Covid-19 has changed life as we know it. Additional sanitary practices are going to have to be considered in many public facing interactive exhibitions going forward.
Intermedia is the name of one of the more creative classes involved in my degree. We are encouraged to explore our interests and discover patterns in our work. At the end of the course, a big exhibition is put on to showcase our groups work to the public. However, for us, a nationwide lockdown due to Covid-19 put limitations on this exhibition and we were forced to adapt to the new situation.
My groups original idea relied heavily on physical interaction from the user. We wanted to remediate the concept of social media into a physical format that seemed less impersonal and more connected. Physical buttons, Physical printed posts. Unfortunately, the new covid-19 restrictions prevented these physical things from being possible. It was back to the drawing board.
My biggest contribution to our final product would probably be coming up with the basic idea. We decided we needed to completely rework the original idea. Still using social media as a base but with a new meaning that could be better portrayed digitally. The new idea revolved around a digital bot that gives validation in a social media-like way. You would converse with it and show it an image, to which it would give you a simple comment, a form of validation for your work. But there's a catch, when prompted to answer if the service was adequate, you are only presented with the option to say no. The idea being that these very simple comments that you see everywhere aren't always genuine. The bot gets mad and throws other forms of validation at you such as likes, and hearts.
I created the bot avatar in Maya 2020, using a free rigged head asset I found and utilising Maya's inbuilt MASH network capabilities. I admit, it is rather scary, but I think it adds to the idea of artificial validation coming from an angry bot.
The bot features a coloured ring that moves with the audio waveform.
Your are left to wonder why we even seek validation like this, and how often a comment is genuine, or not. Is it just another way to build your online image? These are questions I can't answer, but it won't do any harm to take a step back and think about it.
The final product can be viewed here
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