Emotional Architecture Sep03

8/9/2019 Emotional Architecture Sep03

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technologies to come such as nanotechnology where we can apply scientific realities anddo they fit our personal realities? We discover alternate more personal reactive bases,and question, finally, what is home, where is our reality? Home is both an architecture asa material structure or meaning structure of as both reference reality that has been tiedto the limits of the physical or perceptual in metaphors and semantics or the grounding in

geometries that are of our limited perceptions and semantic formats . This is the realityof perception as a cultural phenomenon and must now be seen newly as the dynamics ofthe individual with technology.

The first session

Sara defined her interests for this session as a continuation of last years "LivingArchitecture and Human Generosity Project", representing process, multimodalexperiences and relationships between emotion, spatiality, play and animation. Advancenetworks are a "place to develop, test and contain forms of architecture and dwellingcompatible without physiological abilities as humans, across a number of cultures". Wehave the dichotomy of architecture as on-line contained forms in electronic switching,relative to our dynamics of watching and acknowledging things in the space delineatedby our perceptions; how are they a containment in a computer creation and how do theyspeak of containment? The workshop was considerably smaller than planned due to theSeptember 11 incident.

The First Panel Session

How Do We Understand Cognition, Space and Place, Memory: the Narratives of the

Virtual and Real?

The two panelists Brian Fisher and Marisa Olson, addressed issues of cognition; where ismemory in an on-line relation, and thought processes; how is our conceptualization of theworld adaptable or interfaced by technologies and what remains, and what can and do wedo when we interface these processes?

Brian Fisher

Brian Fisher is the Associate Director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centreat the University of British Columbia and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science andStrategy and Business Economics at UBC.

Brian and his team at UBC is looking for a way to better correlate human thinkingprocesses with technology. They are looking to create graphic semantic references thatfind a solution to the need for personal information cloistering (in effect our memory orhow we store information) and the need to share this information in group work. They try


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to use our awareness, or metacognition.

The human brain works in a dichotomy of change and stasis. Brian described the abilityof the human brain to sort through information in one's surroundings, and yet it mustcontinually relate this information to our permanent cognitive mappings, the cultural

relations and artifacts that we have lived with since childhood.. He placed this dichotomyin a technological context by inquiring as to how our thinking abilities might be altered,aided or mimicked by the use of computers and virtual reality and about how technologyis being created to comply with our limitations rather than to overcome them.

By way of basic psychological explanation he talked, about "finsts", a term coined bycognitive scientist Zenon Plyshyn or the "targets" or "points of focus" that humanschoose. These are isolated from a background (apparently a trait well developed inathletes) and in so doing we align ourselves to a fixed concept of the world, a consistentworld, a cognitive fixed one, in which one's perceptions can change but cognition, isalready mapped. The brain works with multi- areas at once. Unitary consciousness is an

illusion; we relate all these operations to a consistent "world which keeps us operating ina rational form.", the cognitive world. The finst allows for predictions, an inseparabilityof mind and world, this intention of doing something with an object in the world isrelated to the mappings that we have in our brain. It is a form of "index" with a meaningassociated with it.

Brian's project illustrates how the processes of what we call cognition or the theory ofmind, the interaction with others as sharing the ability to map information and react, to bemetacognitive or aware of this ability, can be manipulated in a graphic language. Thegraphics situate cognition, set it apart from the individual, until almost, but notcompletely, we are dealing with information, mapping of graphics, and not with personsas embedded in cognition. The object of the exercise is to use technology in ways thatde-limit human thought processes, to share them in graphic formats.

The first goal is to build a "metarepresentation" which they do with CAWeb. It canchange size and location of items in a spatial organization of information using visuallanguages with indexical and symbolic operations. They want to support "grounding"patterns or "sequences of information and participants, while being aware of others andwhat their "roles" are. They are "creating knowledge" "(capturing) the result of thethinking process". The focus is on innovation, thinking, which he implied is the abilityto relate in an environment via perception and place in the context of a cognitivemapping, or shared cultural information grounding. He is creating what he calls " agraphical analog of a collaborator's thought processes". The software will predict changeover time, and allow for change, so that continual access and ability to re-state, orrevisualize graphic formats allows for continual change, less static than a "cognitive map"and in effect more emphasis on change and correlation.

His attempts to alleviate what he calls mental biases and bottleneck includes eliminatinguncertainty, predicting change, memory limitations, and predicting the actions of another.


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The prototype is continually tested and added to using psychology, kinesiology, mapping,implementing of prototypes .to facilitate an ergonomic HCI model of user, tool , in aprogressive loop of these ongoing functions.

The software maps groups of graphic objects to pinpoint and re-trace information gotten

doing research for example on the web. His example was of how one might do researchon buying a car, and physically set up piles of information, but one would have to knowwhere and how those piles of text relate to the actions of choosing and purchasing thevehicle to describe this to another person. Where is memory, and individual input in thetracing of information, and its use? How do we make graphics interactive and accessibleto actions that must be done based on their referring to shared static and changinginformation?

We are creating a kind of indexical language that might be an indigenous visuallanguage, built on the culture of the users, that overlays the textual one. Technology thencreates a new mapping, cognitive but site specific, to provide access to all like informed

users of what might be available by following this mapping. The problems of webbrowsing are still inherent in not allowing for the following of one trace to another,which is still not possible in the way that computers are built.

Why do we have problems with allowing nonlinear relays of information? This ideally iswhat technology should allow. Exercises such as this alleviate our processing limitationsin our cultural (semantic) relations as they are allowed for by sequestered and doled outinformation, where information is built on information and a framework rather than thenotion of activities following one after another, or concurrent with others. What Briannoted is that rigid hierarchies and categories are being built into technology and we are"hiding information". According to Lev Vygotsky, tools affect how we are "thinking" andwe have to take that into consideration when constructing technologies.

Discussion revolved around how others working with technology deal with these issues.Artists are looking for reactions themselves when they create installations, emotionalones. So there is always adaptability and sensitivity to the individual, a lot of "real time"not a lot of information, hierarchies, or need for memory - this is perception at the mostaccessible level.

How do we determine what kind of shared information works together and what we needto trigger the information; what is the importance of what information is, a triggering initself, a trigger to what; why more information, why not a more definitive change perhapsin the use of direct action? At what level do we arrive at pure reaction?

