Application Examples

### **Chapter 4**

## Perspective Chapter: Re-Inventing Communicative Spaces – A Study to Assess the Shift of Traditional Puppetry Artifacts into Computer-Mediated Objects

*Neelatphal Chanda*

### **Abstract**

Puppetry has always remained a major tool of storytelling for masses. From its inception, this communicative art form has undergone changes, and with the advancement of technological interfaces, its structural space has received a series of modifications. Most puppetry involves storytelling, and its impact is determined by its ability to create patterns into the psycho-spaces of viewers. With changing times, the analog formats of puppetry are getting replaced by the digital objects. These digital objects are computer mediated in nature and have a key characteristic of engaging audiences with multimodal performative interactive system. In the current scenario, under the deep influence of 'convergence culture,' the traditional puppetry art form has not remained insulated from the digitized formations. These spaces are allowing a new alternative media output, which is digitized, watched, as well as promoted on digital screens. Under the wider array of networked spaces, this paper is an attempt to theorize the changing landscape of traditional puppetry art form into the corridors of digital objects. These digital objects have a nature of accommodating themselves into multiple channels of communication and triggering a plethora of imaginative spaces for spectators.

**Keywords:** multimodal, technical structures, puppetry, computer-mediated, communicative spaces

### **1. Introduction**

Puppetry, as a traditional art and practice, involves storytelling, which is determined by its ability to create a fictional space for the viewers. However, with the advancement in the digital technology, there is a huge progression in the mode of "spectatorship."

The animation of digital objects triggers the imagination of spectators in a different way. More and more spectators interacting with digital objects enter into a fictional space, which can be transformed into real time, which will provide possibilities for the process of engagement and co-creation.

With advancement in modern technology, we can simulate and preserve our cultural arts and heritage in a more interactive manner compared to only plain recording [1]. According to Kaplin [2], the digital puppetry is a revolutionary idea that expands the notion of puppetry beyond all definitions. He also describes that digital forms of puppetry will not mean the death of puppetry; rather, it's the preservation of historical, spiritual, and folkloric values.

While delineating the aspects of puppetry in India, there are different forms and practices among which string puppets, rod puppets, glove puppets, and shadow puppets are the most popular ones. The strings, rods, and gloves often used by puppeteers to animate and inanimate are getting replaced by animatronics and computers in this DIGI-driven spaces. According to Stephen Kaplin, there is a direct relationship that revolves around performers and the performing objects. He highlights the role of technology in assembling the gap between the performers and the performing objects. Specifically, the crafting pattern of various puppets comes up with the mechanism that helps puppeteers to involve into conversation through various means of technological possibilities.

*"The puppet, poised between man and machine, a figurative, anthropomorphic character, but operated by technological means—whether rod, string, or something more—provided an artistic site through which to explore new potentials and anxieties around these developments" [3].*

### **2. Extending the frontiers of puppetry into technological spaces**

Puppetry as a communicative art space is gaining more and more momentum across multiple corridors, and in a parallel manner, it's becoming more globally interconnected. The relationship between the human actors and the puppets is undergoing drastic change. According to Kaplin [2], the actors and puppeteers do the same job of projecting characters. Generally, actors involve with the character through voice modulation, action, gestures, and costume elements. The mask becomes an aided element for projecting character, which gets classified into a crafted object. The crafted object when executed into performance takes the shape of a performing object. It is to be noted that as the distance widens between the object and the actor, more and more complex technological interfaces are needed to maneuver around the object and performance.

To understand the relation between humans and the inanimate world, we need to have an entry point through puppetry, which depicts our daily practices with technology. Jane Benett, in philosophical terms, theorizes the new paradigm with a term she calls "thing power."

*"Thing power has the rhetorical advantage of calling to mind a childhood sense of the world as filled with all sorts of animate beings, some human, some not, some organic, some not. It draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve. Thing-power may thus be a good starting point for thinking beyond the life-matter binary, the dominant organizational principle for adult experience" [4].*

The spectators associated with this art form go through the process of imagination through the animation of digital objects and digital puppets. The imaginative space

is fictional in nature and has the key characteristic of digital "beings." Digital objects are computer mediated and can be transformed into different ways that also provide opportunities for engagement and co-creation.

### **3. Puppetry and the newer aspects of media production**

The digital puppetry is broadly dissected into two major segments, namely, puppetry in digital media and puppetry in live theater. While delineating this form of puppetry with digital media, it is to be noted that "mediatisation" plays a vital role in the meta-process through which almost all areas of social and cultural life are affected by the increasingly dominant role of modern media [5]. For this paper, the term "mediatisation" here generalizes the transfer and migration of puppetry to modern digital media. According to Tillis [6], digital puppetry offers the greatest challenge to conventional puppetry theory. Unlike live puppetry performances, puppetry in digital media is lacking in its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be, and its aura of performance [7]. The digital puppetry is the process under which the digital code takes the form of live puppetry performances. The numerical representation of binary codes takes the shape of performative objects on the digital screens and creates fictional images in psycho spaces.

Due to its flexibility and wider acceptability, digital puppetry has gained enough momentum among the masses. According to Wang [5], digital puppetry is without a doubt much more advantageously positioned in the marketplace when it competes directly with theater and other forms of live performance.

Despite drawing a strict line between puppetry and virtual puppets or performing objects, Kaplin [2] mentions four types of puppetry in digital media that are contradictory to the definition given by Levenson. These four types of puppetry, which Kaplin calls as "emerging sub-genres" of media puppetry, are: (i) docu-puppetry, (ii) virtual-puppetry, (iii) hyper-puppetry, and (iv) cyber-puppetry. According to Tillis [6], the digital puppetry performance is recorded, and the recordings further can be edited or manipulated prior to showing them to the audience. In this type of puppetry, the performance at all times works under the control of a human puppeteer performing in "real time." The "real time" generally defines the synchronicity between the puppeteer's control and the puppet's result but not the vocal performance.

From the media production aspect, the "tangible puppet" holds a significant position. According to Tilis [6], the tangible puppet is that which is capable of being touched physically, and it also refers to the digital films and video images that are a direct reference to original materials. Further, Tilis [6] proposes another theory on digital puppetry that classifies digital puppetry into three broad categories: (a) digital puppetry using tangible puppets or performing objects that are tangibly moved or manipulated; (b) digital puppetry using virtual puppets or performing objects; (c) digital puppetry using tangible puppets or performing objects that are intangibly moved or manipulated. On the other hand, "intangible or manipulated" puppets are related to the computer input device such as keyboard, mouse, and the joystick, which can be used for the movement, control, and manipulation of the puppets without puppeteers' involvement in physical spaces.

While discussing digital puppetry, it is mandatory to discuss about CG (Computer Generated). According to Sinha and Udai [8], there are two main divisions of CG: non-interactive and interactive. Non-interactive or passive CG is a form of CG that

only allows one way of relaying information in which observers have no control over the images. On other hand, interactive CG allows users to interact with it. An example of this type of CG is a game of chess whereby the user makes a move before waiting for the computer to make its move. There are instances when interactive systems can be converted into passive computer-generated objects. We may take the example of a printed digital photograph, which has a nature of passive viewing and non-interactivity, but with proper usage of electronic data and appropriate CG software, it can be manipulated into an interactive object.

### **4. Puppetry as an instrument of storytelling**

In India and in other parts of Asia, there are numerous forms of storytelling processes, and one of the classical ways is puppetry. Taking consideration of India, *Katha* (story) and *Kathakar* (narrator) plays an important role in narrating stories from societal, political, and cultural spaces. In this age of digital techno spaces and with the advent of new-age media culture, puppetry as a communicative space is getting under serious danger of extinction.

The starting point of this traditional storytelling process had evolved from theatrical performances, which has its anchoring in the oral material tradition. Gradually, storytellers used different visual devices and oral instruments such as scroll paintings, shadow figures, dolls, and other musical instruments. The process of storytelling got augmented by body movements, dance, mime, and gesticulation.

In different parts of India, there exists puppetry culture. Rajasthan has *Phad* (Scroll Painting), in which the narrator tells a story on a huge picture scroll. The scroll has important scenes from local traditions. The storytelling process evolved with shadow theater that primarily focused on picture panels and scrolls. Themes of the shadow theater centred around *Puranas* and great epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In Indian states like *Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha,* the shadow theater genre is popular.

Sizes of puppets differ from 10 centimeters to 1 meter, and symbolically, puppets are linked to the traditional visual arts of different regions. With the passage of time, three-dimensional puppet theaters (rod puppets) and glove puppets (operated with a hand inside the puppet) evolved in India.

