Breaking the Fourth Wall

c0n513nc3 v1.4 is watching. Lapses in discipline will be punished. Kindness will be rewarded.

Backpedal about 36 hours.

“What is a story?”

“Umm…connected events in a narrative format?”

“Perhaps… but would I gather my children on a long winter’s night to tell them “connected-events-in-a-narrative-format by a roaring fire?”

“Practically yes, but the skill is in making it seem a lot less mundane than that”

And such was our introduction to our two week “unconference”. Officially our institute refers to it as “Technical Studies -3”, but in reality it’s a completely different animal.

Jon’s one of those big guys with a hearty laugh and boundless enthusiasm. It’d be rather boring for him to have to travel the roughly 8000 miles from Scotland to India just to have him teach us “Technical Studies”. That’s not the point here. We were here to learn together. To explore together. And to create together. Slightly more specifically, we were here to imagine our own futures. What could technology do for our daily lives? Smartphones already do a lot more than phone calls. Online shopping sites can guess what you want before you even consciously know it. Our objective here was to come up with scenarios, prototype them and showcase them to the world. And this blog is here to document the process.

Joining us for this journey were Jens and Sriram. Jens whose T-shirt proclaims “we do strange things with code”. And Sriram, practically one of us with a few years leg up in terms of age and experience.

We began with a Google Slide document. “Stories from a Digital Future”. With all the tomfoolery you can expect from 11 college kids working on the same document at the same time, we churned out scenario after scenario, story after story. From an AI that helps you land the date of your dreams to a device that prints positive messages onto your toilet paper just before you need to wipe. Some more outlandish than others, at this stage anything goes.

My story involved an AI that tried to incorporate music into your life in various ways. Imagine a device detecting that your REM sleep cycle has just ended and playing Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” to gently wake you up. Or crankking up the volume and letting you rock out to QOTSA in the shower (nothing gets you cleaner than scrubbing your armpits clean along to hard rock bpm).

After a quick introduction to the Arduino IDE (the classic : here’s an LED, here’s an arduino, this is how you make it blink) we set off building props for a performance.

“What performa-?”, you manage to blurt before I put a single finger to your lips. Hang on there eager beaver, all will be explained.

It was said a group of happy-go-lucky time travelers set out to tell stories of artificial systems living together with humans. Many stories, many endings and plenty of action. Our endeavour was set for 7pm at the amphitheatre. 36 hours to storyboard, build a prop and rehearse our roughly 4 minute performance. Plenty of time, or so it seemed.

I ended up building a motion detector that would send me an email when my stuff was touched (an offshoot of the REM wake up alarm that I could pull off with the materials on hand. I used a Raspberry Pi 3, a PIR motion sensor and a simple Python script that interfaced with the Pi’s GPIO pins and Gmail’s SMTP email server. I later spent the better part of half an hour deleting all the emails I sent myself. I ended up scrapping this prop and most of my story because I wanted something more dramatic for a performance though.

I was working with my good friend and batchmate, Rohit Dongre. While browsing facebook we happened on a video of a self driving potato. Needless to say it captured our imagination for a while.

“Aye, let’s make a self driving carrot na?”

“No.”

“How about a piece of cheese that screams when you try and cut it.”

“No.”

“What about a radish th — “

“Shut up already!”

Once we snapped out of the whole sentient food thing we got to seriously thing. We knew we wanted to do something more than a basic performance. We also knew we wanted to elevate the audience to something a bit more than passive spectators. That’s when we came up with the idea of two parallel scripts, one traditionally on the stage and one being a stream of text messages that would be broadcast to the audience via WhatsApp (hopefully in perfect sync with each other).

Our story follows a particularly rude man (probably diagnosed with a series of weird complexes had he ever been introduced to a psychiatrist) in 3 scenes that happen throughout a random day in his life. The catch? An AI currently in beta testing is watching his every move and judging his social interactions, affecting his “consciety score” (a portmanteau of conscience and society).

We carefully planned a series of text messages Rohit could fire out as the skit went on, formatted to look like it came from an automated system.

*incomplete*