With interactive installations, we can design an environment to trigger explanatoryactivity, to get feedback implicit from the designer. The graphic display can make evidentwhat is in someone's implicit memory - what kind of information and when it wastracked, when one links to a certain indexical figure. How do we play with thoserelations, map them, associate data, how do we use that which an architect learns to do-


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prescriptive design, and how do we use our spatial memory.?

How different is or could be virtual architecture - and indeed how much like architecture- if physical architecture is defined by memory, or the potential for remembering what isthere, a cognitive mapping that leads us to perceptual experiences that are always the

same, but the virtual has the potential to continually change?

With hypertext we have the ability to go forward or backward, but the web can't do that.The web may be chaotic in the abstract but do we have to have an ultimate authority thatknows all links? HTML hierarchy has a forward direction linking it. How do we takeadvantage of what could be the chaotic nature of the web, where we may not be able, orwant to have " a knowing" authority. It is the linking that is more important than themaintaining of the structure.

HTML is a syntactical link, rigid structures, there is no overlap, no nesting, no backward.

If virtual can be unconstrained (and to what extent ) how do we deal with our ideas andstructures that are based on only one world reality?

There is also the questions of how people relate, or how their cultures have allowedcertain things, and how we define those. Is Asian culture more contextual or iscontextual a definition that they give to it in a formal semantic; where or are Americansor Canadians really more flexible in their communication or differing in their use ofcontexts? Human beings relate in space, by building a representation of what anotherperson believes. How we interact with people, that has to be built in joint action,cooperation, building this like world/mind can be done in media VR space.

Marisa Olson

Marisa Olson is a cultural theorist, artist, writer and independent curator currentlyworking in residence at Goldsmith College, University of London.

If Brian dealt with our information structures as constructs the next speaker dealt with theself as a construct, and where does multimedia deal with that. The self is a construct ofinformation and context, or cognitive mapping, but where is our perception a facet of thatif cognition is so fixed. and perception can be continually changing especially withinteractive multimedia. Narrative, as a frame for our personal reality and the self is animportant part of Marisa's research and we saw this question of change and structureapplied to that research. Is there not a function of space that is ours to manipulate, isnarrative not a function of space as well as time, and how do we retain our personalorientation in relation to multimedia; what is ours and what is it; what do we engage withwhen we engage multimedia; how does it enrich or limit our experience of theengagement; and how does it uncover new skills and release old ones?


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She explored the facet of what is the person as a self construct in psychology and inFreudian literature, where she emphasized that the neurophysiology of the body is notthe consideration but the culture is. The narrative as a self construct is spatial andtemporal function, and the formation of culture in symbols is linked to our relations inthat. Culture is rapidly being broken apart by globalization , our sense of place and the

social relation in those places. We have the ability to trace our memories, to constructcertain pathways, and what occurs when our texts, and images are linked for us inmultimedia. What remains of the narrative structure in our relation in terms of what wedo with a text, and in an extended question of our very notions of self?

We have multimedia and now we input more and so are our imaginations, our functionsin relation to a text in the moment being more involved, engaged, with a sense of space,and is that more engaged, where is the stimulus for our imagination then? What of theeastern notion of no inner and outer, no self - does multimedia bring us closer to thisnotion as a fixed culture, a narrative time sequence set out in a semantic mappingdisappears with the interplay of multimedia? Do we have less a fixed correlation of

perception as Brian was noting than an ability to continual track and interact? Where dowe than re-set the self as social?

Marisa addressed some of these issues by outlining the dissipation of our culture. Whatare the issues of space in a contemporary culture built on visuals? What occurs with the'spatial upheaval' of globalization; are we tearing apart existing cultures? "Ourcommunication and communication networks " are "stretching out our social relations "."Time and space compression are fragmenting local cultures" "Locality is stretchedbeyond borders".

Her point of departure for understanding persons in space is Freudian. She explained theego communication of a bodily identity, a spatial orientation, our psychic reality , ourcentre, which is multilayered, where we process ideas, a concept not a place located inthe brain. Freud's is then a world of culture, experiences explained to ourselves and otherthrough re-organizing our memories. Our memory unwinds and clarifies our worldthrough successive bifurcations, our perceptive processes construct a "virtual reality". Weeach have a true identity or true bodily representation before what is imposed on us byculture.

She then set out how we deal with narrative, this force in our culture that shapes the self.Lessing, the theatrical theorist writing in 1766, declared that narratives exist in time, andimages in space and yet one must notice that narratives do exist in space, the action of ourphysical presence and reaction and reference to a narrative is spatial.

Marisa defines narratives in three waysMaterial space

words take up space on the pageNarrated space

space in a story and mise en sceneNarratological


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conceptual imaged data in psychic image philosophical and ethereal hold narrative together, the most profound

Her digital example is an image, text and sound website called "Lair of the MarrowMonkey" in which in the narrative certain persons are given a marrow that gives them the

ability to have vision of true heightened reality - atoms moving (Another emphasis on thephysical real, not the cultural or cognitive mapping). This is in itself a reflection of thenature of reality in a technologically mediated world.

The discussion focused on whether multimedia hypertext, or options for viewingsegments of a narrative are more open ended or limiting than a text, where the textdoesn't provide a point of departure, but offers its own many points of departures. OrMcluhan's hot and cold media - the illusion of more there, giving the viewer moreresponsibility. Do these changes from image to image actually require an interpretationthat is like a gestural movement in space?

Classical cinema gives us a western sense of closure, a shared information architecturebut in viewing the actions of the artist you see how the artist wants you to see more,there is a reason for creating this, having it present, and that is the livelihood of the artistand the creative aspect of art continuing apart from this closure..

Is identity chronological and temporal not spatial; is it conceptualized in the narrative,and where is the self rational? She interpreted Freudian thinking as the understanding ofwho we are guided by our cultural contexts but the body is the mediator between theexternal and the internal. It is this identifying of inner and outer, the collective andindividual self that needs be defined. Who could pinpoint in what field, or analysis, whatis the perception, and what of no inner or outer as in eastern philosophy. Technology asa manipulation of what a narrative is and with the play of images, actually reveals theplay of the structures that create or are labeled the self, and the inner and outer are part ofthat, hence showing us the fallibility and the use of these structures.

