Cangjie's Poetry: An Interactive Art Experience of a Semantic Human-Machine Reality

AbstractThis paper describes the conceptual background, artificial intelligent system design, and visualization strategies of an interactive art experience: Cangjie's Poetry. This artwork provides a conceptual response to the human-machine reality in the context of language, symbols, and semantic meanings. In the Cangjie's Poetry art installation, the intelligent system (Cangjie) constantly observes surroundings through the lens of a camera, writes poetry using its symbolic system based on its interpretation, and explains the evolving poem in natural language to audiences in real time. Due to the global pandemic of COVID-19, multiple presentation formats of this work were developed, which include in-person installation, virtual installation, and a special edition with pre-rendered video. This work prioritizes ambiguity and tension between machinic vision and human perception, the actual and the virtual, past and present.