Maryrose Mercado

Art + Tech + Policy

"Art + Tech + Policy" is a Workshop, where I attended at UAS St. Pölten . But what is "Art + Tech + Policy"?

Each in their own way, artists, technologists, and policy makers are creating the parameters for the fourth industrial revolution. Frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence are already profoundly transforming our economy, society, and democratic institutions. They also challenge our notion of what it means to be human in the digital age.
My colleagues and I are working on a project with Dr. Clara Blume and Martin Rauchbauer from Open Austria, where we are trying to let people understand what digital humanism is about and why it is required to break through existing siloes, to align our human aspirations with the development of beneficial AI, and to empower citizens to participate in the public discourse around the technologies of the future.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

We had brainstormed, which topic is still up-to-date and which it has a big influence in our lives. At the end of the brainstorm-session we found out, that lots of informations at the media were often misleaded. Every day the media "bombard" us with information of all kinds and many times facts are reported in a mediocre manner, often in the form of gossip. In this way only banal curiosity is satisfied and nourished on the "sentional" and we become accustomed to superficially reading our time. My colleague Oskar Beneder had the idea to use Plato's Allegory of the Cave for our project. To embody our concept in a tangible medium, we decided to realise our ideas in a VR chatroom called "Mozilla Hubs". Caroline Bergwinkl was responsible for the exhibition details and I realised the first prototype for our project.

The Project

We just had 3 hours for the prototype until our presentation, so I had to build the VR-room and the model from Oskar and Carloine's idea very fast. I shaped the head with three ears from the 3D program "Blender".

Mozilla Hub

I've never build something on Mozilla Hubs nor I have knowledge with the online 3d scene editor at Mozilla's Spoke. I had two hours to go where I tried to build the VR chat room. The VR room has a long dark hall (in the picture the wall disappears but it's actually there), which symbolise the depressing-heavy feeling in our heads. From the hall you are going to enter the main room, where two heads are flying around and talking about some scientific or fake news.

Teamwork

Oskar, Caroline and I were putting current news on the wall in the VR chatroom and I uploaded the two heads with ears. When the Chatroom was closed, our uploads were gone. You can still visit the clear room here

What's next?

After the workshop I am going to rebuild the VR-Chatroom professionally. I'll use the Programm "Unity" for a better and deep experience. We did also a Podcast with Dr. Clara Blume, where she, Mimoza Neziri and Oskar Beneder talked about digital humanism and the intersection of Art + Tech + Policy and how to preserve our humanity in the digital realm. Enter the Podcast

Links

The Podcast
The VR-Chatroom (no content)
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
UAS St. Pölten - Creative Media Summer
Open Austria