### **5. Involvement of puppetry in digital media**

The computer performance and the digital technology have been major disruptive forces between humans and puppets. Specifically, in a DIGI-driven society, digital advancement and computer-generated imaginary provides ample space to come up with different categories. The most popular categories are:

*a. Live puppetry in digital media that may be edited; b. Stop-action puppetry; c. Non-interactive virtual puppetry; d. Interactive virtual puppetry.*

The digital revolution of computing and communication technology that has taken place since the 1980s has resulted in a rapid switch from analogue mechanical to digital technology. During the beginning of the 1990s, it was already time to affirm that digital was the emerging dominant media form, replacing analogue

### *Perspective Chapter: Re-Inventing Communicative Spaces – A Study to Assess the Shift... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109133*

tele-visual technology [5]. Over the past few decades, CG technology has become an area of proven artistic and commercial potential and has had significant impacts on non-interactive puppetry in digital media. In the present scenario, many recordings of live puppetry performances have been refined and blended with visual effects and computer animations prior to their releases. Apart from digital shadow puppetry that uses 2D, flat and tangible, puppets, there are also some examples of using recordings of hand shadows in digital media. Also known in cinema as silhouette, hand shadowgraph is a genre of shadow play where shadow images and videos are created using human hands. Although hand shadowgraph technically does not belong to the category of shadow puppetry, the terminology and visual esthetics of both performing arts are the same.

Digital media has been used not only to produce and create puppetry but also as a practical medium of preservation. The development of television and archiving of recorded broadcasts provide an excellent way to document puppetry performances [9].

Stop-action puppetry in digital media is also known as stop-motion animation or stop-motion photography [10]. Any tangible object can be used as a performing object of a stop-action puppetry animation; it generally consists of three major categories: jointed 3D marionette puppets, 2D paper cut-outs, and clay objects. The jointed 3D puppets or models for stop-action puppetry are made of latex, silicone, or silicone skin with a wire armature. Stop-action puppetry film and animation that uses 2D cut-outs was influenced by the development of shadow theater in Europe. The most famous and commonly used input device and approach in interactive digital puppetry is the motion capture as some computer technology experts simply employ the term "motion capture" when referring to digital puppetry or computer puppetry. Sturman [11] defines "motion capture" as the combination of the art of puppetry (animating inanimate objects through direct manipulation) with computer animation.

Unlike real puppets, virtual puppets are not bound by natural and physics laws and are able to distort, float, and contort in any manner that may be unnatural to their physical versions. The virtual puppets can be controlled or manipulated by animator(s) using computer keyboard or other input devices without the participation of recognized conventional puppeteer(s). With the advancement of technological interfaces, the dimension of puppetry is undergoing meteoric changes while maintaining its social structure and cultural values. The digital interface is enabling the traditional communicative art form to relocate its venture into the virtual environment while upholding the basic tenets of communicative principles.

### **6. Conclusion**

With the advancement of technology, there has been significant growth in storytelling techniques. The storytelling spaces are getting adjacent with digitized devices marked with the feature of convergence, interactivity, and non-linear synchronicity. However, since puppets have their roots in the traditional storytelling process and with the advancement of technological spaces, the digital code is transcendent in live puppetry performances. This transformation marks the significance of binary codes that take the shape of the 'screens performative object' and play an essential role in the storytelling spaces.

In the computer-mediated storytelling process, gestures and expressions do not remain confined to tangible and physical objects; the dramatic enactments cross over to digital objects. This evolved space is powerful enough to acquaint with cognitive competence and also to interline with the contemporary storytelling process assisted with features of motion-sensing technology and computer animation. Interestingly, puppetry as a communicative platform has a classical storytelling orientation; however, with the growth of medium and technological shift, this medium transcended into an 'Object,' capable enough to acquaint with digital-storytelling mediums.

### **Author details**

Neelatphal Chanda Department of Media Studies, Christ University, Bangalore, India

\*Address all correspondence to: neelatphalchanda48@gmail.com

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

*Perspective Chapter: Re-Inventing Communicative Spaces – A Study to Assess the Shift... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109133*

### **References**

[1] Kim JCM, Talib AZ. A framework for virtual storytelling using the traditional shadow play. In: 2006 International Conference on Computing & Informatics, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 2006. pp. 1-6. DOI: 10.1109/ ICOCI.2006.5276544

[2] Kaplin S. Puppetry into the next millennium. Puppetry International. 1994;**1**:37-39

[3] Orenstein C. Introduction: A puppet moment. In: Posner DN, Orenstein C, Bell J, editors. The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance. London: Routledge; 2014. pp. 2-4

[4] Bennett J. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press; 2010

[5] Wang Z. Digital Puppetry: Real-Time Performance in a Mediatized Age. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong; 2010

[6] Tillis S. The art of puppetry in the age of media production. In: Tillis S, editor. Puppets, Masks, and Performing Object. United State: MIT Press; 1999. pp. 182-195

[7] Benjamin W. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: Zohn H, editor. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books; 1969. pp. 217-251

[8] Sinha NA, Udai DA. Computer Graphics. New Delhi: Tata Publishing Company Limited; 2008

[9] Stoessner JK. Building American Puppetry on the Jim Henson Puppetry. United State: The Ohio State University; 2008

[10] Kerlow IV. The Art of 3D Computer Animation and Effects. Canada: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.; 2004

[11] Sturman DJ. Computer puppetry. IEEE Computer Graphic Application. 1998;**18**(1):38-45

### **Chapter 5**

## Perspective Chapter: The Creative Surrogate

*Andy Deck*

### **Abstract**

It is not just manufacturing jobs that are being replaced by digital automation: creative careers now face this specter. As generative techniques advance, both for images and text, the application of expert systems will not stop at replacing mundane tasks. Instead "smart" software is making incursions into intellectual fields as diverse as art, design, photography, and authorship. Systematized applications of artificial intelligence are beginning to play new roles in the creative process. Intellectual surrogates are becoming a new front in the centuries-long cultural transformation brought about by technical innovation and automation. Production trends in digital culture suggest that we will be treated, increasingly, to "automagical" software authorship and artistry. If past is prolog, the degree of intellectual dependence on software will be a guarded secret. Human input into creative products may begin to resemble the fruit content of packaged juices, as for example "Contains 2% human input." The time has come to evaluate the likely consequences of the systematized generation of (formerly) creative products.

**Keywords:** creativity, artificial intelligence, innovation, art, automation

### **1. Introduction**

Until recently cautionary treatments of machine intelligence were representations of the possible. In the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick's disobedient space station assistant HAL 9000 reflected popular distrust of new computing technology. But it was just a story. After decades of hardware and software engineering and the emergence of ubiquitous computing and personal digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, the assessment of artificial intelligence has shifted from an imaginative thought problem into the realm of day-to-day experience. In short, AI has left the realm of science fiction and become a part of our daily lives.

Since most of us are not decision-makers at Apple or Google, the creep of machine learning into our daily lives has an air of inevitability: It is simply a part of new phones and other devices that we buy. Software keyboards, for example, now use algorithms that mine our personal data to guess what we are trying to type with our fingers. From grammar correction to "suggested reply" buttons in email software (reply: "Thanks!" or "Got it!"), the promotion of normative expression is well upon us. Had a Dadaist like Tristan Tzara written his absurd and irrational poetry in today's word processing tools, his creative process would have become a fight against auto-correction.

Of course there are still "dumb" typewriters available in thrift shops, and for many the convenience of these corrections outweighs other considerations. But it is not too soon to reflect upon the ways that machine learning is changing both habits of mind and modes of expression, especially as it relates to the arts.

### **1.1 Shortcuts in academic writing**

Not long ago, I lectured in a graduate program in fine art that had many foreign exchange students who spoke English as a second language. Around 2018 the poorly written essays turned in by numerous students seemed unlike any I had received in the past. After considerable research, it became apparent that the papers were a byproduct of automated translation. The translated source texts were not attributed, making this misrepresentation a form of plagiarism. Although software detection tools exist to flag plagiarism, those tools typically declare texts to be free of plagiarism if they are first translated into another language and then back into English. While plagiarism is nothing new, the ease with which words can be acquired and "processed" to meet assigned criteria is striking. What is more, these problems were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

In 2021, it was reported that a senior software engineer at Google was put on leave for having the audacity to maintain that a software research tool (Language Model for Dialog Applications) being developed at Google had crossed over into the realm of sentience [1]. An article on the current state of A.I. text generation by Steven B. Johnson, published in the New York Times [2], confirmed that the latest capabilities for synthetic text generation are mind boggling. Johnson related how a person need only type one sentence and a generative text system can produce pages of text that feel like they belong to the same topic and style. This startling shift in word processing technology will have a momentous impact on academic practices. Students now have access to generative tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, and academia is beginning to take note of it [3]. With the emergence of this technology, every paper read by a professor resembles a Turing Test. Is it an essay written by a student or is it a synthetic conglomeration of words and sentences chosen according to a complex probabilistic algorithm? If the degrees conferred by universities and colleges are to signify that students have engaged in research, reflection, and critical thinking, the methods of assessment will have to keep pace with generative text technology that can spit out topical essays on demand.

