Hello everyone I’m actually gonna ask you to kind of stay in heaven a little bit longer because this is a little bit dense and I’m trying to work on making things and lay people’s language so growing up in the 70s I was drawn to three shows Wonder Woman Charlie’s Angels and the Bionic Woman to me the female protagonists appeared to be intelligent able-bodied and independent women who exhibited agency to wield power I identified them as a tomboy it is only retrospectively that I cringe at how I had internalized not only the objectifying gaze of white heteronormative male writers but also a light-hearted and casually condoned culture of rape they surreptitiously pushed my and generations of young men’s buttons at that point I realize that pop culture could be used as a guerrilla weapon to reverse engineer harmful narratives so for the past 15 years I’ve been harvesting pop culture and emerging technology to shift cultural norms I’ve made video games to celebrate pluralism I’ve made animations to raise awareness about unfair immigration laws and I’ve also made location-based augmented reality apps to change perceptions around homelessness well before Pokemon go but then I began to wonder whether a game or an app can really change attitudes and behaviors and if so can I measure that change and what’s the science behind that process so I shifted my focus from making media and technology to measuring their neurobiological effects my doctoral research led me to discover that through clinical studies of the web mobile devices virtual and augmented reality that regardless of the content these tools were a slow form of violence Ries crypting our nervous systems and they were literally changing the structure of our brain my research revealed that the very tools I had been using to positively influence hearts and minds was actually eroding two key areas in the brain necessary for empathy and decision-making the amygdala and the hippocampus in fact our dependence upon these tools was taking over our cognitive and affective faculties and rendering us socially and emotionally incompetent and I felt somehow complicit in that dehumanization so I also believe that persuasive technology is a weapon but one that we can actively appropriate to Reese crypt the script as an interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist my responsibility is to not only reflect upon how present technology shapes our cultural values and social behavior but also to anticipate and actively contribute to a counter discourse and design practice that challenges and transforms the future trajectory of Technology which I see is moving from external to internal colonization so to tackle this question I ask myself a creative question how can I translate the knowable underlying mechanisms of empathy the cognitive affective and motivational aspects into an engine which simulates the ingredients that move us to act Pro socially inspired by the British cyberneticist like who are those dudes I decided to build a machine to embody this so for the past year I’ve been developing an open-source biometric lab an AI system which I call the limbic lab the lab not only captures the brain and body’s response and adaptation to pop culture and emerging technology but also uses machine learning to automate media production processes my goal is to find out what combination of ingredients narrative technological ux/ui are the most appealing and galvanizing to specific target audiences to enable NGOs culture and educational organizations to create more impactful media so this is just kind of a warning that this is kind of the sausage science portion so I began in a very analog way to analyze various case studies across different mediums and I soon realized however that this particular 2d framework was insightful but it was slightly limiting so I decided to start designing and prototyping more of like a tech pipeline that was capable of capturing both static and dynamic as well as quantitative and qualitative data streams in order to empirically measure media effects and then correlate them with more traditional social science methods so the limbic lab now consists of two components a narrative engine and a media machine the narrative engine takes in and syncs real-time data from brain waves biophysical data like your blood flowing your heart beating your muscles contracting and even your temperature and that sort of stuff I tracking as well as facial recognition while a subject is viewing or interacting with different types of media content the data is only captured however at key places in the time code where critical plot points character interaction or unusual camera angles occur these unique biological signatures what I call media imprints are then stored in a database in addition survey data which includes the subjects ideological preferences psychographic data viewing patterns are integrated into the system to garner a more personalised understanding of the individual once there are enough individual signatures in the database I establish patterns by feeding the variables into a predictive modeling script which isolates the narrative ingredients that are more likely to lead to engagement in altruistic behavior rather than distress imbalance or immobility the more signatures added to the database across various mediums from episodic television to games the more nuanced the predictive models become in short I am mapping the first media genome [Music] so the limbic lab enables content creators to refine their storytelling so that it resonates at an individual level with their intended audiences integrating biometric data with artificial intelligence instigates not only a more personalized experience but one that will soon become bio adaptive to the audience’s real-time unconscious responses employing machine learning therefore the media machine will assess how media lists an emotional and physiological response on a granular level and make changes from a library of content targeted to that individual based on their specific media DNA imagine if nonprofits and independent media makers were able to measure how audiences feel as they experience it and alter that content on the fly this is Bio Media the future of media maybe as making and measuring further collapse and automated midi media production processes become the norm a new medium of expression is emerging what i have coined bio media like personalized medicine based on our DNA we will soon be consuming media tailored directly to our entertainment buttons to date most media and social change strategies have attempted to appeal to mass audiences but the new future is media on an individual level as technologies continue to strike not just into our hands but into our bodies we’re going to see a formula comprised of psychographics biometrics an AI that appeals to unique biological signatures I’m currently testing this pipeline on a pilot study which looks specifically at the top 50 episodic television shows as part of a collaboration with the Norman Lear Center and supported by the pop culture collaborative but in the process of preparing for the biometric field study I’m confronted with an ethical dilemma which I’m sure many people in the room are asking themselves right now if you can design a tool but it can be turned into a weapon should you build it by open sourcing the tools to encourage access inclusivity I also run the risk of enabling negative forces to appropriate the platform for fake news marketing and other forms of mass persuasion for me therefore it is important it’s critical to make media effects and data science research as transparent and accessible to lay audiences as GMO labels such accountability potentially offers one way of averting abuse biology is our Conclusion latest secret weapon let’s harvest its intelligence for the creation of more authentic and inclusive stories in doing so we can transform pop culture and emerging technology into narrative medicine deep cultural transformation in social change our long term nonlinear unpredictable and complex processes and no universal consensus currently exists for what works and how it should be measured but because pop culture and emerging technology are integral parts of both our public and private lives they are without a doubt vehicles for achieving achieving lasting positive social change thank you [Music]