The Final Game

July 28, 2015

Find Maria Rivera is a narrative, puzzle-based instillation which follows the story of the disappearance of a water witch from Visalia, CA. Situated between Escape The Room games and Participatory Theater, like Punch Drunk’s Sleep No More, Find Maria Rivera explores themes of environmentalism, mythology, and CSI. The piece leverages responsive objects, web experiences and audio to draw in the participant in a mysterious and emerging story experience. The story takes place in the central valley of California with the backdrop of the looming drought and water crisis. As the user enters the instillation they will be presented with a series of clues and puzzles in a CSI investigation room. The participant will explore the physical objects, text, mobile websites, and audio to unravel the mystery. This was developed as part of the Parsons MFA Design and Technology Thesis Project by Niki Selken. Find Maria RIvera was an award finalist for Indiecade 2015. See the project site here.

Museum Interaction Design

Thesis

What I'm Thinking About

Parsons MFAD+T Projects

Fresh Posts

DATALAND did not appear from nowhere. In 2016, Gray Area and Google presented what has been described as the first exhibition of generative AI art. That same year, Meow Wolf opened a world audiences could physically enter. Later, through Gray Area’s Experiential Space Research Lab, I explored how immersive environments could do more than entertain. They could encourage agency, critical thinking, and new relationships between people, technology, and living systems. Now Refik Anadol’s DATALAND brings those histories together through AI, environmental data, biosensing, and responsive space. The biggest shift is not simply that AI has entered the museum. The museum itself is becoming a living system. I wrote about the longer history behind this Reel, what excites me about DATALAND, and the ethical questions a responsive museum must confront. Read the full story through the link in my bio. #DATALAND #RefikAnadol #AIArt #ImmersiveArt #DigitalArt #MuseumFuture

A lot of the AI conversation right now is about what machines can create. This story is about what they might help us recover. Researchers at Santa Clara University have developed an AI Provenance Assistant to help researchers trace artworks stolen during the Nazi era—searching across fragmented historical records and surfacing connections that might otherwise take enormous amounts of time to find. The AI doesn’t decide who owns a work. Humans still have to verify the evidence. But it can help researchers find the evidence. To me, this is a much more interesting vision of AI: not replacing human expertise, but giving people new ways to navigate enormous amounts of human knowledge. And sometimes, helping recover a history someone tried to erase. Read the full NPR story at the 🔗 link in my bio. #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ArtHistory #DigitalHumanities #CulturalHeritage