And finally the web itself, its existence portends a nonnarrative world. The World is seenas an endless unstructured collection of text sets. Cinema was acknowledged as a keyform of modern expression. We live so much in our culture by the screen, filmic,television, computer, but perhaps its time is now past. We are loosing our lives towireless and VR engagements, even in the sites around the world that have not access totelephones, or TV soon can have wireless connections. Will the screen frame, andnarrative picture be retained as we move into other kinds of mediated, and fragmentedrelations?

Responsive Environments - Space, Materials, Objects and Building

This session attempted to use art and recreational activities to review how spaces, bothhighly structured for the purpose of viewing as in an art gallery, or cities, or recreational


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games, can be seen as responsive. Human activities, sensibilities are laid out in a mannerthat is more responsive. The elements that make up our social spaces, as perhapscommunicative acts, and the nature of life exampled in the construction of cities are re-looked and broken into the elements of performative, viewing and recreational acts.

Anthony Kiendl is the curator, of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Saskatoon. He presentedwork as presentations that dealt with the experiences of the body. It tried to endorse thatLived experience as human beings, (is made up of) subtle actions (that) inform our senseof world around us. By using elements of craft, mixed with industrial and science, wesaw texture, and our own reactions in what normally are illustrative (presentations)".

He presented on three exhibits, an installation made with porcelain vessels are lit fromwithin as brains, lung and kidneys, - hung from the ceiling.;plastic bags hung from the ceiling -, the pliable and momentary amid monumental;and a video of patterns likened to the frozen breath of conversations outdoors in winter.This exemplified the delicate act of breathing, a breath as vehicle for words. All of

these -(Make) us aware of surroundings and own bodies, and how they interact

"We speak a different kind of language using the intelligence of entire bodies.

The concrete matter that is our architectural world, can be permeated or perhaps we canbe allowed a sense of flexibility in our engagement with the material, perceptualboundaries that it forms around us. This might be perhaps en route to more flexibleparameters for living in, creating more sensual reactions and interfaces, and effacing thereactions to concrete, the imposition both on the landscape and into peoples lives that aredefined by these unresponsive materials. We live in the engagement of our reactions,technology feeds on that, and we can create environments that also react to them -flexible and reactive worlds, engaging emotion.

He mentioned the pervasiveness of screens in our culture and screen culturesconfinement of the body as in The body must remain still. or one might say the bodyis fixed in one unmoving direction and the action takes place on the screen for the personoften confined in perceptions of representations. In " screen culture institutionalizedmovie theatres, (where viewers as) prisoners are immobile passive and ready to receivevirtual reality placed in front of an unmoving body.

If cognition is maps, of what can happen, certain links of potential action, andpsychoanalysis is the formation of narratives of time, and semantic relations , then theseartists wanted to return to something more immediate, and of importance to theindividual, the experience of communication as revisited, made tangible, to be sensed andtested.

Technologies define a world where experience is facilitated with less of the culturalmediation and more of the experience. The artists were trying to allow the audience toexperience or measure the weight of words and breath, by putting them in bags. In a


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sense they were making tangible the effort of language itself, the primacy of the action,of communication itself. To refine, clarify that which are words and the action ofcommunication, and to suspend them, to abstract them, ask what they are, so we cansee them and can ask what is the significance of the tangibility of these words asexperiential manifestations, not in a narrative?.

The animated video of" eddies and baroque swirls of conversation outside on coldwinters night. created the vision of language as experienced not as structure.

The second kind of exhibition tried to introduce this mode of questioning, revealing,sensuality, or a dynamics of viewing, with a dynamic of doing - skateboarding. Here thescreen culture brought the metaphor of confinement - and skateboarding breaks art out ofthis, by being art that moves away from restrictive structures be they buildings, ways ofviewing culture, or actually moving in a city, all rhythms that tie in to culturalconstructions and meaning structures.

Godzilla vs Skateboarders - Skateboarding as a Creation of ?

This piece was intended as a critique of architecture, social spaces and the valuesconstituted by the same. A critique of values and spatio temporal mode of living inour cities... skateboarding was a representative mode, of performing, speaking our meanings anda critical quest of city through our actions.

Skateboarders disturb the peace, do damage, and are dispatched near famous urbanlandmarks(often art galleries which are in public plazas.) This skateboarding workrecognizes that contemporary art has a relation to popular culture. He doesnt findskateboarding to be an inactive language, but capable within this context of being a performative language, (u)tterance as bodily engagement. There is also a questioningof losing meaning structure in the breaking of the structures of the city, and the freedomafforded by skateboarding not unthinking and unknowing but certain newness..through lived experience enacted together.

Skateboarding also has a place accorded it in a cultural and recreationalacknowledgment by those working on the geographical map of the city. This act ofbreaking out of the familiar rhythms of walking, driving, even biking, the linear, horizonactivities can be used as juxtaposition to standard cultural building and public spacesframes that are a city, but can also be given a frame a recreational label, and ageographical situ of its own.

Derek Hales Digital Architecture Research, School of Design Technology, U. Of

Huddesfield.

Derek Hales is an architect and Director of Digital Architecture Research atHuddersfield School of Architecture. His work is about finding , displaying, playing with


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and creating new connections of existing cultural forms, mixed and disunited by cellphone engagements. Words are loosed, and narratives normally defined by timedelineated semantic maps for action, are defined by a structure of textual relations createdby an art situation- narrative for concept alone. This might be taken as aconceptualization of what occurs in the extreme of daily cell phone use, an instruction is

given and done, but relative to words on a cell phone not relative to what one is engagedin one's immediate geographic and social relation within that.

Context of mobile interface is - not fixed architecture but contemporary intimate zones

His media centre develops innovative research in digital technologies,

He talks about temporal autonomous zones" where intimate experiences erupt intopublic spaces through mobile communication. He sees conversations as intimate relationsthat are broken out into public actions. Information, conversations and communication

then are correlating our lives not in our geographically situated relations but continuallyvia computers and cell phones. If that is the case then our relations to our cultural worldis now mixed over these lines of communication, and perhaps that includes the stillretained meaning structures, or culture constructs that are existent in our cities."Architecture has been deterritorialized, communication has been freed." Context ofmobile interfaces is ubiquitous, computer pervasive and predictive, ambient andserendipitous, happenchance, and (occurs in)chance meetings. The importance is withthe Location not position, static audiences are (replaced with )mobile users. It is not a push pull dynamic but relativity theory of information.

