Reflections: A Digital Memory Living Lab in Chinatown is a 5-hour workshop facilitated by Chloé Lee, creator of Temporal World (SXSW 2023). In the workshop, she shares her creative process, guiding groups and individuals to reflect on their communities through writing exercises, interviews and experimentation with AI image generation. The workshop is for anyone: people of all skill levels, backgrounds and ages, and all needed technology will be provided. We will reflect on what community means to each of us. By the end of the day, our creations will be installed and shown in a collective 3D interactive virtual gallery built with Unity. The gallery showcases the work and ideas created by the mix of people who come for this one-day event.

These workshops, held throughout 2024 in Berlin, New York City and Montréal, are part of a socially engaged process-oriented virtual reality project, Inter(mediate) Spaces. Through experimenting with technology and reflecting on community, participants’ contributions become the basis of the custom AI system in the long-term virtual reality project which aims to challenge the status quo of popular AI systems.

This event has been funded by Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg.

Participants should fill out this Google Form before attending.

• Participants will reflect on memories and experiences of community by responding to several writing prompts.
• Participants will learn to use AI stable diffusion software to generate 360 degree images based on their writing.
• We will reflect on the use of new technologies, like AI, in our everyday lives.
  

“I have some optimistic ideas, but a pessimistic feeling [about AI and the future]. I think the only thing I can imagine creating a counter today is actually something like community.

It's a place where you have to realize that you have shared interests. And I think these tools are incredibly powerful, as are people, when they decide to be able to use their powers.

The simple fact of coming [to the workshop] is maybe the strongest part. You realize that these new tools are everyday things and you can mess with them and you have to wait for them to work and sometimes they're jumpy and all that stuff is actually nice. The simple fact of seeing who else is working on it, as real people, that’s the strongest the thing - to make sure that people get together to do it I think is really important. I could feel that immediately. I think also the role of the writing was strong - to realize again the power of writing things down with pen and paper and how that feels - that's also important.”

-Tim Summers, Violinist

12:00pm to 2:15pm

• Introductions to each other
• Introduction to the project
• Guided writing reflection
• Discussion and sharing
• Brief introduction to technology/image generation demo

2:30pm to 5:00pm

Open Lab (rotating stations):

• Image generation on laptops (provided)
• One-on-one conversations with Chloé (180 degree video interviews)
• Audio recording booth

Sharing the final project:

• Virtual gallery showcase

We will be providing laptops with Stable Diffusion AI image generation software. If you would like to bring your own laptop you can visit this page to install the same version of Automatic1111. Must have minimum Windows 10 OS and a NVIDIA video card (GPU) with at least 4 GB VRAM.

See a past example of the 3D gallery from our Berlin Workshop.

Chloé Lee has over a decade of experience producing artistic, film and digital work. Using audiovisual, haptic and extended reality technologies, she explores where digital and analog worlds meet, reflecting on themes of migration through discovery and documentation.

As a 2022 Germany Fulbright Scholar, Chloé created the VR project, Temporal World (SXSW 2023). She has been a researcher at Matters of Activity, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and in 2023, she co-founded the media production studio, Present Futures, with Lucas Martinic. Her upcoming project, Inter(mediate) Spaces, is in development.