"Quantum est in libris" explores the intersection of the archaic and the modern. On one side, there are manuscript materials from the Estonian National Museum’s (ERM) more than century-old archive describing the life experiences of Estonian people; on the other side, there is technology that transforms these materials into a dynamic and interactive experience. Connecting technology and cultural heritage is the visitor, who turns texts into inputs for a screen sculpture.

"Quantum est in libris" explores the intersection of the archaic and the modern. On one side, there are manuscript materials from the Estonian National Museum’s more than century-old archive, describing the life experiences of Estonian people; on the other side is technology that transforms these materials into a dynamic and interactive experience. Connecting technology and cultural heritage is the visitor, who turns texts into inputs for a screen sculpture.

I Tell the Moon My Secret and the Moon Tells Me Yours (ITMMSMTMY), created by artist Zoe Li in 2023, is an art piece featuring a robotic arm that repeatedly depicts the waveform of collected secrets, creating light painting photographs with the involvement of Moon. Only when the Moon appears within a certain field of view can the waveform of this sentence be successfully captured by the camera with a long exposure. That is to say, whether the trace of the waveform can be revealed is determined by the natural environment — only when the Moon is bright and clear in the night sky can this secret possibly be conveyed. The project experiments on the synergic dynamics among uncontrollable natural environments, a precise data-driven robot system and humans, fostering new discourse on their relationships through synergistic visual imagery. By portraying the robotic system as an active agent connecting humanity with the cosmic environment, the project also intends to depict the interconnection between these parties, shifting perspective from an anthropocentric view.

Innovations in digital fabrication technologies are increasingly enabling artists and designers to create data physicalizations in real time. In this paper, we discuss how we adapted a circular knitting machine to physicalize visitors at a local art gallery during the pandemic recovery year. To evaluate this year-long installation, we conducted design critiques with 15 individuals including those who worked in the building and lived alongside it for a year, as well as subject matter experts. We then iteratively worked with 11 of those individuals to gain insights for re-deploying the visualization for interpretation. Overall, this paper contributes long-term reflections and recommendations for using digital fabrication for real-time data physicalizations.

The paper discusses the art project A Sigh - a machine with a rebellious and perfunctory personality that, despite having the capability to perform its assigned task of writing human-like diaries, refuses to do so in a proper manner. The pre-trained model in A Sigh was fine-tuned using over 16000 Chinese diaries. Despite the generative model’s ability to generate convincing diaries and a pen-plotter-like appearance, the machine outputs hot air. As a result, the diary entries it creates are merely hot air that leaves a blurry mark on the thermal paper. It presents the outcome of its mission to the audience in a manner that conveys a sense of unwillingness, perfunctoriness, and rebellion - akin to the gesture of a sigh. The project aims to investigate the anthropomorphic properties of the machines by imbuing them with a personality, pushing the boundaries of how machines are perceived. The project strategically positions itself at the edge of human-robot interaction, AI and installation art, which challenges preconceived notions about machines, and provides a new perspective on how we can interact with technology.

This paper discusses the artwork "Visions of Destruction", with a primary conceptual focus on the Anthropocene, which is communicated through audience interaction and generative AI as artistic research methods. Gaze-based interaction transitions the audience from mere observers to agents of landscape transformation, fostering a profound, on-the-edge engagement with pressing issues such as climate change and planetary destruction. The paper looks into early references of interactive art history that deploy eye-tracking as a method for audience interaction, and presents recent AI-aided artworks that demonstrate interactive latent space navigation.

Personal traits are often concealed within the minutiae of one’s daily life. A deeper understanding of an individual requires sustained interaction with each other. However, in certain social settings, we must quickly reveal ourselves within a group and engage in conversation to "break the ice." This necessitates using symbolic "tags" to describe oneself, such as personality types identified by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). With its popularity in recent years, showcasing individual traits in interactions. Building on this, we propose an innovative interactive artwork whose research question is how artwork can utilize visualization techniques to create images that embody personalities based on the MBTI classification. Utilizing the Design-Based Research (DBR) method, we combine MBTI with style transfer technology to visually express personal characteristics, aptly termed "personality tags." In a user test, we invited 12 users to experience our work. Eleven of them believed that the generated images partially reflected their personality. Based on this, we believe this artwork underscores the potential of style transfer to enhance graphical visualization and personal expression.

