From Precision to Viral Emotion | Generated by AI
It sounds like you’re looking for a structured summary of the talk, highlighting the key points and the evolution of the speaker’s art. Here’s a more cohesive organization of the talk:
The Unexpected Journey from Geometric Art to “Emotion Manufacturing”
The speaker, Joshua Schachter, describes his artistic evolution from creating meticulous geometric art with plotters to intentionally frustrating robot-generated “mistakes” that unexpectedly went viral.
Early Work: Precision and Apathy
For years, Schachter focused on computer-generated geometric art, using pen and paper on plotters. He even built some of the machines himself. He’d upload videos of the process to social media, hoping the “soft noises and clicks and pops” would resonate with an audience. However, these works largely went unnoticed, with “no one really paying any attention.”
The Accidental Discovery: Mess, Mistakes, and Reactions
The turning point came when he experimented with a chocolate 3D printer extruder, filling it with acrylic paint, which resulted in “a terrible mess.” This led him to program a plotter to make dots. Crucially, “the dots weren’t in order,” a “mistake” that garnered unexpected and strong reactions. People were “angry,” “sympathized with the robot,” or even “danced to it,” though “mostly angry.” This experience sparked a realization: he “could manufacture emotions of various kinds with just a robot and pen and paper.”
Leaning into Frustration: The Viral Phenomenon
Embracing this discovery, Schachter intentionally leaned into creating “bad” or “imperfect” robot art. These pieces, like “Bad day at the circle factory,” were designed to be slightly annoying or frustrating. The reactions were intense: people “got very upset” and he “got yelled at a lot,” albeit “very gently,” often with comments like “I hope your pillow is warm.” These short videos, typically 12 to 15 seconds long, began to attract millions of views and countless reactions.
Schachter quickly learned the “rules of this little medium”:
- Conciseness: Keep videos short (12-15 seconds).
- Pacing: Go quickly.
- Deception: Hide the “mistake” underneath the mechanism.
- Impactful Ending: The ending “had to be traumatic.”
He would “promise people oddly satisfying, and then [he] would betray them.” A particularly viral example, where the plotter went “right past the exit” of a maze, led to 200,000 hours of watch time on a 17-second video and his phone “died repeatedly for days” from notifications.
The Aftermath and Reflection
The unexpected popularity led to viewers interpreting his work as being “about AI.” While successful in terms of reach, Schachter ultimately found himself becoming a “crappy cover artist of [his] own work.” He didn’t enjoy this creative constraint and decided to take a break. He concludes by humorously suggesting that if you encounter something slightly annoying online, “it might have been me.”