"Surrender Control" was the name of the exercise, which used ambigious/generalisedrelations in correlation to the specificity of place, making use of SMS text basedmessaging system, a European social phenomenon. It was a simple rules basednarratives - (wherein one )surrenders control to rules. Cross over the road, take thenext left etc. came over the cell phone and you were expected to follow these rules.

The artists knew where people who were executing the instructions were, and theyinvited people who could cope, not pushing people too far. There are other projectsdone by others in which groups of people being moved across a city in response to aplanned event, in that instance one that could weave performative space together, but inhis work the control people were in isolation. This was an exercise in looking at theSpace between virtual landscape and physical environment, the notion of urbanlandscape, the notion of invisible topographies that can be mapped.

Landscape as a trope, turn conversation around, an evolutionary process, fluidity andinterrelation between events like relativity theory. Researchers at RCA are looking at real physical geographies that exist in invisible topographies of electromagnetic fields.

"Ocean of Possibilities, Sea of Plenty"In this work architects create their representations of how their emotions might look as


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geographical sites, to locate again where our emotions are shaped in cultural links togeography. The book describes personal terrain as a landscape, a world, field, orlandscape of intensities, an ocean of possibilities, bogged down in swamp of boredom, apeninsula of pleasure.

"Speakers Corner"A 15m LED display linked to web, voice recognition, and SMS Street interface by Jaapde Jonge They commission content from writers, artist and commercial partners and thepublic can input via the web and have it appear on this outdoor screen. Its softwareincludes 3G and Bluetooth at www.speakerscorner.org.uk

Derek sees this work as bringing back to architecture a kind of physical manifestation.In this work he stated that perhaps two things could be occurring. One that this input bythe public showing up on a screen was actually a Stillness in relation to visual screenculture. The screen remains however, but a stillness in the offering, a creation of aform of poetics, singular statements from anyone, not a singular one comment, as images

or text that grabs the responses, rather a continually changing offering. Secondly hewonders if evolution gives way to programming if in this context we are no longercompeting for attention, but being offered by computers and programming ways ofinteracting in more forms and outlets.

Anttie Vaatanen Research scientist, VTT Information Technologies, Human

Interaction Technologies, Finland-

The scientist is engaged in:

The development and study of user interfaces and services

Where to use these interfaces, communication, sports, entertainment. Specialized body and space interfaces, embedded in clothing, exercise cycles or a

room.

Two projectsIn a spatial version of a ping pong game the player controls the racket, via their spatialrelation to a reactive grey square on the screen. A ball in 3D comes back, and one hascontrol of the ball in relation to the square to acquire pointsThe square is controlled by a reaction range of 5m on each side. If you move forward theracket goes up, right to go right, down when going backwards. There are 49 floor tilesunder each of which are four pressure sensitive sensors, a microcontroller, and

electromagnetic fibre, a microphone or loudspeaker as well.

A screen based diving bell works as a group project: Using a loudspeaker, one woofer,and one wall as the screen this group game utilizes interactive virtual space. The groupmoves to steer the diving bell on the screen to free a dolphin stuck under the shipwreck.The creators used a story board of 15-20 possible scenarios, to work out the kind of gamecontent, what the players do in that room and the effects of the players' movement.


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Floor sensors carry signals from the mass centre of the group, via signal processingsoftware, and game software controls the visual screen and effect devices, and the lights.To control the diving bell in the lake, the group moves left and the diving bell turns left,moving forward it moves faster, backward it moves backward, and flapping arms andstomping raise the bell, and when all crouch down the bell goes down

www.vtt.fi/tte/projects/lumetila/

Another project was exampled by turning out the lights and playing the sounds from thissound motivated game, a calm dispersion of electronic like sounds. A sound playercontrols with a wireless control device which recognizes gestures and hand movements,in a role playing like game. In the narrative a crazy scientist invented the device to listento stars.

Bill Seaman is with Design/ Media Arts, at UCLA (Multi-Modal Experience

intelligence, bodies and Texts)

Bill's work interests include semantic maps and correlations of metaphors. In thispresentation he demonstrated a database of potential working products and interactiveinstallations that engage persons in irregular and seemingly unpractical body angles anduses. He correlates potential technological parts as functionary, to create works inprogress, and hypothetical works in real engagements for potentially practicalengagements. He refreshes the notion of practical in offering up correlations inabundance and in nonrestrictive notions of engagement hence liberating the notions ofwhat an environment is by what might work in one. He takes the notion of correlationitself and has it work as a creative device to engage us in working environments andsituations. It acknowledges that the engagement of these devices can allow for creativecorrelations that defy our normal body/space relations by going on-line, by revealinggenetics as functions, and by engaging body parts as such not as whole persons innarratives.

The Hybrid Invention Generator.

Bill did his PHD at CAIIA where he explored emergent meaning with a virtualenvironment. What are these environmental computer based spaces? How do we dealwith the discourse mechanism if it is the experiential in which meaning arises ;where is the , texture element, pictorial element" in an emotional kind of space forcontemplation? His works offer variances on linking of objects, dynamics, and theircreation and interaction with computers. A fixed range of uses, and emotional reactionsis exchanged for a limitless and looping mix of actions and reactions facilitated bycomputers, offering conceptual contemplative and practical results.

He has created a database that creates a range of new engagements with space, not juston-line ones that loops the functionality within the database to continually create newproducts and functions. It is in effect a database of relevant alternateinput/functionality/output description. He uses a conjunction code in which Input plusFunctionality equals Output, and each object be it made up of bolts, or a fishing reel or a


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computer has that capacity. For a computer input might be code, function is theperforming of operations, output is code. Devices are made inter-functional by taking theoutput of one and making the input of another. Metaphorically this conjunction code canbe applied to say JAVA based functionalities on the internet. The output one can becomeinput of another find a bridging conjunction code; code translated into electrical energy

might be one example. To facilitate many persons the database, in networked version,links to a copy in another city, participants could work together and see each other with avideo avatar. The database can generate hybrids where the genetics ( or make-up) oftwo models are interpolated and one can see what form might take shape in the mixing.It is in this way a tool to brainstorm about inventions.