In a cautionary column assessing the merits of using AI for writing, author and columnist Mitch Albom "asked" ChatGPT why a student should NOT use it to write papers. Albom's critique of the reply was that it left out joy and satisfaction. "There is a joy in taking the language you have learned and reassembling it to create your thoughts.…There is satisfaction when you read over something you have created from scratch, something that only exists because you made it exist, something that took the impulse in your brain's gray matter and sent it through your fingers and onto the page, where your eyes can read it and your heart can appreciate it" [4]. While Albom's point of view is reasonable, the proliferation of fascinating interactive AI spectacles leaves little doubt that joy and satisfaction can be generated in ways that do not qualify as "from scratch" creativity.

Looked at from the perspective of the budding writer, this new ability to produce pages of coherent text based on one sentence is rather seductive. In many creative disciplines, it is not uncommon to seek ideas from reference material as an aid to production. For example, many designers peruse color palettes, often made by others, in an effort to choose exactly the right colors for a design project. An argument can

be made that having a software writing partner that suggests possible sentences (to follow the current sentence) is little more than a source of inspiration, like a book of color palettes. But if the majority of writers draw inspiration from text generative systems, what would be the cultural impact?

Since the essence of a machine learning system is the digestion and regurgitation of a training set, they are fundamentally imitative. Admittedly, much of what passes as human "creativity" is often highly imitative, too. Still, the use of writing prompts is a problematic turn for the practice of writing. It would appear to tip the scales in favor of writing products that are similar, corrected, and normative. Also, it contributes to a kind of intellectual laziness. Instead of thinking through which sentence, idea or argument, should come next, the writer is encouraged to treat writing as a kind of multiple-choice activity. It is certainly a kind of writing, but it represents a new habit of mind that's reliant upon software.

How does this compare to the use of navigation systems? Before global positioning system (GPS) navigation became common, people internalized more of the knowledge required to get from point A to point B. They used maps and asked local residents for help, but the process involved cultivating memory to make the process smoother the second and third time around. With reliance on navigation systems, the impetus to learn the route is diminished. One can simply turn on the navigation system each time. It is easy and efficient. Navigation systems are able to incorporate current traffic conditions in ways that were not possible in the past. Ultimately people will disagree about the best way to navigate, and there are reasonable arguments to be made for older ways and newer approaches. Citing anthropological research and the philosophy of Albert Borgmann, Jeff Robbins argues in his analysis of GPS that "our addiction to the power of technical order [renders] us increasingly helpless without our conveniences" [5]. Could the same be said for using machine learning as a creative prompt for writing?

It has been suggested by Aeschylus that memory is the mother of all wisdom. Does an intellectual surrogate like ChatGPT apply the right sort of memory to evoke the insight of wisdom? Isn't there an important difference between the data model of cloud computing and the human mind? Profound human experiences like loss, betrayal, and love can impact how a person thinks, what she remembers, and what feels valuable. But machines do not have those kinds of experiences or feelings. Nor do they experience mortality, urgency, regret, and so on. In short, human experiences and emotions are unavailable to a machine algorithm that is optimized to predict the next sentence based on the previous sentences and a database of models.

This is not to say that machine learning should be banished from the domain of writing. Software grammar correction tools—and suggested reply email buttons can help to teach a language. There is intriguing potential in learning to write with expert systems that can convey which vocabulary and grammatical structures are most commonly deployed in a given form of written discourse. The point at which this process of guided writing becomes problematic is when the writer begins to rely upon it to generate ideas and to inform the thoughts that they are expressing.

When the academic intent is to expand student understanding, plagiarism—no matter how technological—typically grounds for expulsion. Institutions of higher learning do not exist simply to generate text, they are also founded upon ethical and idealistic principles about education. But it is not hard to see that the use of technology to game the academic system—to circumvent rules—is the kind of corner-cutting tactic that brings success in other contexts. In social media, like Twitter, a misrepresentation akin to plagiarism has already proven to be effective in influencing people: bots and bot farms inject content into social media using fake accounts and automated scripting. The practice has afforded some people an outsized influence in promoting messages, candidates, and ideological agendas. Arguably this kind of strategic messaging is a bit like false-flag public service advertising: corporations masquerading as benign-sounding trade organizations to promote their own interests.

Another kind of fraud also excites influence: so-called deep fake technology makes it surprisingly easy to produce photorealistic videos that simulate events and actions that never took place. Although it undermines the truism that seeing is believing, ultimately the deep fake is simply a new tool in the expressive arsenal of video producers. That deep fake products are often a hot commodity in the meme culture of social media shows how the application of advanced technology can be both rewarding and ethically problematic. These memes can be a form of slander and an instrument of propaganda. But some bleed over into the domain of parody and prank, as well. Used with a parodic intent, the deep fake is not that different from a prank by celebrated artists like the Yes Men.

If there is a potential for new tools and digital practices to generate buzz, followers, and media attention, their eventual use is assured regardless of ethical complications. Contemporary media culture has created an appetite for visual novelties and innovation. Whether newly minted tactical media strategies are clever or corrupt may simply depend upon the context. Each institution, it seems-whether it be a media corporation, an educational institution, or an art competition-must establish its own set of rules about what sorts of deceptions are permissible.

### **1.2 Template-driven visual culture**

Demand for visual innovation has not been a historical constant. Visual practices in many cultures have been founded upon the ability to reproduce the representational qualities of a master or of a regional style of painting. Though they are often beautiful, these kinds of visual orthodoxy tend to constrain creative practices. Works by one artisan can look strikingly like those of another. The visual modes in such cultural traditions resemble a kind of decoration that reflects an assortment of models.

The approach is reminiscent of the template-driven qualities that dominate contemporary web design, in which authors are offered minor variations on a set of pre-built templates. There is a practical side to this, since web design encompasses complexities of software engineering today. For years artists and designers have experimented with web design and struggled with it. The design process has changed as a result of the growing complexity of building websites that meet usability goals as well as visual design goals. The field of user experience design and user interface design (UX/UI) is largely an outgrowth of the demand for elegant solutions to complex interactive design challenges. It has been a growing sector of design for decades.

Today, however, one can generate Web site imagery and mockups of branding designs by summoning them forth from an AI image generation system (**Figure 1**). One need only describe images with a few words to obtain something usable. This easy emulation of design, illustration, lighting, and photography portends some radical changes of working processes in design. Moreover, as visual design merges with software engineering, there is an opening for systematization and machine learning to usurp a surprisingly large amount of the visual designer's work. In a scenario anticipated by Steven P. Anderson in his address at South By South West (SXSW) in 2019, feedback can be applied to interactive designs through a process known as "A/B testing" [6]. In essence, Web site visitors are presented with subtly different versions of the Web site. User response times and click-through rates can be observed *Perspective Chapter: The Creative Surrogate DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110855*

and designs can be optimized to establish the best fonts, colors, text sizes, and so on, until the results are as good as it gets. For decades the notion that machines and new technology would supplant a lot of arduous physical labor has been a commonplace assumption. Now, however, the specter of automating more conceptual professions like interactive design demands consideration of whether it is desirable to relinquish to machine "intelligence" the very activities that define the expressive qualities of our visual culture.

### **1.3 Controversy surrounding generative imagery**

In 2022, a state-wide art competition in Colorado awarded its first prize to an image that judges undoubtedly had assumed to be produced in a traditional, painterly manner. Despite an oblique clue appended as part of the entrant's name, they were unprepared for the possibility that the image had in fact been generated using algorithms that applied machine learning and deep convolutional neural networks. In short, the contestant, Jason M. Allen, fed a series of textual descriptions into the Midjourney software package until it spat out the prize-winning image. The products of that process are both familiar and unanticipated due to the ways that the content and visual style are reflected through the matrix of other images that have been used to train the system. Not surprisingly, artists who had used more traditional means for their submissions to the contest were suitably miffed by the decision. In fairness to the judges, the image that they chose adhered to principles of composition, balance, and color that traditionally have only been applied by knowledgeable artists who are familiar with painting and art history. The controversial selection raises a salient question: why should the contestant be punished for using artificial intelligence to generate an image if judges felt it was the best?

There are a variety of potential responses. For one, the winning image was comprised only of colored pixels. Unlike many of the other submissions, there was no

physical artifact. Yet there is no reason that, eventually, machines could not reproduce the physical textures and qualities of paintings, too, using similar machine learning techniques to establish the most desirable properties of famous canvases. Would it have been more acceptable if the winning contestant had used paints and brushes to copy the image he generated procedurally onto a canvas? It is tricky to defend traditional image-making approaches on the basis of the visual difference of the products themselves because it is impossible to anticipate the myriad correlations that "AI art" could involve, or the training sets of images that comparable software systems could be provided. Is the real problem, as with plagiarism and academic integrity, that the AI artist just cut too many corners?

