2 Publications & Honorable Mention at ACM DIS '24 | Copenhagen, Denmark
Presented two new peer-reviewed publications at the 2024 Designing Interactive Systems Conference
Last week, I attended the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2024 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) at IT University of Copenhagen. I presented two new peer-reviewed archival publications, one at the Digital Craft & Computational Affordances session, and the other at the Spiritual Imaginaries session. One of the publications received honorable mention for best paper at the conference, meaning that it ranked in the top 5% among 695 submissions. I also co-organized a workshop on generative AI for design research. Below are the abstracts and links to the publications, which are available open access in the ACM Digital Library.
Resistive Threads: Electronic Streetwear as Social Movement Material
🎖 Honorable Mention
Brett A. Halperin, William Rhodes, Kai Leshne, Afroditi Psarra, & Daniela K. Rosner
Informed by legacies of textile activism, we design Resistive Threads as a wearable probe to investigate potential roles and trajectories of electronic streetwear in US urban social movements. Resistive Threads is an interactive denim jacket that refashions the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (Dis)location Black Exodus print zine. The jacket plays audio stories, poetry, and music from embedded speakers when interactive patches sewn with conductive thread are tapped upon. Examining the artifact with 10 community organizers and partners, we find that augmented streetwear may take on the role of a housing organizing instrument or speculative garment. In turn, we discuss how we might learn from textile histories and solidarities to recognize—not rehearse—damage-centered research. We close with a reflection on what makes the electronic aspect of e-textiles meaningful to social movement practice and performance.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563657.3595990
Artificial Dreams: Surreal Visual Storytelling as Inquiry Into AI ‘Hallucination’
Brett A. Halperin & Stephanie M. Lukin
What does it mean for stochastic artificial intelligence (AI) to “hallucinate” when performing a literary task as open-ended as creative visual storytelling? In this paper, we investigate AI “hallucination” by stress-testing a visual storytelling algorithm with different visual and textual inputs designed to probe dream logic inspired by cinematic surrealism. Following a close reading of 100 visual stories that we deem artificial dreams, we describe how AI “hallucination” in computational visual storytelling is the opposite of groundedness: literary expression that is ungrounded in the visual or textual inputs. We find that this lack of grounding can be a source of either creativity or harm entangled with bias and illusion. In turn, we disentangle these obscurities and discuss steps toward addressing the perils while harnessing the potentials for innocuous cases of AI “hallucination” to enhance the creativity of visual storytelling.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3660685
