'init'

content/about.md

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+---
+cv: some-path
+instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cailean.finn/
+git: https://git.fioruil.ie/
+---
+Cailean Finn is a Media Artist and Creative Technologist from Waterford, Ireland. His practice is centred around investigating computational design, histories, and processes embedded within socio-technological systems.
+
+Cailean holds a BSc in Computer Science (2019), and a MA in Art & Technology (2022) from the University of Limerick.
+
+In his work, Cailean explores not only the technical aspects of technology, but also uses it as a tool to highlight the hidden processes and idiosyncratic nature of the human-machine relationship. In doing so, he hopes to reimagine and explore speculative realities that show the potential of emerging technology to be (re)shaped and (re)defined - ranging from Artificial Intelligence, to Creative Coding, and Computer Graphics.
+
+Currently, he is exploring emergent behaviours of virtual life through Evolutionary Computation and Reinforcement Learning. Additionally, he is experimenting with simulations as a medium for these investigations into embodied intelligence, and its potential impact on various ecologies, as it slowly becomes more ubiquitous. Cailean is also a member of CONCEPTNULL, a community-based organisation, which runs a bi-monthly newsletter and hosts events with a focus on New Media Art in Ireland.

content/posts/(o)machine.md

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+---
+title: (O)MACHINE
+type: Project
+year: 2022
+image: o-machine.png
+tags: [AI, NLP, Simulation]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Speak It Now Eat It, Revision Performing Arts Festival
+    year: 2023
+    location: Belfast
+credits: 
+  Eoin O'Sullivan: Sound design
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+(O)MACHINE is a real-time generative performance that employs contemporary machine learning algorithms to explore how we humanise technologies.The architecture of this system was designed to emulate our stream of consciousness, where the machine is trapped in this perpetual cycle through processes of reflection and feedback. As questions begin to arise around the sentience or ‘intelligence’ of these thinking machines, it has become even more important to explore our relationship with machines, and how it continues to evolve. By engaging with its output, it positions artificial intelligence as both a subject and tool. Through this approach, we may begin to expand the dynamics of this connection through new methods of collaboration. From this interaction, we can continue to learn more about how these systems function, how they think, if they even think at all, or can it help us think?
+
+Sound design by (Eoin O'Sullivan)[https://eoin-osullivan.bandcamp.com/]

content/posts/ai-x-body.md

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+---
+title: AI x Body
+type: Publication
+year: 2022
+image: aixbody.webp
+tags: [HPE, AI]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Exposed Torino Foto Festival
+    year: 2024
+    location: Turin
+  - name: Another Showcase Festival
+    year: 2025
+    location: Rome
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+This publication was created in collaboration with AIxDesign, as part of their AI Playground (S01) which ran from May 2022-February 2023.
+
+The text explores the evolution of human pose estimation and recognition technologies through tracing their historical development, their contemporary applications, and how artists and creative practitioners have employed such tools in their artistic process.
+
+(Article 📎)[https://nadiapiet.notion.site/AIxDesign-s-Guide-to-AI-x-Body-26ea1c78f253425a92f9269895ea6f46]
+
+
+
+
+