It is quite common in art schools for students to copy great paintings and to make sketches from paintings. Practices that resemble forgery are permitted in the academic context as a way to understand great works in more detail. The point of these exercises is not to train people in the art of forgery. It is to comprehend the process and content of revered paintings so that the knowledge acquired can later be applied to new works. In this model of art training, which sometimes also involves apprenticeship, the trainee must understand the canon and learn to reproduce its qualities before departing on a more independent path. While these rites of passage have not been universal, they have been a very common pattern of training in the arts of the last few centuries. The sudden emergence of an image-making practice that involves calling forth images, with a few clicks of a mouse, flies in the face of this tradition, which is a tradition of both painting and knowledge transmission. In some ways it resembles the challenge to painting that was posed by the Daguerrotype, about which the painter Paul Delaroche pronounced, in 1840, "from this day, painting is dead."

But in truth the challenge to traditional painting posed by software has been arriving for a long time. In 1988 Timothy Binkley wrote:

*One hallmark of interactivity with an "intelligent" machine is the ability to discourse in generalities and dispense with the need to delineate all the specifics: we can tell the computer to adjust properties of objects or images without delineating each and every detail as a painter must in manipulating pigment. Since the computer understands concepts, we can tell it to make the mountains rougher without saying exactly how it is to be done. This makes it possible for the artist to work at a higher level of generality [7].*

What is astonishing about a tool like Midjourney is the way that it functions with only the most general instructions from its human operator. It removes the practice of image-making from the realm of labor and expertise. This break is centuries in the making. The Western tradition of painting has long cultivated a mystique about the genius of the artist who was able to translate a rich imagination into paintings and sculptures. With the emergence of perspective in the Renaissance, artists worked increasingly in styles that reflected a cohesive point of view, as if the artist's eye were a camera. As David Hockney argued in his BBC series Secret Knowledge [8], the artistic application of imaging technologies like concave mirrors, lenses, the Camera Lucida, and the Camera Obscura contributed to the transformation of European painting styles. Representational practices that were extremely difficult to achieve with the unaided eye became common. In his assessment, the use of optical imaging technology began to spread beginning in the fourteenth century, even though their use remained a guarded secret. The secrecy not only conveyed a competitive advantage vis-a-vis other artists, it also sustained impressions of

### *Perspective Chapter: The Creative Surrogate DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110855*

artistic genius and skill. In effect the imaging tools permitted artists to focus their attention differently. They were able to work "at a higher level of generality" by tracing the contours of a scene from a projection rather than having to precisely observe every detail of position and proportion. Since art historians have largely neglected the implications of Hockney's work, many young artists who encounter secret knowledge for the first time are surprised to learn that imaging technologies have been around for centuries.

Even today many artists keep their digital cooking a secret. Computer imaging technologies have quietly pervaded contemporary art to the point where it is uncommon when artistic practices do not involve the computer in some way. In this context, it does not really make sense to ask whether artists and art competitions should be required to use only traditional media and techniques. Instead the problem is how to address certain technologies that seem to break too radically with conventional practice, and how to respond to the dissatisfaction with the encroachment of new modes of generative imaging based on machine learning.

In 2022, a French game developer known by the name "5you" created an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for people to generate manga without artistic skill. Suddenly people with no illustration talent could generate manga that looked professional. This use of AI to simplify the generation of anime and manga, in the style of the artist Kim Jung Gi, sparked a furious backlash from Japan's anime community. 5you reported that he received death threats from Jung Gi loyalists and illustrators who resented this appropriation of the recently deceased artist's work. According to 5you, the reaction also reflects a kind of panic among the artists and illustrators. "I think they fear that they're training for something they won't ever be able to live off because they're going to be replaced by AI" [9].

Like photography, which made obsolete the practice of hand-painting slides for projection, this automagical production process does threaten to disrupt career paths. The replacement of skills with software systems brings the specter of technologicallydriven unemployment to a whole new class of professions, ones that until recently seemed safe from the tumult of automation. From expendable illustrators and artists to outmoded fashion models, who are being supplanted by evergreen virtual avatars (like Lil Miquel with over 2 million followers), the visual culture is evolving in some unanticipated ways.

Although in the current state of AI art, controlling the results remains somewhat crude, the public's fascination with visual effects and simple "creative" practices insures that these kinds of image generation are not going away. Already there are countless apps for mobile media, that permit people to see themselves as a cartoon, make themselves bug-eyed, or wear cartoon animal masks that adapt to their facial expressions.

These visual effects unlock new dimensions of digital media as a performative context. From "machinema" to the "deep fake" technologies, the world of computing is becoming a playground filled with low-hanging fruit techniques of image manipulation, filtering, and enhancement. With social media as a venue for these types of spectacles, the need for "art competitions" and the imprimatur of artistic exhibition are in many ways becoming unnecessary.

Nevertheless, mobile phone camera effects software makes photos produced by different users all start to look the same. When users are presented with limited style options this is inevitable. Such canned effects now appear uncritically in admissions portfolios for art schools. In many respects the style of these photos belongs more to the "app"than to the artists. They are baked into the software systems in a way.

Of course if the only criterion that matters is whether the student photographer experienced joy while making the images, then the glib application of styles is no mistake, just a happy accident. Assuredly the makers of simplistic software tools would like people to adopt this point of view. The marketing of software tools routinely exaggerates the usefulness of such products. What is more it attempts to fool consumers into believing that they will become creative simply by buying the product. Such marketing is hardly new, but with the popularization of easy media production tools, the *zeitgeist* of self-centered and intoxicated pseudo-creativity has been taken to new levels.

### **1.4 Ideal creativity**

In the classical Greece of Plato, painters were not even thought to be creative. Their work was imitative rather than intellectual. Through the Middle Ages in Europe, creativity was God's work. Even centuries after the Renaissance the term "creativity" seemed a bit too proud for Christiandom, where the term evoked the Latin notion of creation "*ex nihilo*" (from nothing). By the nineteenth century the idea of art as human creativity became more commonplace.

Even so, in the mid-nineteenth century, when Henry Fox Talbot titled his book of innovative new (photographic) calotype prints, he chose *Pencil of Nature*. Like other early inventors of photography, Fox Talbot saw himself more as mid-wife to the creative process, revealing the images that nature had generated on his treated paper. Today marketing rhetoric for popular software has departed from this modesty. If we are to believe the software industry hype, it takes no effort for anyone to generate results so astounding that it is unclear which is more impressive, the new technology or our casual mastery of it. In this new world, illuminated by the glow of marketing, there is no cause to credit nature, or the almighty: the credit for this wonderful creativity is all ours.

To articulate an "anti-technological" ideal of creativity today would amount to a rejection of the modern world. In the wake of a century and a half of staggering technological change, it should be quite clear that technical standards and methods are eventually surpassed. That some of the new methods seem too easy to be "artistic"has rarely prevented artists from using them. For men like Daguerre and Nadar, who were already successful before pioneering photographic media, it is clear that the potential of the photographic medium drove them as innovators within a new field of expression. Similar motivations have driven artists to adopt computers in their creative processes. But for most people who adopt new media tools today, the rationale for using such technology has little to do with a clear artistic or innovative purpose. In the years since the introduction of the personal computer, at the beginning of the 1980s, the software offerings have become less tool-like and more toy-like. Today people use technology because it is "cool" and fun, not simply because of what things it can help to create.

**Figure 2** shows an interactive artwork that I made in 2001 named "Robotross—a pun meant to evoke both a robotic version of the TV painter Bob Ross and the mythic albatross sea bird, a symbol of inescapable troubles. The work addresses the issue of creativity in new media. Specifically, it is a mediation on the seductiveness, potential, and shortcomings of digital media as a vehicle for creativity. Unlike painting, which permits great latitude for content and stylistic choices, the Robotross interface implies that it offers paint brushes, but it actually only delivers pre-painted elements. While it is possible to configure this small collection of elements—a sky, a mountain, a tree,

*Perspective Chapter: The Creative Surrogate DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110855*

**Figure 2.** *Robotross, Andy Deck, 2001, artcode.org/robotross.*

etc.—into a variety of digital "paintings," the transformation of the brushes into buttons that paste pictures calls attention to a restriction of freedom and control as compared to traditional painting. Robotross is a form of culture jamming that responds to a general culture of computing technology (and "computer art") that seems to take progress for granted. It poses the question of why artists would use and celebrate tools that force them to make images based on a limited set of model paintings? Ultimately, it seems that there is a novelty value in producing images in a new way, whether it is with Robotross or digital image filter operations that draw upon deep convolutional neural networks.

I am certainly not the first to reflect upon the impact of computers on the creative process. In the 1960s, A. Michael Noll produced a variety of monochrome images using computers and pen plotter printers. He also wrote perceptively about the artistcomputer rapport.

