Human in the loop — Minhua Ren | Creative Technologist

HUMAN IN THE LOOP
Multimodal installation, 2025

Role Concept, 3D Design & Visuals
Team 3 person Collaboration
Format AI-assisted Installation
Tools ComfyUI,Blender
Year 2025

OVERVIEW

A speculative experiment where human cognition and robotic AI jointly generate string figure patterns. By mixing human body movement, mechanical precision, and algorithmic inference, the project exposes the cognitive gap between human spatial intuition and machine logic. It highlights the disharmony of human machine collaboration, presenting a new dynamic defined not by perfection, but by uncertainty, failure, and computational hallucination.

INPUT

Serving as the primary input for the entire workflow, the unconscious manual play of string figures is used to explore the machine's comprehension of uniquely human actions.

OUTCOME

The work focuses on the attempts, failures and unstable structures produced during the experiment rather than a polished
result. Unable to truly understand the image, the AI reconstructs the string figures through its own topological logic, producing
computational hallucinations that reveal the gap between human spatial intuition and algorithmic construction.

COGNITIVE TRANSLATION

Frame Capture (Gradio): Automatically extracts the final form from the string-performance video.
Algorithmic Misreading (ComfyUI & Qwen-Edit): Uses diffusion workflows and prompts to deliberately reinterpret its topology.
Computational Hallucination: Transforms fluid string forms into a machine-generated visual language, translating human movement into machine logic.

Phase 1 — Noise: Random noise establishes the image’s rough structure, texture and lighting.

Phase 2 — Refinement: The algorithm gradually removes noise, identifying lines and directional flow to clarify the forms.

Phase 3 — Emergence: Like a photograph developing in a darkroom, the final image gradually emerges from the noise.

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