This paper explores the potential of generative AI within interactive art, employing a practice-based research approach. It presents the interactive artwork "Visions of Destruction" as a detailed case study, highlighting its innovative use of generative AI to create a dynamic, audience-responsive experience. This artwork applies gaze-based interaction to dynamically alter digital landscapes, symbolizing the impact of human activities on the environment by generating contemporary collages created with AI, trained on data about human damage to nature, and guided by audience interaction. The transformation of pristine natural scenes into human-made and industrialized landscapes through viewer interaction serves as a stark reminder of environmental degradation. The paper thoroughly explores the technical challenges and artistic innovations involved in creating such an interactive art installation, emphasizing the potential of generative AI to revolutionize artistic expression, audience engagement, and especially the opportunities for the interactive art field. It offers insights into the conceptual framework behind the artwork, aiming to evoke a deeper understanding and reflection on the Anthropocene era and human-induced climate change. This study contributes significantly to the field of creative AI and interactive art, blending technology and environmental consciousness in a compelling, thought-provoking manner.

Psychedelic Forms is a series of case studies that explore deep learning (DL) possibilities for creating a tangible form guided by text prompt and 3D object. The selected generated digital 3D objects were manually altered and prepared for 3D printing in ceramics (Figure 1). Glazing happened by hand, often inspired by the AI-generated objects’ vertex colors. And the pouring technique used for painting, it is a metaphor of the thermodynamics of meaning spaces in the latent spaces.

Interactive NeuroKnitting: Knitting with Your Brain stems from our previous work about knitting and brain data. A self-made circular knitting machine Circular Knitic is activated on the user’s EEG data in real-time. It means that knitting happens only when a spectator wears BCI (brain-computer interface). The audience’s meditation and attention levels are translated to the knitting machine’s speed and pattern. Hence, the autonomous knitting machine is turned into a brain-data-driven mechanism that enables the audience to experience their brain activity through the knitting process, leaving the pattern in the garment behind. The growing collective brain-knitting installation is accompanied by the on-screen personal EEG data visualization overlaying AI-generated videos. A multimodal EEG data experience enables the viewers to understand their brain activity in novel and artistic ways.

Our participatory art project, Bitter Data, allows the audience to taste the bitterness of 100,000 trouble data via 11 teapots corresponding to 11 years of data. The bitterness and color of each pot reflect the quantity of trouble data in the corresponding year. By mapping bitterness and color to data quantity, we brew tea with varying tastes and tones. Tasting the tea with multi-sensory feelings allows participants to understand the negative emotions behind the data and how young Chinese have faced troubles in the past 11 years.

POSTcard Landscapes from Lanzarote I and II are two AI-generated video works accompanied by two sound pieces. The StyleGAN 2-created visuals were composed of location-based datasets, more precisely, from Flickr photos of Lanzarote – a tourists’ Mecca of Canary Islands. One video intends to represent a touristic, and the other, a local view of the place. The project draws attention to the influence of the tourist gaze on the landscape and identity formation of the Lanzarote island in Spain. Heavily dominated by the imaginative geographies that have been constantly reproduced by the visitors, create a conflict between desired touristic rituals, which one is preprogrammed to reproduce when arrived at the destination, and the reality. Better said in the words of an expert on tourist photography Jonas Larsen “[…] circulating images overpower reality: ‘reality’ becomes touristic, an item for visual consumption.” [3]

Dream Painter is an interactive robotic art installation that turns the audience's spoken dreams into a collective painting. By telling one's past dream, a participant guides the interactive robotic system in the latent space of the AI model that results in a multicolored line drawing. The artwork consists of several parts: an interaction station, a painting robot, a kinetic and animated mechanism that moves the paper roll when a drawing is finished, and the deep learning model that transforms a spoken word into a painting. All these interconnected components of hardware and software are arranged into an autonomous and interactive robotic art installation. The main aims of this project are to explore the interactive potential of AI technology and robotics, and trigger discussion over the deep learning applications in a wider sense. More precisely, this case study is primarily focused on the translation of different semiotic spaces as a trigger for creativity and audience interaction method.