*In the computer, man has created not just an inanimate tool but an intellectual and active creative partner that, when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new esthetic experiences …. The artist's role as master creator will remain, however, because even though the physical limitations of the medium will be different from traditional media, his training, devotion, and visualization will give him a higher degree of control of the artistic experience. As an example, the artist's particular interactions with the computer might be recorded and played back by the public on their own computers. Specified amounts of interaction and modification might be introduced by the individual, but the overall course of the interactive experience would still follow the artist's model [10].*

In many respects the passage above is a reasonably accurate description of the actual relationship that many artist-programmers have attained with computers in the intervening half century. Yet like many enthusiastic pioneers Noll overlooked some pitfalls. With time it has become clear that in addition to being an "intellectual partner" the computer is also a product. Moreover, most people using it are not programmers. Consequently its software is, more often than not, a product, too. Commercial tools may require periodic relearning and sizable investments. Though in some respects artists may be "master creators" using such tools, in other ways

the artist is boxed in by programmers, lawyers, and executives in the software and computer industries.

This is not to suggest that software tools are always problematic. Like conventional tools, some are good and some end up in the back of a junk drawer. It is worth noting, though, that "creative" software is not the same as a brush. Paint brushes do not record your actions and location, and they do not put demographically targeted advertisements in front of you while you are working. Paint programs can. If software is an intellectual partner, and its savvy nature is coded into it by a programmer, then who is the creative force behind the interaction of the user and the software tool? The poet W. H. Auden insisted that the true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. He made similarly dismissive comments about the impact of artists [11]. His provocative claim begs the question of whether science, engineering, and industrial design may be more creatively influential than the people using their PCs to make pictures and stories? Indeed, there are types of products that issue from software that are largely predefined by the hardware and software, leaving only minor decisions to the operator of the software. One example is children's "art" software, which often trivializes the creative process in the name of colorful entertainment.

To employ a baseball metaphor, are we headed for a period in which young artists grow up thinking that they have hit a triple when in fact software programmers have put them on third base? In some domains, like immersive and interactive entertainment, it is entirely possible that consumers of interactive narratives will not really care about the relative contributions of man and machine to their experiences. Indeed they may come to think of themselves as the co-creators of their own personalized adventures.

In the aforementioned column addressing ChatGPT, Albom asked it: "What would the writer Mitch Albom think about a computer-generated story?" It answered, in part, "as a professional author and storyteller, he may feel that the use of computergenerated stories undermines the value of human creativity, imagination and the emotional connection that a human author can create with the readers. Additionally, he may also feel that the computer-generated stories lack the unique voice, perspective and the emotional depth that a human author can bring to a story" [4]. Albom agreed. But the fact that the tool had anticipated his perspective is remarkable. Indeed it is easy to underestimate the potential of machine learning when it is the focus of research. When I first read Wendy Lehnert's 1981 treatise on narrative notations, her hand drawn plot units and narrative summarization seemed rather obtuse, if not preposterous [12]. Forty years later, that work has become foundational research into AI storytelling, notable for its event-driven understanding of narrative plots, and part of the broader field of narrative understanding. Whether by parsing the logic of events in a narrative, or by modeling characters and their relationships [13], or by analyzing visual changes from moment to moment in an image stream [14], synthetic "understanding" that seemed beyond systematization only a few decades ago is becoming a part of the software that we live with.

### **2. Conclusions**

To conclude, there is a profound shift occurring in the realm of what has been known as creativity. Creative professionals are now lurching toward engagement with tools and practices that challenge assumptions about the need for expertise and

### *Perspective Chapter: The Creative Surrogate DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110855*

human intelligence in a wide array of art and design fields. More than ever before, humans are being guided through operations rather than using innate tools and internalized knowledge. These new capacities can be seen in both positive and negative lights. Either they represent low-having fruit to be exploited easily, or, alternatively, the shift represents a deterioration of creative control on the part of the artist, who operates in a playground of code that is largely written by others. One consequence of the emergence of simplified production tools is that seemingly anyone becomes an artist, writer, or designer. The barriers to entry drop, but at the same time, the prospects for careers in these domains dim. The emergence of artificially intelligent creative surrogates means that intellectual careers that used to seem to be safe from automation are suddenly at risk like manufacturing jobs before them. The significance for the broader culture of the destabilization of these creative professions is a matter of concern. Will the transformed cultural sphere be more derivative as its creative products are perpetually remixed? Will the easy tools engender habits of mind that are too reliant on software for ideas? Maybe the future is brighter than bright, but this is a moment of inflection for the intellectual and the next steps feel like they are into the unknown.

### **Author details**

Andy Deck University of Michigan - Flint, Flint, USA

\*Address all correspondence to: andydeck@umich.edu

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

### **References**

[1] The Guardian. Google Engineer Put on Leave after Saying AI Chatbot Has Become Sentient. 2022. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2022/jun/12/googleengineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine. [Accessed: March 22, 2022]

[2] NYTimes. A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?. 2022. Available from: https://www.nytimes. com/2022/04/15/magazine/ai-language. html. [Accessed: April 17, 2022]

[3] NYTimes. Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach. 2023. Available from: https://www. nytimes.com/2023/01/16/technology/ chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-universities. html. [Accessed: January 16, 2023]

[4] Albom, Mitch. ChatGPT Is Smart, Fast and Easy — All the Reasons you Should be Wary. 2023. Available from: https://www.freep.com/story/sports/ columnists/mitch-albom/2023/01/29/ chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-smartfast-easy-writing-aide/69851024007/

[5] Robbins J. GPS navigation… but what is it doing to us? In: In 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society. Wollongong, NSW, Australia: IEEE; 2010. pp. 309-318. DOI: 10.1109/ISTAS.2010.5514623

[6] Medium. The Future of Design: Computation & Complexity. 2022. Available from: https://stephenanderson. medium.com/the-future-of-designcomputation-complexity-a434d2da3cd5 [Accessed: September 22, 2022]

[7] Timothy B. The computer is not a medium. Philosophic Exchange. 1988-1989;**19**(1):162

[8] Hockney D. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York: Viking Studio; 2001. ISBN 10: 0670030260

[9] Rest of World. AI-generated Art Sparks Furious Backlash from Japan's Anime Community. 2022. Available from: https://restofworld.org/2022/ ai-backlash-anime-artists [Accessed: March 22, 2022]

[10] Michael NA. The digital computer as a creative medium. IEEE Spectrum. 1967;**4**(10):88-95

[11] Auden WH. The poet and the City. In: The Dyer's Hand. New York: Random House; 1962

[12] Lehnart W. Plot units and narrative summarization. Cognitive Science. 1981;**4**:293-331

[13] Chaturvedi S, Srivastava S, Daume III H, Dyer C. Modeling Evolving Relationships Between Characters in Literary Novels. AAAI [Internet]. 5 Mar 2016;**30**(1). Available from: https:// ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/ view/10358 [cited 2023 Mar. 28]

[14] Cavazza M, Charles F, Mead SJ. Interactive storytelling: From AI experiment to new media. In Proceedings of the second international conference on Entertainment computing (ICEC '03). USA: Carnegie Mellon University; 2003. pp. 1-8

### **Chapter 6**

## *Thumb.CAD:* Essays on Technology, Design and Image

*Caio Almeida, Renato César Souza and Lucas Luciano*

### **Abstract**

This work seeks, through the use of jargon from the internet and computing to make an analogy game to situations found contemporaneously in image, digital culture and architecture, showing the intertwining between many factors that increase the complexity of tasks and demanding answers that are also compatible. The essay seeks no to argue against technology and its use, but to discuss the pitfalls of the enchantment generated by its facilities. In this way, questions arise about how to face the problems of a world moulded by accelerated information and communication technologies, in which our ways of thinking are highly influenced by electronic mediation. Finally, it is proposed to discuss a dialogical and cooperative involvement between technology and man that emphasize possibilities and reenchants our tools to reformulate the architectural practice and promote openings for emancipation.

**Keywords:** architecture, digital, culture, image, technology

### **1. Introduction**

The text follows an essay structure, and using terms linked to the technology field allows us to deduce two brief statements: the terms, being recent and linked to information science, can generate an ambiguity or misunderstanding of its concepts. It is worth emphasizing that the use of some of these words is done to establish a bridge between the different names treated, to make connections and not to transfigure meanings between them or employ new uses.

Current image consolidation scenario is reinforced by the recent proliferation of generative images conceived by Artificial Intelligence. Obtaining increasingly significant results and reaching a number of users and dissemination on a large scale, their capabilities range from obtaining images by text prompts to videos with non-real human faces and 3D spaces obtained with a simple mouse click. These transformations impact not only art the concept of authorship, plagiarism and the future of design professionals in their various fields.

So, there is no alternative but to deal with the new "soft" infrastructures that are emerging: knowledge, program, cultural and virtual infrastructure. The demand for design and de-design in the ultra-designed, ultra-mediated world is huge, but most architects still respond to these demands in the medieval language of stoic and autonomous construction [1].

What is certain is that this new visuality does not arrive free of problems and paradoxes. At the same time that it opens us up to unprecedented and auspicious perspectives regarding our relationship with the world, it has also distanced us from the world. The way we use the computer and its interfaces today, it has paradoxically expanded the possibilities of our action in the world, and at the same time impoverished the quality of our experience of the world. Computerized representations bring us the world imagetically, but they also serve as a barrier, creating a distance between us and the represented world. And since we started to take the representations sufficiently, as if they were the world, we fall into a simulacrum cult, into a reinvented idolatry [2].

