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

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Parsons MFAD+T Projects

Fresh Posts

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

Today is the date Ray Bradbury imagined. August 5, 2026. In There Will Come Soft Rains, an automated house wakes, cooks breakfast, cleans, and reads poetry—long after the people it was built to serve are gone. On August 5th I awoke to a calendar reminder with a link to the story. I don’t remember making the event, but my past self was telling my future self something. So I think it’s worth taking a few minutes to read or listen to this short story. Written in 1950, the story feels eerily close today, as we live alongside AI assistants, smart homes, and increasingly autonomous systems. The machines work perfectly. The humans are gone. For perhaps the most fitting voice to guide us through Bradbury’s future, Leonard Nimoy reads the story in this haunting 1975 recording. 🎧 Listen to the complete recording through the link in my bio. Now that we’ve reached Bradbury’s imagined date, what part of his vision feels most relevant today? Audio: Leonard Nimoy reads Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, originally released by Caedmon Records in 1975. #RayBradbury #LeonardNimoy #ThereWillComeSoftRains #August52026 #AI SpeculativeFiction ArtificialIntelligence SmartHomes FutureOfTechnology Bookstagram ClassicLiterature DystopianFiction