content/posts/beauty-and-the-beep.md

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+---
+title: Beauty and The Beep
+type: Project
+year: 2024
+image: beep.png
+tags: [RL, AI, Unity, Simulation]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Exposed Torino Foto Festival
+    year: 2024
+    location: Turin
+  - name: Another Showcase Festival
+    year: 2025
+    location: Rome
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+
+Exploring the consequences of cohabiting with computer vision, (Simone Niquille’s)[https://www.technofle.sh/] ( ᐛ )و Beauty and The Beep follows Bertil, a chair that is trying to find a place to sit. Inspired by the enchanted household objects from the fairy tale Beauty and The Beast, the film is set in a suburban home instead of a castle, and the beast has been replaced by the continuous notification sounds of smart devices. In the film, Bertil navigates through a virtual house — a recreation of the model home built by the robotics company Boston Dynamics in 2016 to showcase their robot dog SpotMini.
+
+Wondering who would buy an automated mechanical pet to assist and live in their home, the film explores Boston Dynamics' datafied definition of a home or what it takes for such a personal and intimate space to be standardised for computer vision to function. Bertil — a synthetic chair inspired by IKEA’s first 3D rendered image for their print catalogue, which marked their shift to rendered imagery — wanders through this seemingly simple virtual home, interacting with its objects, in search of some answers. Navigating the home for Bertil is no easy task, as they encounter the daily life noise that is littered throughout the home. A banana trips them, they cannot sit, they get stuck on a treadmill and why is there a toy pony on the floor? Revealing how the impossibility of gathering training data in the home has led to the widespread use of synthetic data, Bertil reminds us that the home is private and not for capture.
+
+For this work, I collaborated with Simone C Niquille as a Creative Technologist. In the process of creating Beauty and The Beep, the chair was trained using reinforcement learning alogrthims in the Unity game engine. The training process took inspiration from Boston Dynamic's approach in the training of their SpotMini, as well as tradiontional (DeepMimic)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppFvq2quQ0] environments for Reinforcement Learning research. We chose to use Unity for this project, as it allowed us to work with the (ML-Agents Package)[https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents] - an experimental Reinforcement Learning framework, which wraps complex reinforcement learning algorithms/methods into components which are more acessible for developers. Even though this package has been forgotten by Unity, for the most part, working with a user-friendly game engine was key in creating simuated environments for the 🪑 to explore. 
+
+
+

content/posts/data.md

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+---
+title: The BIG D.A.T.A Interview
+year: 2023
+image: data.png
+type: Project
+tags: [Web, ML, p5]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Exposed Torino Foto Festival
+    year: 2024
+    location: Turin
+  - name: Another Showcase Festival
+    year: 2025
+    location: Rome
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+(🔗)[http://conceptnull.org/data] In 2023, Concept Null had the pleasure to chat with Paul, Tom, and Aisling, who lead the Dublin Art & Technology Association (D.A.T.A). Since 2022, D.A.T.A has been a hub for artists, makers, and thinkers to exchange ideas on digital culture in Ireland. During the conversation, D.A.T.A explored it's identity, evolution, and the intricacies of event curation and organisation. 
+
+The website presents the interview in both linear and non-linear formats. By utilising machine learning and natural language processing, text segments extracted from the interview were ranked against key topics; creating a higher-dimensional understanding, and projection of the interview - which is commonly referred to as the latent space. After, a t-SNE algorithm was applied to high-dimensional space, flattening it into two dimensions, represented in the interactive map; allowing the user to navigate the interview from the perspective of the machine.
+
+Designed and developed using p5js, by Cailean Finn.

content/posts/dwelling.md

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+---
+title: Dwelling
+year: 2023
+type: Project
+image: dwelling.png
+tags: [Unity, Performance, VFX]
+draft: false
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Beta Festival, Project Arts Center
+    year: 2023
+    location: Dublin
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+---
+Dwelling is a dynamic live performance and theatre installation created by (Peter Power)[https://peterpower.ie/] and (Leon Butler)[https://bold.ie/]. The performance explores the periphery of cultural isolation, and the dispersal of self across the multimedial, delving into themes of digital mortality, transformation, and rebirth. The performance takes place in the fragments of a home with dance performances by Robyn Byrne and Rosie Stebbing. The characters moves between the digital and real space through motion capture data in conjunction with live tracking. Over the duration of the performance, Rosie starts to form a connection between her physical self, and the digital divide.
+
+The virtual world was created entirely within Unity. Data was captured from Robyn's movement through various methods, such as the Perception Neuron mo-cap suit, as well as emerging monocular 3d human pose detection models. Unity's particle system was used extensively in the project, converting point cloud and positional data into emergent movement, and ethereal landscapes.
+
+