In this way, we will try to address in this text questions about the performance of design and the architect in the face of technological advances and the image and digital technology affirmation as at the momentum, the definitive instruments of communication and production.

### **2. Thumb.CAD: technical image under the finger tip**

The term thumbnail designates an image with the function of intuitively assisting in the navigation of pages and content on the internet, especially for children's and naïve users. On the internet, it has common use, which designates a miniature image use to draw attention to a particular video, link or page. For content producers in this media, it is a fundamental item that directly interferes with the search results for videos and news, as well as the possible views number and the reach (interactivity) that certain content can receive. This miniaturized image seeks to represent the possible content to be treated by the click made on it, also refining the search engines, with a more communicative, direct and why not democratic role, than would be the textual form.

However, the resource has also been used to act against this same search engine, mainly through the thumbnail image's communicative capacity. This tactic of accessing false and sensational content can be observed at all times on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and popularly it is called clickbait.

The images start to be produced more to orient themselves from the digital platforms' perspective with strong aesthetic and communication appeal. This indiscriminate use of image processing and digital manipulation is compounded by the sometimes-illogical way in which text and images are correlated by search engines.

The representations detach themselves from their referents and start to act in an erratic way, almost free recombination [3]. This is added to the constant novelty sensation experienced through an infinite scroll bar, conveying an imaginary seduction experience that is not of a repetitive void, but that of constant new information [4]. The technical image is summarily produced by devices; it is no longer made by planes but by dots and pixels, and it is zero dimensional.

According to Cabral [2], photography carried out using analogue means had as its main elements: the automation of its production, the replacement speed and the ease of its distribution. With the arrival of digital means, such elements will suffer a significant displacement: the automation transmutes into immediacy; replacement speed turns into manipulation; and the ease of distribution creates omnipresence (ubiquity of a photographic universe). The most visible effect of the increase in the speed of the technical image essential characteristics is undoubtedly a generalized banalization in their use. An inflation of images will mark our daily lives and permeate all our most common activities, and they are calculated images.

### Thumb.CAD: *Essays on Technology, Design and Image DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110669*

Thus, computerized representations bring us the world through images and serve as a barrier, creating a distance between us and the represented world. Canadian architects and theorists Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier [5] argue that if we want to understand the current excessive image proliferation scenario, we will have to refer back to a crucial moment in the History of Western Culture, when even in Greek Theater the separation between stage and audience. With this distinction, a "distance" arises between the show, the author and the audience, making theatre a different manifestation of ancient rituals where these "distances" did not exist. Interestingly, while the ritual reinforces and corroborates specific worldviews, the theatre opens itself to experimentation with new worldviews. The establishment of this distance in the theatre will be especially characterized by three aspects: predominance of the visual (and to a lesser extent the auditory), the feasibility of a rational development (through the institution of authorship), and a bodily disengagement from most of the people involved (the audience).

The thumbnail goes towards this miniaturization idea and availability at your fingertips, a latent reduction and technical devices compression, the videos length, less text and writing, attention, patience and goes on. Images transform all our desires, objectivities and conditions into them [6].

The image return is not revolutionary news as Flusser [6] had already warned 40 years ago, but a comeback to its importance as a majority communication after the writing invention and the importance of texts. At one point, it was the writing that explained the images of the world, in the present-future it explains the text's illustrations. The cognition and thinking abstraction are nothing but a progressive subtraction of the object's dimensions, their roughness and imperfections.

The visualization itself becomes a trap, and we jump between scales and engage in this centesimal universe of pixels, codes, data and zero dimensionality. Alienation starts from this moment, when we try to incorporate linear thinking into the surface thinking. Decisions, design and work gradually become semi-autonomous. The virtual is interwoven in the way of experimentation in increasingly abstract forms, but simultaneously intentional. Data are said to be disembodied and neutral but are stained and occluded somewhere. The main implication that technical images, device proliferation, automation, emulation, semi-autonomy and memetic culture always will generate is the program affirmation.

The fiercest critics fear the objectification of desire (through automation) and the dissolution of communication (through interaction).

In this sense, a discussion on how we deal with this images production and interpretation becomes important, which will directly impact on culture, behaviour and workings, especially designers, architects and other professionals who manage the communication of their ideas with others, the world and the multiple technological devices and social media, through images.

### **2.1 The programmatic image: memetic cultures and semi-autonomy design**

In 1936, the German philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin published one of his best-known essays, "The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility" [7], where he analysed the impact of new technologies, in particular photography and cinema. For him, the new techniques will lead to a gradual disembodiment of thought embodied in artistic production, causing a constant loss of aesthetic affection which he called "aura" of the art object, understood by him as the character that

defines the uniqueness of each work, and which is now being reproduced indefinitely due to the many technical advances.

Benjamin [7] noted that the works of art were always reproducible throughout history, with falsification by copies and moulds but with the technical emergency, the authenticity of the original is lost. In a reproduction culture, the original does not matter much, and consequently, this artwork and image "aura", weakens and loses its charm. Sixty years later, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard [8] remakes the argument by saying that it was no simply that the importance of the original had been lost by the proliferation of copies in our simulation culture. Instead, in this era dominated by third-order simulation, we have entered a new phase. If the second order was the moment as Benjamin observed, when the distinction between original and copy was broken, the third order is marked by the complete disappearance of any reference to the original notion and often to reality itself, giving rise to a new kind of charm.

Several other contemporary studies seek to deepen the view of repetition and copying, giving rise to meme neologism. Coined by biologist Richard Dawkins [9] in 1976, the word meme refers to how ideas and culture (music, phrases, words, images) spread, reinforcing the argument that culture is propagated by imitation. The task of technical images is thus to establish a general code to reunify culture [10].

The technical improvement allows digital reproduction to clone, emulate and cut without suffering the deterioration that usually happened in the previous mechanical era. In this memetic culture fuelled by likes, tweets and shares, it is not the original that becomes important, but the number of times it is replicated. Originality gives rise to replication and repetition as a discourse enhancement.

An obvious question is whether the memetic culture spread in digital media is linked to copyright issues and image use. How to protect these rights when a digital file can be copied, emulated and reproduced endlessly? YouTube, for example, only "monetizes" original content, and uses algorithm and the platform's own users to identify videos that appropriate music, images and parts of other videos with protected rights, but the problem is much deeper. In 2013, the 3D print of the "Liberator" a firearm was made available online and epitomizes the potential but also the risk associated with the rapid digital file's dissemination. Days after its publication, distribution and manufacture were banned from the public. The American government justified that there was no way to regulate the data control and possession relationships, but the print files were available in many torrents for several years until they were started to be controlled.

It is not just a matter of dealing with the technical capacity question of replication generated by digital technologies. There are interlocking social and cultural factors that reveal or hide extreme conditions emerging from these technological capabilities.

For Weizman [11], the image goes beyond the mere representation question, but most of the things that are communicated and the decisions made, by humans or networks shared between humans and technological devices, are made through image sharing. The images, the aesthetic domain, become operationalized.

Suppose prehistoric magic ritualizes certain models and myths. Current magic ritualizes another kind of model: programs [10]. Technical images mean programs; they are projections that aim at their receptors and models for our behaviour [6]. The main implication that technical images, device proliferation, automation, emulation, semiautonomy and memetic culture will generate is this program affirmation. Programs are characterized by systems in which chance becomes a necessity. Games in which all virtuality, even the least likely ones, will necessarily take place if played for a long time [12].

There is no last device or program for all programs, behind a program there is the need for a metaprogram for its programming. It is an opening upwards and tending to the infinite [10]. The man-appliance relationship is then reversed, and it is we who now work in appliances function, even though we continue to deny the loss of that control. A Program affirmation and a desire for its affirmation, since the programs are getting better given their infinite possibilities amount that surpasses man's decision-making capacity.

The device's speech will become even more imperative, thanks precisely to these telematics and unintelligible dialogues. The devices always work more independently of the programmers' motives. And devices that have been programmed by other devices appear more frequently [12].

With digital information manipulation technologies, interactive systems can make use of automation to abstract repetitive and low-significance tasks, and thus enhance their scope; on the other hand, conversely, automation systems can now make use of interaction to become more adaptive and open.

### **2.2 Obfuscation: hidden the image and it's programs**

Obfuscation is a technique in the programming language, which aims to mask the real code meaning and intention, thus serving either as an obstacle to the base code copy/decryption or to hide the algorithm real intention. The obfuscation method works by automatically and regularly shuffling the variables, leaving the code legibility impaired, with meaningless characters or changing the execution steps' order.

