Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies.   By Helena Wee

"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies" is a short interactive performance artwork that included five elemental mythologies as recounted by a computational entity. The classification of clean technologies using Chinese five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water, was explored through these stories. The piece involves moving elemental energy across classical Shan Shui paintings representing different seasons. This was accomplished through the use of modified or pseudo tai chi movements. Each element was represented on screen using generative graphics created algorithmically. The Web Speech API was used to read the stories' texts.

The stories included the beginning of the internet and collaboration between humans and computers, reimagined as hybrid symbiotic organisms called voices. The technologies examined ranged from lead acid batteries or LABs used in mobile phones and electric cars, to hydropower energy technology such as the Three Gorges Dam and its effects on endangered voices and surrounding ecosystems. Other issues explored were rare earth elements and their toxicity and use in solar panels and magnets, Bitcoin, the Blockchain and their contribution to climate change.

There were two main variations on the piece, a performance version and an installation version. The performance version was projected behind the performer whilst elements were manipulated across the landscape with pseudo tai chi movements. These seemed to be channelling the ancient martial art of tai chi, but were not real postures. Instead the movements implied tai chi's manipulation of energies, but did so in a new and different way. The deep learning model Posenet was used to estimate poses and move elements around the screen. I trained a sentence-level LSTM to produce Chinese style poetry. This drifted into view when certain poses occurred, different poems for different seasons, fetched from a database. The third iteration of this piece was a website version whose interaction occurred through face movements.

wood
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Wood. Spring. Installation view.
wood
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Wood. Spring. Installation view.
Fire
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Fire. Summer. Installation view.
earth
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Earth. Midsummer. Installation view.
earth
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Earth. Midsummer. Installation view.
metal
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Metal. Autumn. Installation view.
metal
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Metal. Autumn. Installation view.
Water
"Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies". Water. Winter. Installation view.

Code files for the artwork: https://github.com/Sblob1/fiveelements.

An online paper describing "A Chinese Five Element Classification System for Technical Objects".

Website version of "Cosmotechnical Elemental Mythologies" is the online paper "Mythologies exploring clean technology development through the classification of technical objects using Chinese Five Element Theory".