In another project, with dancer Regina van Berkow, he worked on the physicality ofhow environment would suggest use but become implicated in the use. He facilitatedan interactive engagement of a body, a sensual encounter with an interface that lookedlike a strange hybrid piece of furniture, but which was actually created for the purpose oftriggering a media invention. For example you can put your knee in a wood freestanding

shape and see an image of a dancers knee in the video.

It was remarked that in Bills piece, the relationship between the position of a body partand the kinds of things happening on screen gives meaning to experience, implying thatcorrelation is meaning and how does his work show how we create, reduce and redefinethese correlations with technology?

The summaries of these sessions brought out the thesis of responsive environments andlooked at how they related to what we engage in as social environments. Gender issituated or exists in the culturally structured spaces that we have. Derek's cell phone piecefor example- Re-defines social space and investigates where narrativity, and fiction andreality sit within persons lives.

Some very basic things become apparent, clarification of what is the social space, andwhat is the body space, - the body space is perceptual, but where is the social space,defined as communication and semantics, and orientation in our cities and world anddisassociated from the body. In another Banff workshop, "Smart Sexy and Healthy", theparticipants examined how artists look at technologies, what they bring that is new totechnology for example, as does Bill play with the notion of cataloguing actions- andhow this can be re-worked to inventions that are of use. This exercise extends to mixingpractices, using science but extending and loosening its uses. Are we willing to do thingsthat have more risk involved with them, to lose our fears, identify perhaps what limitsconstruct our fears?

We saw in Dereks rule games with mobile phones, how to loosen social actions in a cityformat until we are just doing things without the cognitive armature of intentionalreactions, and interactions. This loosening happens in Anttie's games with the diving belland even his sound gesture notion, freed gesture, group interaction in a dangerousinteractive cinema. Are we also playing with the risks of existent social actions and what


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new modes of interacting, using the body, and "natural languages" are introduced withthese interactions? Social spaces can offer one kind of intimacy, but interaction with ascreen can offer another, that of the body in a personal reaction, and interface. Sound andmobility - mobility is about developing mobile intimate spaces, the space of the futureand both of these take us from the screen. There are other types of connection,

community in physical space, combining digital and physical over the long distance byvibrating someone via telecommunication. Some of these experiences as new requireassistance from guides in gallery showings.

Play! Perform! Games Space, Cognition, Engagement: the Body and The Story

John Buchanan Research Scientist, Electronic Arts, Director of Advanced Technology forthe Canadian studio and University liaison officer for the company world wide.

John began his talk stating that industry has something to offer academia citing his ownbackground in both fields. His talk dealt mostly with interactive storytelling. Heillustrated how the technology has a facility to do more than what games are offering, thatthe commercialization of winning limits what people can do with the technology.

The notion of winning became largely a boring manifestation of the game as he describedhow one's interest in manipulating the software could take over the reality built into agame to the extent that it overrides the intent built into them. The ISM #2 PC game hasthe intent of making the animated people happy and hence a win. In the SIM #2 PC gamehe found that it was more interesting to see how he could destroy the happiness in the co-dependence of their personal lives and careers and in doing so actually end the lives ofthe characters. He deprived them of key elements of their lives, careers, and watched asincome disappeared, bad habits accrued and the government intervened to take away theirchildren, and their motivation for being healthy.

He also tracked what is in the games industry considered to be improvements on aninteractive story by showing a series of improvements on a core game, NHL hockey. Hiscriterion was realistic experience, allow a user to control the most important player, theone with the puck, iterating on this, involve the viewer, give control to the user. Currentgames actually feel like participation in a hockey game. Starting with SuperNintendoNHL 1995 clips he traced the progression of the experience of being in a game. Johnfocused mostly on game playing (and we saw the movement detail, clarity of change,focus and the elements of the graphics improve)

Who is interested in creating high realism and at what cost? What does the audiencewant, a lot of reality, interaction, and why ? Is it an emotion that they are creating, anddoes too much reality on a screen create a too pact interaction, nothing that they can bringto it ?

The tools that we give to artists will get better, - how do we provide an artist with tools


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to access technology? Every new info technology brings new ways to tell a story;what was language invented for other than story telling. Is storytelling a definingfeature of humanity, and how does language create that, and how less limited are we thananimals? The next 10 years will see video game media audiences mature. Currently thegreatest amount of users are the 18-35 population., but plays tations are becoming more

and more part of a household. It is not a shift but a broadening of the market. People arebuilding a portion of their social life around their entertainment the same way people talkabout movies.

He talked about the non-competitiveness of a SIMS environment. It is aboutconstructing scenarios and testing them against SIMS life.. There is an investment(as) in a design environment (allowing) the users (to) have more sense of community,versus "classic narrative" game structure. With SIMS they build a house, have aparticular theme, and experience one of these characters There is then this juxtapositionof "goal" oriented versus "learning experience"

Other issues come out of the limits now apparent in games. Where is the need for realitycoming from, is that a scientific challenge and will that change as artists are becomingmore a part of computer graphic research? Why do we not have more abstracts in shapes,or black and white, non recto linear? There is a gender issue in games, where boys seemto respond better to strategy oriented games. What kinds of games do girls like or areexposed to that correlate with whatever else they do in their lives? What is of interest isthe feeling of actually having visited a place, rather than just a sequence of images.

Why do people turn to virtual environments; where is the notion of a real communitysituation a feeling of home? " In a WalMart commercial, the voice over extols thevirtues of Walmart, in any city theres a Walmart - a sort of commercially conjoinedenvironment not of the situ in which the store is located but of the commercial marketthat hopes to connect it with other commercial locals. Where is the sense of place in anentertainment megaplex for example? Human spaces (are) eaten up by commercialspaces, (disappearing) the old idea of a market, (where) people go and connect with otherpeople.

