Classroom/Seminar demos from AID702 (2026)
Facing Digital Life Creation (46KB)
Surveilled for Digital Life (39KB – depreciated original, stolen code)
Vibing Note: hydra “Live Coding Video Synth” is pretty neat. It offer visible real time interactions in clear code. For this project I tired to refract that nature via now common tropes of Surveillance Capitalism, ‘hiding’ the control surfaces that enable/create our digital lives. Namely, how computational surveillance leverages our emotions, and put this front stage in a very personal way: making digital life with your own face. It required stealing some life-like visualisations that hydra couldn’t quite compute, and patching this with accessible facial recognition that is available on line and does god knows what, to produce this result. “Digital Life” was also inspired as a bad take on our Digital Life Lab
Bits I stole for Surveilled for Digital Life
Hydra is still used as the final visual/compositing layer.
MediaPipe Face Landmarker loads dynamically to ‘not identify you’ but instead reads facial landmarks and expression blendshapes, and then triggers life to appear. Don’t believe me, ask Google. I just vibe here.
The actual “digital life creature” that appears is custom WebGL/GLSL code embedded directly in the HTML/JS. I forget where I stole it from; this is bad. It’s a copyright problem, but also a moral rights one – the code I borrowed was explicit on education purposes only. So it’s here on that, tenuous, thinest of assumptions. I at least got Codex to dig into its own work, finding traces of others’ work. And Google helped me with where I’d been. And then i found it’s family tree.
Allan’s 808 (65KB)
Vibing Note: I stole this. To make a music box for my kids.
Someone pretty cool (Allan) asked Claude to teach Ableton by making a interactive “hands-on breakdown of the maximalist, sample-soaked, 808-heavy sound of records like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy“. The pedagogy there is actually neat; start with the cultural artefact (album sound) and work back to the tool set and workflows that can help create it.
Allan’s html was designed so that as you scrolled through the instructions, widgets actually made sounds and taught you how Ableton controls them (like swing). A 4 by 16 step drum sequencer. A faked sampler pad, that sliced a note w effects; a chord maker, and some ambient synth referencing appropriate producers, explaining their purpose musically and where on Ableton you find such controls. That’s all on Allan and Claude.
Later, an 8/y old didn’t see the instruction set and Ableton knowledge, they saw music makers embedded in the narrative they had to scroll through and mouse between.
So, I took the html, asked a model for some very quick and simple redesign to unite all the boards, added keyboard controls, a real sampler from built in mic, and a loop recorder/song builder that could string together the basic ‘recordings’. My lesson was the frightening ease of iterating off giants. So now we have a web-based beatbox weighing in at 0.065MB.
Bits I stole for Allan’s 808
All of it.
other vibes
Kids* these days, just don’t like AI.
*Western monolingual kids, often privileged enough to have just 5-figure-debted their degree; Rest of World seems to like AI just fine. What is to be done?
2025 fun remains here for historical record (circa soft turn in software making)
April 2025 I asked ChatGPT to make a spiral galaxy of my research, from data scraped from Google Scholar, via asking for some cluster analysis or SNA from the abstracts, to help build the visualisation. The April 2025 o4-mini-high model felt like a brute force approach and produced some Frankenstein type life – after vigorous tweaking and urging on my part, and much ‘reasoning’ on its part for simple tweaks. After its memory rotted and its code decomposed a bit, I was locked out and needed to use o4-mini, which was faster, more responsive, and didn’t mess up as much.
o4-mini made this pretty easily, but also cooked after too much tweaking, becoming unresponsive; we get what we get and we don’t get upset.
The “SNA” was basically all wrong, and sycophantic to the non substantive parts of my requests.
Here’s some pics from the initial trials from o4-mini-high, that just kept reasoning too damned much. It did have some nice suggestions like spinning the whole thing, that seemed to carry over from conversations that had rotted.
