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.