His last example was of key frame animation, key frames on a time line, aestheticallypleasing, that create a certain specific type of performance, capturing an artistperforming, He is currently working on a character base and demonstrated a taping of aJackie Chan animation using a motion capture suit on the actor himself. He also recordedthe text. Motion Capture images, for which he records the motion of the actor with dotsso that there are moving outlines of the dots representative of what the actors movementpatterns would look like in a shoot, then they create an animated skeleton on top of themotion capture dots. Key frame animation, and MOCAP work on discreet little movesand the game engine links all the moves together. The creators want the designedenvironment to be dynamic, everything interactive, have a character created in isolationinteract and use physics to get characters to interact


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Martin Courchesne Radical Entertainment.Research Engineer at Radical Entertainment in Vancouver.

Martin's presentation dealt with the introduction of physics into animation. Thisintroduction of physics into animation is to create a balance between realism and control

in animation, to allow animation in games to be more "interactive in an environment.When there is a collision in hockey there is added energy at the (point of the collision)There is now the ability to fine tune a game engine so that there is a virtual centre ofmass in the animated character, energy accumulates in the body, and the engine canreact to a measure of instability in the body. Martin notes that there where there is toomuch speed the animation can actually input a stumble animation.

Brian Wyvill

Computer Scientist University of Calgary

Brian deals with reactive models and implicit surfaces. Physics is really important, but towhat end, are we really interested in photorealism? He is interested in finding better waysof modelling, and modelling metaphors. In the future he foresees the death of thepolygon, the use of what he calls the blob tree, simulation and art, and reactive graphics.

Polygon objects have been in common use in computer graphics but it is technically verydifficult to simulate a reaction to their surroundings. Most graphics, and games are donewith polygons of 200,000 polygons to 10 mbytes of information to send over theinternet.

"The death of polygon is the arrival of the implicit surfaces"

Once we start to play with physics, we have more flexibility and the choices arise as towhat we do is a reality in itself, is it a copy of reality, or a symbol of reality, or anexperience for the user.

take position as artist, make new kinds of experimental playful physics, stretch thelaws of physics, these work with haptics, conflate artificial with real physics.

Perceptions of the world can be shifted by the speed we live in and the global context.Happening too slowly is realistic but we have become used to the speed of technologywithout differentiating it from our own reactions.

DiscussionHow do we get these simulations; what is interesting when change to physics, and userscan change these rules; what happens if the real world doesnt work this way as we playwith examples( weather mapping)

Creative ways in which to use Reactive Objects:

What front ends building: a. great programmers; b. what an artist wants to do? What theartist wants to do is a new peculiar indescribable thing that will happen. These projects


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will help define a set of tools, whereas autocad for example is difficult to control.Allowing for collaborations for creation is difficult within the academic situation -universities are compartmentalized:; within a department cooperation is difficult, andacross departments even more so.

As for the collaboration between art and technology there is no real business case for it.The nature of graphics boards are dictated by Microsoft. Government periodically fundsart and technology with the expectation of short term economic returns.

The Banff Centre is allowing for faculty from the University of Calgary to spend time atthe Banff Centre, for artists wanting to interface with technologies. There is a project onmaking interfaces for younger people to play with these kind of tools that use physics.

.

Architectures of Power, Architectures of violence, Architectures of War,

Architectures of Peace.

This was a discussion set chaired by Sara on the understandings of global virtual andphysical architectures drawn from the implications of the events of the week before,September 11, 2002.

There were insights into a shared reality, our shared emotional and cognitive parameters,as our symbolic and physical constructions came crashing down. The grasp of theseevents was relayed by the media, and through personal relations ; information sourcesextracting reactions that were global and personal. There were questions as to how theseshared realities and sources implicate conflicting constructs to create violence.

From Scott Patterson who lives within blocks of the site, there came the personalperceptions, of dirt; the stockpiling of debris; wandering in the remains of the physicalconstructions; the personal reactions of friends; and the recording in a personal media,camera of what occurred.

The discussion on the media, which is how most people were given a grasp of this event,was about representation and misrepresentation and how we gauge what is real, andbecome emotionally changed by the ability of media to manipulate the senses, to beflimsy and unsubstantiated to shape the story as a construct that is ongoing . Objectivityends with television. Where does this event relate to one's world, own actions, socialnational structures? If TV is emotional, or causing a reaction, it takes the formidability ofthe event, and makes it tangible in our nervous systems. In this instance it was first handexperiences that we were being fed. The hand held cameras were on site, a site that wasfamiliar to many personally, and to a great deal by reputation. How was fear itself builtinto the media- a flight and fright reaction to the narrative picture, the moment ofreaction again and again on tv, tintillating, in the print and electronic media carrying thestimulation of the conflict?

Other technologies including cell phones, telephone, e-mail, and later list-serves allowed


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individuals to communicate, to attempt to transmit that there was a disaster and one ofglobal implications, to pick up on the consequences for private lives, and to react to theincidents and its potential growth implicated everyone there. Sara called this use oftechnology " surveillance architecture", or the engagement in the events; what peopleused to contact people right away.

Time zones were broken as events that took place in a work area became the height ofpeople's day across the world and across time zones. Irregardless of the "place" on theglobe that one held, New York was the "time", and the "space" that mattered. So ineffect the medias had an ability to hone in on the space that is New York, and make thatplace the focus globally across the time of the globe. The physical impact of the eventwas felt world wide as buildings were evacuated, and no doubt military bases around theworld went on alert.

We made do with fragments of the event, drawing the implications from our own sourcesof information on world activities. As Joy Mountford mentioned, there was no sound in

the pictures of the explosion. Was this deliberate because the cameras recording it didn'thave the capability to record good sound or was the sound deafening? The power of theaural is often personal, was this a media function to soften the blow; to have us comingback for more, looking for a personal relevance that was omitted?

This was a physical reality that North America didn't have after the World Wars, thescars of battle in their cities, which Europe does. Often deliberately in Europe, thesescars were left as a remembrance of what occurred. How will the event and its buildingsbe 'remembered' on this site? The replacement of the towers was already being cited asthe largest urban planning project ever.

The World Trade Centre in itself, was unique in its size and symbolism of a financialworld that was led by New York. The symbol of the construction, the construct, of thisfinancial economy built on the cultural tendencies of persons and their abstracts,numbers, rising against the horizon; a symbol of human ability to shape perception andplay with it in the space of a city or globally in its economic range, has come down.

