Ideogenetic Machine is an interactive application that incorporates portraits of participants into an algorithmically generated comic book. The comic is created live through custom software using portraits of participants captured with a Kinect camera and a database of drawings by the artist illustrating speculative narratives based on current news and events. Participants are invited to actively respond to the emerging story through performance and collaboration. The layout and configuration of images from which new narratives continuously form never repeats. The software also adds blank speech bubbles into the composition, which participants can later fill with their own invented dialogue. Thus, each participant is transformed into the protagonist and the creator of a unique comic book. During the comic book making party, the artist will help participants print and bind their comics into zines. http://www.novajiang.com/installations/ideogenetic-machine