Teachable Machine… Experiment

Here’s a link to my Teachable Machine Learning Experiment. This version is live. For the experiment to work, I need to be sitting behind the camera, teasing the machine. *See above for a screen capture.*

I used the first three lines of Puck’s closing monologue from Shakespeare’s comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96). (Monday morning when the rest of my CoLab cohort wrote their own poems, I was welcoming my cohort BA students. It was the first day of the new academic year.)

The poem’s first line: ‘If we shadows have offended’. How to visualise this? I chose to flip through an artist book by Idit Nathan. Many of the images feature text in languages I do not read. Hence I understand them in as images. I wanted to acknowledge that flipping through may offend those who do read these languages – not to mention the artist, who may not appreciate me using her work to make my own.

The second line: ‘Think but this and all is mended’. I used some mirror foil for this. With a bit of practice I think it could be more hypnotic. Or maybe another gesture would work better… bandaging or sewing perhaps.

The third line: ‘That you have but lingered here’. This featured the bottle of my favourite cologne, No 4711 (the formula has been the same for 200+ years). We’ve been having conversations about activating all our senses… This particular scent is wonderfully citrus but it doesn’t linger, which is to say it doesn’t stay on the skin.

This is how the preview looks in the the Teachable Machine programme.
You can tell it’s working because the bars change colour. This video still features ‘neutral mode’ so
the bars are translucent.

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