// new media class

This project in a continuation of my dancing bird prototype from Winter 2024 which came from an ongoing exploration of new dynamics for interfacing, performing, and engaging with distributed image models. Such models are often opaque—both in their internal operations and in the networks through which they function.

For this project, I chose ‘attention’ as the guiding metaphor, interpreting how vision models select and interpret visual information. By structuring the work around a ‘signal-receiver’ dynamic, the kinetic actor (an animatronic bird) continuously ‘performs’ for an observing entity (camera/vision-model), actively ‘adapting’ its gestures and behavior to achieve stronger resonance.

Through materializing the usually distributed source of images into a kinetic, performative entity, and simplifying the framework of the model, the project seeks to uncover previously unseen contingencies and foster novel forms of interaction and understanding.