How is this "our" war, whose war is it? Will it be mediated by international law?Someone present had flown on the flight number of one of the high jacked planes just aweek or so earlier. War goes on in other countries, in Africa, a continuing part of ourculture but this time it is about"our"people, in our country, our neighbour. The event was"remembered", laid out for reactions again and again by the people who control the largenetworks. Where were the pirate radios, solar controlled to provide insight from theartists' community, about what they were experiencing ?

Politically there were signs of patriotism, symbols everywhere, bringing out concernsover right fundamentalism, the defence of one symbol or territory over another. In laterweeks came a global show of American flags, attesting to America's presence in theworld and the feeling of kinship in the at least media global narrative to its people,whereas millions in Africa who die never receive the "show" that this disaster did.


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The use of technology couldn't prevent the event, and it took very little technologicalsavvy to create the disaster. What is technology's role in preventing conflict? Perhaps ithas something new to offer to override these conflicts not work in the climate of them.Perhaps technology is not being given the opportunity to do what it could.

Then there was the physical demolition itself. The nature of the attack, the gasoline fires,created a "beautiful" demolition based on the unique construction of the buildings.Movies had depicted this kind of destruction. What took years to build, and had held foryears, imploded in a very short time.

Finally, the construct that is the American people, the nation, its picture of invincibilitywas broken.

Designing Appropriate Architectures/Designing for Context/Integrating Users

Franklin Hernandez-Castro is an industrial designer who is a professor at Hoschschule furGestaltung, Schwabisch Gmund in Germany, has taught at the Costa Rica Institute ofTechnology, and is the head of the design team for the LINCOS project, (or LittleIntelligent Communities). LINCOS is a project of the MIT Media Lab and Costa RicaInstitutes of Technology.

The project designs telematic units bringing information technologies to rural areas indeveloping countries. To date this has been done in the Dominican Republic and CostaRica. The project was initiated by The Costa Rica Foundation for SustainableDevelopment who invited the participation of the Media Lab at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT), the Instituto Tecnolgico de Costa Rica (ITCR), and theCenter for Future Health at the University of Rochester and now Harvard Universityparticipates as well.. As Franklin pointed out this is a good example of multi-partnerwork from varied educational institutions, and commercial input.

The project brings easily set up physical structures to a remote community to hook theinhabitants to satellite connections and a local IT project. Each of the units of the projectis constructed of a used standard 20 foot shipping container. It is a box like building thatis brought in to the site, and then covered with a white tent like structure to protect it. Theunit is equipped with digital satellite link and integrated local wireless telephoneconnection, analytical laboratories, telemedicine services, a computer lab, electroniccommerce and banking services, and a multi-purpose information center. There is thepotential to run the technical systems through solar powered energy.


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The unit provides several uses to the villagers1. health2. education3. communications4. electronic commerce

Inside the unit is broken up into various areas.

The health component of the project is largely telehealth, and a database of information.The telehealth might include the sending of soil, water or personal health information toexperts to be analyzed. The computer lab allows for the education of the students in thevillage. It gives access to all the villagers to the computers and training on them, as wellas other electronic communication such as fax machines.Communication is facilitated through

video conferencing provides not only uses in education, health or agriculture, but

entertainment for the community. As well the villagers are given the opportunity to create their own entertainment

be it with video or a radio station.

Communications are provided through the wireless network, and through aportable server that is biked around the village.

E-Commerce and banking services have also been planned for the units, with intelligentcards and banking services.

Barbara Mones-Hattal

Barbara is tenure Associate Professor and founding Director of the Visual InformationTechnologies Ma/MFA Program at George Mason University.Barbara presented her work on archiving and making accessible graphics work fromyears gone by. In a medium where things are continually created new she wanted topresent in an accessible fashion work that had been done previously so that others mightuse it as reference. Each individual who accesses her database creates their own log ofwhat they want to look at as a reference. She also presented a graphic animation work ofher students at the University of Washington. "Who Has Seen the Wind" was created in2000.

Austin Parsons

Austin Parsons is an assistant professor in Building Technology at Dalhousie Universityin Nova Scotia and a visiting assistant professor of Building Technology at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. His focus is on appliedbuilding sciences. His presentation was on the use of digital technology to design abuilding using straw bale construction. The presentation in its web form was


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representative of how he uses the web to teach his course, or "how the digital world hasimpacted on the teaching of architectural technology " as he practices it. He hasintroduced digital design tools into his course, eg. computational fluid dynamic programsPHOENIC to model air flow in a building. He might relate his course to a project in thedesign studio, or integrate a design project into the class for a specific technological

focus.

He used what is called a performance approach in his class work where the dynamics orthe building as a system realizes the building as a multiplicity of dynamics wherechanging one specification alters the correlation of the others. The course was createdaround the design exercise of completing a wall section for a straw bale house inQueensland, Nova Scotia. The use of straw bale technology holds an emotional response.There are those with a "zealot belief" in its benefits, and those who think there istechnical evidence that go against its use. His own pedagogical reasons for its useincluded the notion that a typical construction technique allows students to apply their"understanding of structure and environmental control strategies". There are no

differences between the building user's primary requirements of comfort and durabilitywith a straw bale house than with a more conventional design. The design issue isprimarily technical. Straw bale construction can be considered a part of the "greenbuilding movement, its use is topical and provides additional motivation to the student."

Digital information includes information sources such as web sites that inform about thehistory of technology and the design of straw bale construction to data on climate andeconomics:digital modelers including computer aided design CAD like AutoCad, visualization toolssuch as Form Z to performance modelers such as Multiframe and PHOENIXS.

Austin's presentation looked at the various needs for design tools to realize the dynamicsof construction, and as well the web design facilitated a certain freedom and engagementof his students in the course outlines, posting of required books, student presentations,and their final projects, as well as announcements and updates on school outings andcourse data locations.

SECOND SESSION ON FRIDAY

Enacting Human Memory, Intimacy, The Body and Cognition

Ted KruegerTed is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Hiscurrent research involves the design of Media augmented Exercise Equipment for use inMicro-gravity Environments. Ted's work is based on the analysis of cognitive function,and the dynamics of persons' psychology that is later revisited in his research on how werelate to our environments. His work has been of practical concern to scientists at NASAwho are developing furnishings and exercise equipment for gravity absent residences ofastronauts traveling to Mars.


