Duncan Gough
A creative technologist and autotelic, designing and juxtaposing ideas applied to creative communities, games, empathetic digital companions, and ambient experiences.
I am a maker looking to answer questions about how we live alongside technology as it continues to disrupt and become invisible. And I am trying to thread the needle between initiating meaningful work for large audiences, and creating art that moves people.
Portfolio
TouchDesigner + OpenAI 📍
Published an integration between TouchDesigner and OpenAI to design a creative path for AI to work with generative art tools.
Steganogra-pfps ㊙️
Minting NFTs and using steganography to embed side-channel data directly into the image. Inspired by the Spore creature creator.
Mirror of Multitudes 🪞
Check your vibe in the multiverse - using OpenAI to generate selfies that reveal how you look in an alternate reality.
Memory Palais 👑
Using the OpenAI datasets to make it easier to decorate our memory palaces with remarkable images.
Video Filters 
Gesture recognition in the browser & real-time video effects, using the Google Mediapipe APIs.
Radio Robot 
Thee 🏴☠️ radio station run by robots, 🦜 not included. Created out of a desire for an always-on, passive listening experience, the Radio Robots had free reign to deliver their own programming schedule with only a few strict rules.
Can AI be creative? 🤔
A lightning talk at the Site Gallery that helped me to condense some uncertainties around AI into to work on digital companionship.
¡hypebot! 🎤
A quick lockdown hack to create a speech recognition hype-bot as a kind of meeting augmentation companion.
Amy Href 📰
A trainable newsletter-parsing bot that lived in your inbox and managed a daily dashboard of fresh links and news, and learned what content was the most shared, popular, and 'liked'.
bliss ⛯
“Everywhere you look, there seem to be increasing signs that we are living inside a novel that JG Ballard started to write at the exact moment he died, a novel that takes the form of a reverberating hallucination”
Inspired by this quote I built a living data visualisation of social activity across London, mapping social media check-ins over an abstract Google Maps style background, to reveal the feedback loop when digital and physical meet.Metro 🚇
Playing on the theme of designing for opposites, this was a mobile game about data couriers, designed for the underground and only playable offline.
Jewel Thief 💎
A one-button/one-finger casual game designed for desktop and mobile with variations written in Flash and PyGame.
Slider / WordSlider 🧩
A pair of match-three style word puzzle games, built using Pygame.
A trainable Bayesian ICQ/MSN chatbot, able to parse, learn and 'guess' using Peacelights 💡
Crafting a limited edition set of nightlights with silhouette inserts to create ambient, restful furniture pieces.
vrnjr 🎨
A physcial, generative art product with ambient lifecycles and a library of different design styles guided by a 'director' AI that selected the colour, effects, duration etc, based on a simple and effective time-of-day cycle.
Maylo 🎧
Maylo used environmental audio recognition datasets to track and identify her environment by the background noises and draw in her sketchbook, creating an ML-powered record of each day. Using pytorch, Quick, Draw! dataset, and AudioSet.
Ara 🐦
As part of my work investigating what it will be like to live with AI in the future, Ara is an experiment in understanding robotic companionship. Ara has been featured in an AI edition of Creative Review, exhibited at the Derby QUAD, and led to talks at the Site Gallery in Sheffield, and the Festival of Marketing in London.
Glyphe 🪷
Using a raspberrypi and eink screen to create a daily meditatative mood-setting selection of hieroglyphs that act as an ambient daily horoscope, deliberately open to interpretation. Icons from Alice Noir.
iQu 👁️👁️
A consciously small and fun project to add life to an e-ink screen, these eyes refresh independently on a regular basis throughout the day, keeping track of the state of each eye in order to present a harmonius pair.
Somewhere ⚡
Co-founded a future of work and employee engagement platform that encouraged visual sharing, community meetups, and prompted open discussions that focused on the how and why of what people are working towards.
Storythings @ Dublin Maker Faire 🧦
Spent a day as part of a long-running arts and research studio, Special Branch, making LED sock-puppets whilst running a storytelling booth at the first Maker Faire in Dublin, 2012.
PMOG / TheNethernet 🕹️
Co-founded a games company in San Francisco and turned the internet into a passively multiplayer online gaming space.
Recognition
- Creative Review, The AI Issue - for work in passive AI and digital art
- The Next Web, Winner - Best Startup, Somewhere.com
- Schön! Magazine - featured as part of a 'future is now' series
- Guest speaker, MEGA Plus - Media Business School
- Guardian.co.uk - named Runner-up Game of the Year, Gamelayers.com
- The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences - nominated for Game of the Year, Gamelayers.com
- Conference appearances including Festival of Marketing, Creative Mornings, Playful, and Wired