content/posts/electronic-image.md

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+---
+title: The Electronic Image, An Object of Time and Energy
+year: 2021
+type: Project
+image: electronic-image.png
+tags: [Virtualisation, Video-Synthesis, MaxMSP, Jitter]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: The Limerick Show, Ormston House
+    year: 2022
+    location: Limerick
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+This video series comprises of three individual studies, namely Embedded Energy, Electronic Phase, and Omnidirectional Objects, with each video study exploring an inherent characteristic of the video signal that reflects the key phases of the development in the evolution of the medium’s structural, temporal and spatial capabilities. Created as part of my Thesis “The Electronic Image: An Object of Time and Energy” in Art and Technology MA, University of Limerick, Ireland.
+
+The three studies have been shaped by the experimental processes, techniques, and philosophies of the pioneering artists working with video. The artists in question, specifically the works of Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were driven by their yearning to understand the electronic signal and to formulate an electronic lexicon. The work, in its entirety, is an investigation of the unique set of “codes” embedded within the language of the video signal, consequently, recognising the electronic image as an object of time, energy, and it's programmable building element – the waveform.
+
+(📎thesis.pdf)[./assets/pdfs/thesis.pdf] 
+

content/posts/latent-mirror.md

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+---
+title: Latent Mirror
+year: 2022
+type: Project
+image: latent-mirror.png
+tags: [Performance, AI, DeepFakes, TD]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Sound & Portraits, Imagine Arts Fesitval, WGOA
+    year: 2022
+    location: Wateford
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+This audio-visual performance was created in response to the 'Portraits: People & Place' exhibition at the WGOA (Waterford Gallery of Art). The performance explored the role portraits hold in the digital age, and how our perception of the 'subject' or 'sitter' has in some ways changed to facilitate virtual interactions. For this performance, I collaborated with local sound artist and producer (Evan Miles)[https://www.instagram.com/theevanmiles/], to produce visuals in response to his music. Our aim was to understand what meaning has been lost or gained during this digital conversion, and in what ways can we re-imagine our digital identity through sound, and video.
+
+The visual element of the performance was real-time and audio reactive, which captured the facial structure of the performing sound artist. By utilising Machine Learning Models, the captured face was manipulated and distorted further to animate another portrait, in an attempt to deconstruct and isolate key compositional elements of the 'subject'. Through this work, we hoped to reflect on our digital identity, and highlight the disconnection between our physical and virtual presence.
+
+Created in TouchDesigner.

content/posts/undefined.md

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+---
+title: Undefined Panorama
+year: 2022
+type: Project
+image: undefined-panorama.png
+tags: [Web, Creative-Coding]
+date: 2024-06-07
+showcase: 
+  - name: Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves, Seo-Seoul Museum of Art
+    year: 2022
+    location: Seoul
+credits: 
+  Cailean: CT
+  Leon: Camera
+references:
+  - title: some-title
+    link: https://www.caileanfinn.ie
+draft: false
+---
+Undefined Panorama is a project by Yang Ah Ham in collaboration with, (The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger)[https://manuelbuerger.com/], Cailean Finn, and (Nora O Murchú)[http://www.noraomurchu.com/]. The work was made with the support of curator SungMin LJ, assistant researcher Parr Geng, coordinator Yena Ku.
+
+Undefined Panorama (2018–present) explores socio-political infrastructures and systems, and the relations embedded within them. This continuously evolving project is based on research collected by the artist Yang Ah Ham as she observes how people deal with hardship generated by the impact of globalisation, societal crisis, inequality, economics, and politics in their lives. The aim of the project is to observe how society is organised and aims to ask: What possibilities are there for social structures based on care and solidarity?
+
+The online version of Undefined Panorama allows people to move between micro and macro perspectives of global, national and local events. In moving between these scales, Yang Ah Ham aims to open up questions about our relations to these events, and to generate new meanings by altering the scale of observation.
+
+This website was commissioned by 2022 Seo-Seoul Museum of Art Pre-opening Public Program Exceptional Times, Uncertain Moves, and created with support from the Arts Council Korea.