Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.
News from the sunny shores of oio
Before we get our beach balls, bathing suits and boomblasters ready for 'hot vaxx summer' we wanted to share yet another round of news, updates and GIFs from our side of the internet.
The past month we've been occupied across client briefs and internal development. Some related to AR games and cityscapes some related to smart plugs and switches. With travel restrictions lifting some of us also had the chance to meet in person for the first time!
Oio News! 🗞
Some news from the oio space.
oio.land is live!
That's right. We are launching a whole new website! It's basically a blog, but with a much cooler name.
Actually it's more than that - oio.land is our research journal and notepad of ideas where we share thoughts, snippets and random experiments. Curious now? Read more about it in our Hello World manifesto.
Our first entry of many to come is a piece on AI and Machine Learning in the design process. This is an area we're heavily embedded in, so stay tuned for more thoughts, frameworks and our first fully Artificially Crafted product! We're still in early alpha, so please let us know if you see anything breaking on your devices.
Roby - what are you doing in Wallpaper?!
Many of you already know from our Instagram posts, but just in case you haven't noticed oio is featured in the August issue of Wallpaper magazine. We still can't believe it, it's an incredible feature and an astonishing recognition of our work.
The article is an interview with oio's co-founder Matteo Loglio, where he talks about designing with other intelligences, the poetry of technology and many of the topics we research here at oio. So get your copy from the newsstand before they run out, it's a collector's edition!
More-than-human fictions
Have you ever thought about how a toaster feels today? Or what would be like to be a self driving car? Last week we held a workshop as part of IF Festival 2021, beaming remotely into Darmstadt Interactive Media school. We introduced our vision of how to design from a perspective that is 'other' than human. This is the third of a series of workshop that Simone held first at IAM Barcelona and Thingscon Festival last year (you can read previous examples here). For this workshop in particular we chose to focus on natural 'beings' and 'big' objects lost in the world..
During the workshop the participants worked on writing short stories in a common Google Doc, where they abandoned their human self and explored the daily life of devices and natural beings. The stories then got remixed to find common threads and point of views on the more-than-human world that we all live in.
From satellites last words, to a therapy session between a bot and a scared plane, we were all astonished by the creative outputs of the participants and this is definitely not the last time we do something like this...
⚡️ Oio Thoughts
🕵️♀️ Copywriteabbablelelb?
The use of technology to create art is nothing new but GANs and similar neural networks increasingly blur the lines when it comes to creation, authorship, ownership and monetisation of intellectual property.
Questions like:
Can I copywrite this new piece of art my GAN just made?
Oh no! My GAN was trained on copyrighted material, am I infringing any rights?
I'm a robot musician and I have listened to millions of songs, does that make my work derivative?!
Are all becoming increasingly relevant as AI makes its' way into the arts and creative domain.
Like your friendly neighborhood reporter we're following the development closely and in the next months we'll write and publish a series of pieces on the legal lay of the land for creative AI. These posts, frameworks and thought experiments will supplement our workpioneering Algorithmic Design as a discipline. So keep your eyes peeled over on oio.land and let us know if IP/AI Law is your specialism! We're always open for collaboration!
🌐 Oio Community Links
Our Discord community is growing, we are now almost 300 people. Discord is where we announce things before any other channel - workshops, drops and job ads. If you want to stay tuned with the hottest news from oio, make sure to smash this JOIN link.
Here some cherry-picked links for you:
- 👅 Pallette.io is the World's first open-source tongue-computer interface.
- ➗ Father and son have created a suited of mathematically inspired typefaces
- 👯♀️ Holly Herndons AI twin managed by a DAO
- ⌨️ A crunchy tutorial on designing your Keyboard PCB from scratch
- 💬 Anthony Bourdain’s voice was deepfaked in a new film
- 🐴 French vineyards rediscover the power of horses
🕵️ Follow oio
📡 Listen to oio.radio
✌️ Have a great rest of the week everyone!