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SHORT FILM, CREATIVE CODE, UNITY 3D, STORYTELLING, WORLDBUILDING
Piece-ful Mind
Role: Member of CAM Collective [Carisa Antariksa, Amreen Ashraf, Maria Denise Yala] a collaborative research group
watch the filmProject Toolkit
- HTML
- Unity
- C#
- Digital art
- (AI) Prompt programming
Piece-ful mind is a storytelling exploration of isolation, the ways in which we seek community, and our tangled existence with technology. Inspired by nostalgia, the use of early web 2.0 and 90s aesthetics acts as a juxtaposition to our relationship with predictive algorithmic, content-driven information that continuously saturates our lives. Through the different artifacts, we follow a teenage character and her interaction with different worlds; the physical world (her bedroom), the digital world (screens), and her internal world, in the form of a visualized internet "rabbit hole". The final piece intends to convey a slice of her life that reflects a blurring of digital and physical realities.This project was created using a combination of Unity 3D, computer graphic art, and AI generated imagery using prompt engineering.
This work was created in 2022 as part of the Roundtable Residency.
In my role as a CAM Collective member, I:
- Participated in the creative research and conceptualization of the project
- Gathered digital artifacts and aided in the creation of the interactive room in Unity 3D
- Coded the webpage that was used to generate the "rabbit hole" portions of the film
For the project we drew upon the nostalgia of our own girlhoods, thinking of what the intersection of technology and girlhood would look like during a lockdown.
The set for the character's bedroom was created using Unity 3D and designed to mimic a teenage girl's bedroom.
For the themes of the film we leant into the dystopian atmosphere of the COVID-19 pandemic: death, lockdowns, doom-scrolling, loneliness, isolation, algorithms and inescapable technology. We explored the kinds of media that we are bombarded with online. Using an early version of generative AI prompt programming tools we generated images inspired by the content we were seeing online. The resulting images were distorted and surreal-like, which to us reflected the feeling of how things merged together on line when doomscrolling.
We used WEBGL to create a tunnel like experience in the browser using the AI generated images. This disorienting experience was meant to mimic the sensation of being sucked into one's phone.
Watch our short film here.