Colossal Cave Adventure — The Movie

Animation, 2022
With Thomas Hawranke

The project deals with one of the first text-based adventure games in computer game history. Colossal Cave Adventure was developed by Will Crowther in 1976 and is based on the spatial presence of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Crowther’s game completely avoids a visual representation of the cave – instead, text input and text response shape the cave in the player’s individual perception. The AI-based animated film is approximately 55 minutes long. The camera constantly moves downwards, digging through geological layers and exposing new cave spaces again and again. Every eight seconds, the AI system receives a new textual description. These descriptions are taken from the 1976 source code of the game, which contains a total of 379 inputs ranging from narrative descriptions of nature, to jargon from the vocabulary of speleologists, to single words meaning an object, a compass direction, or an exclamation.

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Hidden Layers Summer School

At Köln International School of Design, we are hosting the summer school Hidden Layers from July 18 to 22. The event gathers a diverse group of experts to collectively discuss and learn about artificial intelligence in design. It is held by the research project KITeGG on design and AI and combines a public program with talks, an exhibition and workshops with internal meetings of the five art and design schools that are part of the project

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KITeGG: BMBF Project on Design & AI

Making AI Tangible and Comprehensible: Connecting Technology and Society Through Design – KITeGG

Since December 2021, KISD is part of a four-year BMBF project on design and artificial intelligence. The aim of the project is to establish a strong network of design departments and universities in order to sustainably anchor the teaching of AI topics and methods in the entire field of design.

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Animation in X-Reality. Summer School in Vilnius

Animation in X-Reality is a Summer School on the expanded field of animation: motion capture, 3D scanning, augmented and virtual reality, interaction, and creative artificial intelligence. It is organized at the Department of Graphical Systems at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in collaboration with Köln International School of Design, Tampere University of Applied Sciences and Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

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Computers all the Way Down at Conversations with Computers, Linz

I’ll be part of Conversations with Computers, a 2-day symposium organized by the net-culture initiative servus.at in cooperation with the University of Art and Design Linz. The symposium addresses contemporary artistic research in the field of AI, focusing on new languages that emerge between humans and machines, but also how work and communication are facilitated through technological means.

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Politics of the Machines: Rogue Research

In an intervention at the international conference Politics of the Machines: Rogue Research, students of KISD and HS Augsburg present work that critically deals with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The presentation titled “Training to Deal with Otherness” is the result of the work in three study programs dealing with design and/of technology: the Integrated Design BA and MA program of KISD, the Code & Context program of TH Köln, and the Hybrid Things Lab of Hochschule Augsburg.

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