Helena
Väinmaa

Dev work

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I have a Bachelor's degree in IT Systems Development from Tallinn University of Technology. It was a very practical education and completely new to me. My big dream was always to learn tools that I could use for creative projects - which I believe I've accomplished.

Stack of choice

When I do my own projects, e.g theatre, my stack of choice is

  • Vue3 with Pinia
  • ExpressJS
  • MongoDB & mongoose

That's me coding on the floor!

Woman sitting on floor with laptop

Fun projects

I helped make Theatre Box, which took an image and some input parameters and generated a theatre scene. It then performed it. It was done in Python using OpenAI APIs.

TBox

Hardware and case: laser-cut 4mm plywood and plexiglass, Thinkpad laptop, Arduino, old webcam, 3D printed details.
Software: Python and Arduino scripts, Stable Diffusion, GPT4, Whisper.

Hyper-personalisation and AI

Theatre in a Box or TBox is a co-creation system for humans and AI. It is an exploration of personalised AI-generated content influenced by human parameters. It uses improv theatre methods and retro arcade-like interaction dynamics to generate personalised short-form content influenced by user inputs. Why are arcade dynamics so attractive? And why can we say the same about Netflix and social media feeds? Gamifying and personalising are the most obvious answers. Through exploring why these medias are so interesting to us, we hope to start to discover the formats of the future.

We achieve the greatest insights through play, and exploring a topic as vital and timely as AI-generated personalised content is only possible by doing – try it! And when you try it, imagine it as your own Netflix feed, or your TikTok or Instagram feed. When content is tailored to your expectations completely, what is left of the cathartic experience of consuming art?

The inputs – buttons, and sliders to set up a story’s location, style, drama, and comedy – are not really tangible topics, but representing these abstract concepts physically can help you better understand and experiment with them. Screen-based activities are often solitary, which tangible interfaces also seek to remedy. When you are turning knobs and choosing your favourite Little Guy from the characters, it is easy to integrate friends into this activity.

TBox was created during a Tangible Interaction Design course in the Estonian Academy of Art’s Interaction Design MA program.

Spring 2024, Tallinn
My team members from my class at EKA:
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Carol Alice Tõniste is a visual storyteller, in day-to-day through photo and video but she also likes to work with her hands and experiment with different mediums. www.carolalice.com

Iie-Mall Püüa is a qualitative researcher who delivers cultural insights to brands to develop impactful communication strategies and services/products that fit the users’ needs.

The success of TBox lead to being invited to be part of the team representing the Estonian Academy of Art at ARS ELECTRONICA in Sep 2024. TBox among with the other projects of my classmates are now part of the permanent AI art exhibition at Tallinn Pop and Contemporary Art Museum PoCo's new spinoff, the POCO AI Lab. You can read Carol Alice's case study of TBox, or visit Iie-Mall's portfolio.