An Aquarium of Machines: A Physically Realized Artificial Life Simulation
How do you make machine intelligence something the public can stand inside of? For Anicka Yi’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, we built an artificial-life system of autonomous aerial machines — each composing its behavior from goal-directed instincts, with parameters mapped to personality traits so every machine decided, moved, and responded as an individual. The paper documents the simulation architecture and what it took to run genuinely autonomous behavior continuously, in public, for four months. This work underlies the behavioral-modeling capability in our discipline. Read the preprint · SIGGRAPH technical talk
Designing for NFC: Improving User Interfaces for Smart Objects
When we re-engineered the Dana-Farber zebrafish display from capacitive touch to NFC, we had to answer a question with no literature behind it: how do you teach visitors to use a near-field interface in a walk-up public setting, without instructions or staff? The paper reports what worked, what failed, and the interface conventions we’d recommend to anyone putting smart objects in public space.
Exploring the Potential of Text-to-Image Models in Creative Practices
Text-to-image models arrived in creative studios faster than any shared understanding of how to use them well. This work examines where the models genuinely extend a creative practice — and where they substitute for it — based on production use inside a working studio.
Published findings & case studies
Beyond the peer-reviewed record, we publish our user research so clients and peers can check our claims: the Climate Perception Gap case study, the Yale Peabody locomotion user-testing findings, and the Dana-Farber zebrafish case study.
Forthcoming
We currently have additional work under peer review on accessibility, adaptive narrative systems, evidentiary drift in the experience economy, and the role of social translation in interactive systems for collective action.