The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) researches and develops subjective computing systems.
Subjective computing systems are artificial intelligence and cognitive science-based computing systems for creative expression, cultural analysis, and social change.
Our work includes new forms of gaming, interactive narrative, social media, software art, and, most importantly, creative computing forms unanticipated by any of those.
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D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D.; ICE Lab Director;
Associate Professor, MIT
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker have included Professor Fox Harrell in their Top Ten for ARTFORUM. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker are writers and lecturers in the areas of technology and culture and together edit the influential electronic journal CTheory.
Fox Harrell, an MIT research professor working at the interface of the humanities and artificial intelligence, has rewritten the codes of computer gaming to combat social stigma, bias, and prejudice, as well as to reveal biographies yet untold—those still unwritten stories about the disappearance of identity in the digital haze of network culture.
We're excited to launch the public beta of our interactive narrative game, Mimesis! In Mimesis, you play as a mimic octopus who has lost her way, and encounters various undersea creatures on her way home. Will the anglerfish help or hinder you? Is the seahorse getting snippy? Use your heart and emotions to guide your conversations with them as you move toward home!
Mimesis allows players to explore a a subtle form of social discrimination. Mimesis engages players in experiences "microaggressions," or subtle everyday acts of discrimination that compound, affecting health and happiness negatively, yet, in their subtleties, are often dismissed.
We hope you enjoy our game, and if you have any feedback that is not covered during the play experience, please don't hesitate to let us know!
"Fox Harrell on NPR speaking about "Pong" and video games"
Associate Professor of Digital Media Fox Harrell spoke recently with Action Speaks, whose podcasts celebrate great, America-changing anniversaries. [Read More]
"Prof. Fox Harrell discusses virtual self-identities with WGBH's Innovation Hub"
From host Kara Miller's segment on "How Social Media Is Defining Us". [Read More]
"Strategies for Arts + Science + Technology Research"
CMS professor Fox Harrell, along with colleagues from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, have released a key report examining how the arts, sciences, and technology can overcome decades of diverging interests and practices. [Read More]
Interview with Fox Harrell: "How An Artist-Scientist Conjurer Thinks, Works and Lives"
Our thanks to Anne Khaminwa for conducting this great interview with Fox Harrell for the International Review of African American Art: [Read More]
Podcast: Fox Harrell and the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab [Listen]
NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant talk on the GeNIE project (Sept 2010)
Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities.
The Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project ($535,060/5 years, NSF CAREER Award #0952896) is a new transdisciplinary approach to the problem of designing identity technologies to enable imaginative self-representations and to counter social stigmas by implementing dynamic social identity models grounded in computing and cognitive science.
The Gestural Narrative Interactive Expression (GeNIE) Project (NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant) aims to develop and better understanding the use of gestural interfaces for expressive works of interactive narrative. Gestural interfaces have become more popular with the increasing prevalence of systems such as the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360, mobile phones with multi-touch screens and built-in gyroscopes and accelerometers, and laptop computers equipped with touchpads.
The Living Liberia Fabric, produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, is an interactive, web-based narrative supporting the goal of lasting peace after years of civil war (1979-2003). It links concerns for liberation, dignity, and the future with needs for cultural foundations, human rights, truth, and reconciliation. Our system is based in Liberia's culture and the specificities of the conflicts, hence representing a cultural computing perspective. Our system explores how multiplicitous narratives culturally-aesthetically memorializing
Loss, Undersea is an interactive narrative/multimedia semantics project by Fox Harrell in which a character moving through a standard workday encounters a world submerging into the depths -- a double-scope story of banal life blended with a fantastic Atlantean metaphor. As a user selects emotion-driven actions for the character to perform, the character transforms -- sea creature extensions protrude and calcify around him -- and poetic text narrating his loss of humanity and the human world undersea ensues.
