as a smaller custom trained model trained on the original text of "Again".

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