Obfuscation has some parameters that make it less or more complex, such as power (the complexity degree of the obfuscated code in relation to the original), resistance (to cyber-attacks), stealth (code camouflage with the rest of the program) and cost (runtime and overload on the obsolete system in relation to the original system). The obfuscation concept/practice can also be used in both directions. Ambiguity on how to note is a virtual constant factor. The technique can be used to protect passwords, personal data, programming lines, anti-piracy control against hacker's attacks, malwares and others stuff. But they also serve to monitoring, control, determine, presume, suggest, collect, and provide feedback, in short to increase the opacity of the so-called "black box system".

According to Glanville [13], James Clark Maxwell was a British philosopher and mathematician, who besides having contributed to modern theories on electromagnetism used the black box concept in a pioneering way. The concept was attached to cybernetics studies by W. Ross Ashby [14], as an artifice that allows the observer to construct a description explaining some system behaviour. One of the best examples to illustrate the black box concept is given by Flusser [10] when analysing the camera and its operation: "The photographer when using a camera must be only part of the device competence so that the whole camera never reveals itself. The box's darkness is the challenge. Although the photographer knows the box output and input, he does not know what is going on inside the box. The impenetrability of this system and its complexity is what can be called a black box".

Concept inserted not only in the internal machine structure such as cameras, computers and cell phones, but which is also rooted in economic, political and cultural systems, translating specific forms of suggestion and interpretation.

For Bridle [15], there is a concrete and causal relationship between the complexity of the systems we encounter every day and the opacity with which most of these systems are configured and their direct relationship with inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism issues.

With the digital technology's emergence, the connection between magic and technology is frequently invoked again, since the functionality of digital devices challenges the common observer's understanding. We thus repeat the same behaviour of the primitive man in relation to the pre-scientific world: we call magic what we do not understand but which in the digital technology case is less linked to his experience as it was in the archaic sense, and more to illusionism resulting from ignorance in relation to what is programmed or, hidden in the black box [16].

The observation of these images/data and its programs, should not be performed uncritically, but rather explore ways to make more transparent the "black box" of the apparatus, see intentions in these programs and which are usually covered by complexity, opacity and impersonality layers.

Architecture is confined to representation, because instead of making it a philosophical problem, it has become a strategy, a space for manoeuver, a hiding place, and not a means of attack as it should be [17].

Sanford Kwinter [18] writes that the telescope and microscope invention, thus making objects on the smallest scale and those very distant visible to the human eye, were the main key in ending various historical tyrannies. Cabral [19] complements this by noting that this mobility allowed by the microscope and telescope occurs within the scope of scale, which is mainly a space question and only indirectly a question of time. The new visuality that comes with digital technologies allows us a similar mobility strategy, and the main factor that differentiates this mobility is that it does not only occur in space, but mainly in time. In some ways we can now cast our gaze back in time, simulating the past and to a certain extent, the future.

Returning to the questions raised, this is perhaps the great computer contribution to our culture: the possibility of making explicit the mechanisms behind complex processes. If the telescope and microscope showed us scales inaccessible to the unaided/naked human eye, the computer can give us access to the origin of the processes and to understanding of the whole otherwise inaccessible to the unaided/ naked eye [18].

Cybernetics is a possible solution for dealing with complex systems (black boxes), transforming unpredictable situations into informative ones.

Complexity is a recurring theme in everything, it is mainly linked to technology and computing, information and systems theory, but it appears eventually more in other areas such as economics, design, architecture and urbanism. Among its many definitions, complexity is related to the difficulty level in forecasting the interconnections present in a system, and it is a way of thinking that can contribute to giving visibility to processes.

For a long time, everything was compared to a machine [3], and the importance of talking about machines, clouds, networks and other metaphors is a challenge that usually encompasses many understandings, many meanings, and, in a way, always ends up leading to a trivialized commonplace. The cloud is the moment metaphor, where we connect, work and store things. The cloud lands at all points and explores the ambiguous status they hold; it is able to mould itself to geographies of power due to its physical distance from the solidity of its intentions.

Technological acceleration transforms the planet, society and the individual daily, but has failed to transform our understanding of these things. The digital paradigm marks a knowledge expansion that results from the increasingly information intensity assets and their extensive dissemination that shape our reality, obscuring disciplinary boundaries [20]. We need not only new technologies but also new metaphors: a meta-language to describe the world that complex systems have generated. New

abbreviations, which at the same time recognize and deal with reality in a world in which people, politics, culture and technology and their images are all entangled [15].

### **2.3 For a cybernetic design: transformations in architectural practice and design process**

Cybernetics emerged at the beginning of the information age, in pre-digital communications, creating a connection between human-machine interaction and systems among themselves. As a result, cybernetics frames the world in terms of systems and their goals [21].

The relationship between cybernetics and surveillance and control techniques has been strengthened by the continuous communication tools development and the representation of technical devices. Surveillance and control managed through large bits conglomerates, with the name of Big Data, are now interpreted by algorithms in increasingly larger volumes and collected by capture and information devices in smaller space and time intervals. Its influences range from political campaign promotion and data package sales to lobbying, as well as military strategies.

Weizman [11] points out that there are two forms of violence that are getting deeper: physical and digital. This digital violence was enhanced by the isolation caused by the Corona Virus pandemic, serving as an alibi for companies to use the connection between the two, collecting data, monitoring people and guiding practices that reflect on social/political space structures. Power and control (surveillance/security) are paradoxical variables when technologically oriented. Technology expands power but can concentrate if it is done unevenly. And control since the more sophisticated the security devices, the more sophisticated the attacks also become.

Thus, a search for attempts to solve complexity and reduce its abstraction arises. But the more one tries to explain the virtual world functioning, the more diffuse it seems to get. Flusser [6], adds: the more complex the tools, the more abstract their functions will be.

According to Spuybroek [22], architects have been more obsessed with shapes such as cubes, spheres and other Euclidean geometric shapes, and now they are attracted to clouds, swarms, patterns, automata, cells, rhizomes, substances, fractals, biomimetics and others concepts borrowed from fields like biology and philosophy. They start drawing less and simulating more. Proportion, perspective, typology and other arbitrary and stabilizing cultural forms are no longer the interest focus in the current digital architectural production model; this intermediation role was assumed by CAD software. A move from the generation of processes seen from the outside to the inside, propitiated by the growing importance given to the virtual dimension in architecture. Open dynamic systems bring an approach in which the meaning lies in unveiling potentialities of indeterminations.

A shift in the process generation seen from the outside in, brought about by the growing importance given the dimension of the virtual in architecture.

It is good to remember that the ultra-mediated computational universe becomes dangerous when it ceases to be a heuristic device, of possibility and becomes an ideology that privileges information, technique and access to these facilities, highlighting the image above all things, as is practised in many of the so-called digital architectures and the discourse that accompany them.

Graafland [23], will question if the incorporation of theories about composition, semiotics, philosophy, critical theory and the list continues, can still help in the discovery of a better design/project quality, or if they would actually be a sum of fields

belonging to a same postmodern universe that is disguised under a new discourse, in which the longing for theses interdisciplinarities is being used to put on a design and endow it with insignificant meanings.

But how to face the problems of a world formed by information and communication technologies, in which our ways of thinking are highly influenced by electronic mediation? These issues were not restricted to the "design means", but will also influence the ways we see and experience spaces.

So, the "digital shift" as put by Mario Carpo [24], became larger than was initially thought, in depth and comprehensiveness in architecture. There is no way to highlight only a duality, such as between representation and production, between criticism and design, technology and art, artefact and nature and other divisions, because they are nevertheless not able to understand the full complexity. The digital shift makes their relationships liquefied, and thus other needs arise, such as avoiding taking shortcuts and resisting easy solutions [22].

Profession increasingly needs to deal with the communication systems, work and space acceleration. Understand that cyberspace is not on a plane so different from ours, part of a virtual life taken apart, but that new reasoning is needed more than ever to capture our relations with these digital worlds.

The architecture role idea as an intangible services producer, whether they are digital files for manufacturing, interface design or as an organization model has grown a lot. Growth that goes hand in hand with the manufacturing distributed trend that breaks with the traditional supply chain, as several companies start selling information and digitalized data that allow the production of parts instead of manufacturing and selling them physically. Some factories, like some architectural firms, are moving away from services based solely on drawings and objects to being based on information. The tendency has already been seen in objects such as lamps, clocks and shoes for another time to make artefacts and buildings. For Spuybroek [22], design becomes more about the organization among infinite possibilities.

The material aspect mentioned by Flusser [10] is no longer what gives value or involvement with a particular object, but the software, the virtuality contained therein. In architecture, because it is an object with physicality, scale and wide appropriations, the issue is more delicate, but it is not foreign to these discussions. According to Bitoni [25], materials are no longer formed by the tool progression, as has been the case since the beginning of civilization, where from the first primitive stone tools, we continue to make more sophisticated ones. Our tools are now linguistic; language is now our hammer and saw.

The effective progress of technological advances in architecture will not be solved without organization and rationalization, and it will be done through flexible interactions and not rigid hierarchies, requiring a behaviour that is more adaptable than mechanical.

