MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Teaching the Machine

with Gene Kogan

This workshop was a hands-on introduction to machine learning with a focus on creating artistic and interactive applications. Machine learning is a field dedicated to teaching computers how to perform tasks given examples and human oversight and has been used by artists, musicians, and designers to add a dimension of machine intelligence and interaction to their work. The students focused on the core algorithms used for discovering patterns in complex multimedia data, including images, sounds, and text. They learned how to use neural networks to create real-time, cross-modal interactions for use in video, installation, live music performance, and physical computing. They were provided a suite of tools and code for clustering, visualizing, and searching through large collections of multimedia.