digital media - http://archive.pkmital.com https://archive.pkmital.com computational audiovisual augmented reality research Wed, 01 Sep 2021 19:59:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 UCLA Course on “Cultural Appropriation with Machine Learning” https://archive.pkmital.com/2021/09/01/ucla-course-on-cultural-appropriation-with-machine-learning/ https://archive.pkmital.com/2021/09/01/ucla-course-on-cultural-appropriation-with-machine-learning/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2021 04:37:33 +0000 http://pkmital.com/home/?p=2093 During the Fall of 2020, I had the honor of teaching a new course at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Design Media Arts (DMA) entitled “Cultural Appropriation with Machine Learning”. This provocatively titled course came together after wrestling with many questions I had that year in the wake of the pandemic, black civil rights movements, and a crushed economy.

Rather than teach a course that focuses purely on the “how” of machine learning, like Creative Applications of Deep Learning does, I wanted to also include a critical component to guide students through the questions they should be asking as they learn and employ these tools. I also wanted students to understand how these tools and algorithms came to be in today’s society, so that they knew better what questions to ask when they were using them. It became clear early on that cultural appropriation was a central theme across most generative arts practices. I say this because machine learning requires large amounts of data which tend to come from existing corpora of creative content, such as flickr archives, or instagram collections. What does it mean when an algorithm owned by Google or Microsoft is capable … Continue reading...

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]]> https://archive.pkmital.com/2021/09/01/ucla-course-on-cultural-appropriation-with-machine-learning/feed/ 1 NFT Pixels https://archive.pkmital.com/2021/08/31/nft-pixels/ https://archive.pkmital.com/2021/08/31/nft-pixels/#respond Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:17:30 +0000 http://pkmital.com/home/?p=2058 NFTs, or non-fungible tokens are data stored on the blockchain that certifies and records transactions associated with a digital asset. Effectively, they are certificates of authenticity of digital assets traded on blockchain-based exchanges that have spurred an economy of scarcity for digital assets such as images, GIFs, sound clips, and videos. In the past, artists producing digital content may have also considered selling their work in places such as instagram, behance, deviant art, or via their own websites. Though, it is unlikely that this content would have been actually bought in any form. This is likely because the content is already accessible to all. On these platforms, if we are to call it art, it could be akin to a digital version of public art in some ways, for all to see and consume. Or more likely, we would consider it either documentation or advertising and marketing of the artist’s work.

The entire point of NFTs, and the reason they are so marketed as being valuable, is because we believe there is digital scarcity of the content being traded and sold.

Prior to NFT marketplaces for digital art, let’s say that someone were to decide that they wanted ownership of … Continue reading...

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