The essential mechanism for the eventual success of experiences with participation and indeterminacy is feedback. Some solutions go ahead and others do not, but all generate circularity. This requires greater connectivity between architects and other members of the system, to create a holistic workflow. This is the elementary design function of any nature, to improve people's lives and meet their needs. Put that away, one of the great design tasks nowadays is to adjust connections between things that appear to be disconnected. Task is currently called designing interfaces [3].

Some architects have sought to automate the intuitive realization of their ideas through algorithms, at the risk of falling into the classic trap that tools, regardless

of their nature, do not satisfy the objectives and are not even used to interpret their results in addition to computer simulations.

Thus, according to Gobin et al. [26], the use of digital is once again a generalizing specialist system, and the architect's dilemma continues as it has been since the profession's emergence, the classic difficulty of translating from conception to representation, and representation for realization.

When designing ontology, the objects, operations and relationships that can be described in an information processing system are determined. This indicates which attributes are stored in files and databases, and with which objects are presented to users to interact [27].

Potentialities that seek flexible interfaces with different abstraction levels capable of gradually involving users and their autonomy and the architecture craft can thus discover other paths for the profession, providing the interfaces that generate involvement and interest in architecture and its agency, challenges that Gordon Pask [28] had already glimpsed 50 years ago.

It is increasingly necessary to think about new technologies in other ways and criticize them to participate significantly in this cybernetic driving. Thinking about the project not as something sealed, but as part of a system open to possible indeterminations.

### **2.4 Refactoring the image**

Refactoring is the process of modifying a system and its program to improve the internal code structure without changing its external behaviour.

The technique improves the software conception (design) and avoids its entropy, reducing its useful life. This entropy is caused by changes with short-term objectives or changes that were not considered in the system design.

Another feature is the ease of understanding, facilitating the maintenance and communication of their motivations, intentions and goals. When analysing the architectural design process, regardless of the tools, there are similar concepts to the refactoring importance in its various stages.

The computer must be a constructive means and not merely representational, not only be understood as a separate tool but as an organizational model, an agent capable of creating continuity in the process.

This continuity paradigm must also consider the body and the suggested spaces imbued with active, undetermined potential, but charged with trends that promote interaction as stated by Cabral Filho [4].

Creativity must start from dialog with the order, in language, in communication and in the community. Provoke a new consciousness emergence, a collective game strategy. After all, playing is an activity proper to human beings and tests that virtue that makes them privileged in nature: the ability to analyse a situation, weigh pros and cons and finally decide.

We need, as warned by Flusser [10], to invert the point of view when analysing the image. Not under the aspect that is usually given to detachment from reality, but from the need to ask what the image projects towards the world. Seek to break instrumental limits and implement ways to overcome obstacles in obtaining feedback and engagement. Refactor and reenchant are the available tools. Software, machines and devices will continue to be complex, but experimentation and integration can clear these conjectures.

Conceptual shifts can be listed at this moment as potentially revolutionary in the practice of architectural design, as a direct digital technologies dissemination result. The focus of the act of designing is no longer the object design and becomes the programming of processes that manage this object. In representation processes, the projective design strategy gives way to the construction of parameterized models, which opens up the possibility of experimentation and testing of the model before its effective construction [19].

Technology is, and can be, the guide of this thought, as long as we do not privilege its output. Computers are not here to give us answers, but they are tools for asking questions [15].

Real literacy in relation to systems goes far beyond attempts to understand their functionality, but to reveal contextual aspects and their consequences. Guiding for information production process awareness.

The designing gesture should not be held hostage to the idiosyncrasies addition linked to a flow of pre-existing forms, but should follow a similar path to what Koolhas [29] proposes, that there is a technological awareness inherent in the very modernization of the process and its realization. Therefore, we must be interested not only in how things are and what they mean but also in how they become real and how this real is produced.

Architects can no longer rely on the representation domain for resistance and control regarding the profession position; new ways of thinking, processing and finally refactoring and reinventing the profession are needed.

### **2.5 Storytelling: architecture and the image diffusion**

As part of the subject, we will deal with a practical experience through storytelling. The faculty of architecture and urbanism at the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora is an academic unit like many others in Brazil dedicated to training future professionals in the field. One of the biggest perceived difficulties is the creativity associated with technological resources; most of them cannot describe the process or express their ideas in different media.

A couple of weeks back, in a classroom filled with architecture and urbanism students, an architecture teacher introduced the topic of artificial intelligence, authorship and its potential impact on the design field.

In order to introduce a debate on the progress of instruments such as artificial intelligence and creativity, it was proposed that each of them develop an image of a dream project, such as a house, describing it on open platforms such as Midjourney. Midjourney is a text-to-image generator powered by artificial intelligence. The tool operates within Discord app and works collaboratively. The choice of the tool was due to the results closest to the ideas formulated by the students.

They could make use of other reference images, and also use sketches and drawings to begin from a starting point for the image generation. The students were initially sceptical, but the teacher explained how AI-powered platforms like Midjourney could revolutionize the way architects and designers create and visualize their projects.

To illustrate the point, the teacher assigned the class a creative task: each student was asked to create an image of their dream house using Midjourney The students dove into the task with enthusiasm, experimenting with different design elements and features. Some students imagined fantastical scenarios, like a floating castle in the clouds or a treehouse village nestled in a dense forest. Others dreamed up their ideal homes, complete with all the features and amenities they desired.

As part of the assignment, each student had to create a client profile for their project. They had to consider the physical aspects of the design, as well as the personal tastes and behaviour of the supposed client. This helped the students to learn how to think about the needs and wants of their clients, and how to design spaces that would meet those needs.

After creating their designs, the students used Midjourney to generate images. The final step of the assignment was to shuffle the images and try to guess each image's author. This was a fun and challenging way for the students to test their skills and see how their designs compared to their classmates.

As the class progressed, the teacher encouraged the students to think about how AI could be used to enhance the design process and to consider the ethical implications of relying on technology to create images.

The students realized the potential of AI to enhance their creativity and were excited about the possibilities and obstacles for the future of their profession. They left the classroom with a new understanding of how AI could be used to augment their skills and help them create even more innovative and unexpected designs, while maintaining a critical position on the consequences of such instruments.

### **3. Conclusions**

The ultra-mediated computational universe can become dangerous according to several types of research when it is no longer a device of heuristics and possibilities, and becomes an ideology that privileges information, technique, access to these facilities and the image over the rest of all things. Decisions, design and work gradually become semi-autonomous. The virtual is interwoven in experimentation ways in increasingly abstract forms, but simultaneously intentional. Data are said to be disembodied but stained somewhere.

Indeed, if there has been a digital revolution in the last five decades as we are led to believe, a large part of this revolution was a visualization revolution, or to be more exact, a revolution in how images are produced. A production mode that actually profoundly changes the modes of distribution and manipulation of images. Databases, digital models, multimedia presentations and others, are all more than ways of organizing data, ways of visualizing data. In the evolution of computer, we went from the calculation for the image through computer graphics to the image for communication through multimedia computers. And if the best-case scenario comes true, we will move from communication to conversational (or the truly dialogic) with the computer taken as a tool of indeterminacy [19].

With each new version, the tendency is that the language becomes more and more simplified; the software gives a direction towards more friendly and intuitive interfaces, less apparent buttons, less text to read, more patterns and more tutorials instilled in the step-by-step of how to do it. Maybe this will lead to a trend towards a trivialization of a technical, aesthetic, linguistic and conceptual order or on the contrary, will it expand the possibilities exponentially and will new forms of production and interpretation emerge provided by these facilities?

Reject technology is impossible, but the ability to articulate and design need not be limited only to their means. It is necessary to aim for syncretism, a reasonable vision and the capacities of each one to act dialogically for a legitimate mobilization. Focus on the here and now, one step back to a future better jump.

### **Acknowledgements**

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

### **Author details**

Caio Almeida1 \*, Renato César Souza1 and Lucas Luciano2

1 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

2 Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil

\*Address all correspondence to: caio.rabite@gmail.com

© 2023 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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## *Edited by Şenay Sabah*

Storytelling is a form of communication that has been present throughout a substantial span of human history. The advent of emerging technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality, has significantly transformed the conventional narrative in the realm of digital storytelling. Currently, this technology has the potential to be utilised in various application domains spanning multiple fields of study. It holds significant value for various entities within a given society, including corporations, non-profit organisations, tourism operators, educators, developers of online and mobile games, marketers, and numerous other stakeholders operating within diverse contexts. Hence, one might suggest that digital storytelling possesses significant potential in contemporary society.

## *Taufiq Choudhry, Business, Management and Economics Series Editor*

Published in London, UK © 2023 IntechOpen © Igor Kutyaev / iStock

Digital Storytelling - Content and Application

IntechOpen Series

Business, Management and Economics,

Volume 11

Digital Storytelling

Content and Application

*Edited by Şenay Sabah*