Benjamin et al., CHI 2021 · via Shadowplay (TEI ‘24)
What it says
A model’s uncertainty is not a bug waiting to be engineered out. It is a property with texture — it drifts, it hesitates, it produces things nobody specified — and a designer can build an experience out of exactly that instead of apologising for it.
Does it hold for my work
Conditional. It activates only if the thesis installation actually generates images in real time. In Brutalist Pix2pix it would have been directly usable: the whole experience was the model failing to decide what a body was, and turning it into concrete.
Phosphor has no model in the chain — gamepad, Unity, OSC, Max. So for the current direction this sits unused.
Why I keep it anyway
Because it is the more usable of the two AI concepts I collected. It is about a design decision I would actually have to make, whereas Rancière is about what the work means afterwards.
Unresolved
If unpredictability is the material, what happens to discernible action and result? A system that surprises you may be a system whose rules you can never read.