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Citing examples and sources on the nature of cognition, as an "active mind" his lectureillustrated how "to contemplate what is cognition as an information processing being withall its biological cultural templates involved, and how one's environment shapes that." Toillustrate this .he showed video clips of a psychology exercise at Harvard that" illustrates

that rather than building a comprehensive cognitive mode of the world we inhabit we letthe assumed stability of the world be its own memory, its own "best model". In the videoa woman talking to a construction worker can be tricked into thinking that the manreplaced by another as her view is barred by a plank is still the same man. The advent ofnotions of cognition as dynamical, being created and changed in relation to anenvironment is tested with that of embedded technologies, where the environment itselfinteracts with the individual and their changing cognitive model. His work includescreating furnishings for long distance travel by NASA to MARS where nongravity livingquarters requires new of furnishings, and he showed a picture of a seated platform withits own speaker system.

Nina Czegledy

Nina is the presidend of the International Board of ISEA and recipient of a DanielLanglois foundation Grant for the Digitized Bodies Project 2000. It was this project thatshe presented at this session. Digitized Bodies is an ongoing intercontinental series ofexhibits, panels, and a CDROM that explores the effects of digital technologies, mostspecifically imaging techniques on the way that we perceive the body in medicine, and inart. The work draws on philosophical notions of the person, the body and mind split ofDescarte, and takes it into the technology of imaging with the input of scientists andcultural theorists in Canada and in Eastern Europe who reflect on their work usingimagery to piece together the human form less as form than as digitized data thrown intorelief by technology, and what does that do the notion of the human body as a construct?.The art works reflect on the change in medical imaging over the years, and the matchingof natural patterns and human ones, and their integration with the interactive nature ofexhibits.

Igor Stromajer

Igor Stromajer is an artist specializing in internet art and creator of the Intima VirtualBase. He prefaced his work by introducing a phrase he uses on his website, that "sadnesscan be an important emotion". His interest in mobile art reflects not only on an interest inintimacy as erotic but also intimate as in an engagement with the site. His work, requiresthat the participant seek out various ways of access to the site, and then is faced withnumerous choices of other websites, all spin offs from the phrases and symbolic figures,familiar from street signs, airports, and public places. The spin off sites are intricatelydesigned to look like commercial or information sites on the web, however carefulscrutiny reveals them to be not commercial, but Igor's own inventions. He has led us tofollow the graphics of the web as we are accustomed to, to in effect "trap" us in ourpatterns or shared memory of web function. The intimacy of the encounter becomes


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obvious with the revelation of symbols themselves, bounded by them, and the physicalreactions that become evident as we go from one to another, seeking some stability, someconcept and encountering only more symbols.

His other project site that he displayed was of a screen tableau, multiple pictures in a

layout of frames, and the use of sound to register a long female scream.

Lynn LukasLynn Lukkas is an interdisciplinary New Media artist, who has completed a co-production residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and is an assistant professor ofTime and Interactivity and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art atthe University of Minnesota.

She related her impressions of technology in general while tying it to her work with

interactive art using biosensors that collect date from the user's body.

She is facilitating, with her work, a search for the self, the cultural person but doing soby allowing for technology to bring to us and make apparent our most subtle notions ofhaving a physical experience, the source for piecing together all behavior as culture andthe construction of the self. Her interests were thus identity and the framework whichconstructs the self, and what are common human experiences - our ownembodiedness, and our awareness of it, ones consciousness personally and in artwork.

She cites three influences in her work; personal, the work of emotional scientists, andBuddhist philosophy and practice. With these she is trying to re-connect the action of thecultural mind and its references and those of the bodily experience of life. She looks tothe work of emotional scientist Antonio DAmasio . The states of a living organismwithin its body bounds are being altered by encounters with its environment.

Even story telling is related to body symbols, and the experience of that story. Culturalexperiences are physical ones. She implies that we actually re-experience a story when itis retold, when a story is repeated we are knowing what story the organism is living.Her interpretation of DAmasio being that we have a sense of self as a body/mind and acontext and that human consciousness has emerged from an intelligent organism". ForDAmasio - Descartes body mind split made consciousness a purely cognitiveexperience. (and by implication we have to return to include the physical in ourexperience, however it is labeled.)

In linking culture, story and bodily experience she traces traumatic memories through totheir bodily reactions. She cited the research of Joseph Ledu on the emotional brain withveterans who have post traumatic stress disorder. Sensory memories of war re-activateamygdala circuits in the brain, the reaction reaches the temporal lobe memory system andleads to recall of recent trauma. There are then conscious memories of being in a state ofstrong emotional arousal. These give rise to conscious anxiety and worry, that flow from


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the neocortex to the hippocampus. They keep the body aware that the body response isongoing, an emotional and cognitive excitement.

Buddhist meditation practices privilege the experiential over the symbolic. Themeditation practices are fundamentally experiential, not knowing but doing breath. They

focus ones concentration, provide control over and awareness of some emotionalresponses, and become aware of the shift in how we experience the sense of the self, inthe sense of the temporal and spatial, the self as it unfolds moment by moment in aparticular context.

She has been trying to have this personal level of experience realized in an intentionalmode, and hence she makes available what we experience as tangible for interaction byothers or by technology. She was trying to determine how she would put together hermeditation practices and her digital media work. She found that she was dealing with aSpace of consciousness, emotion, and body in its material form. She created amachine body interface with biosensors attached to the body, to send signals via

transmitter to a receiver that goes into a computer. Serial data went into Max and cameout as graphics. The participant sees a graphic grid "undulating" on the screen in therhythms of one's personal biorhythms. The loop goes from tech, and back to body mind.

The work she presented will have its first showing in South Africa in March. A graphicgrid reacts to the biosensors that pick up the patterns of one's breath. As we do a breaththe grids expand in relation to the breath. Another project would have the actual roombreath in relation to the user's body. Small speakers are embedded in the walls, and theuser's breath is amplified out of those speakers. The problem that arose was the noise inthe sensors that has to be parsed out as the "architect " or artist creates the conceptualstructure of sensory reactions.

The discussion noted again what is normally a personal action being broken out into thepublic domain; for example, the cell phone interactions, or the hanging plastic bags thatfocus on inducing a personal tactile reaction in a public place. The participants saw whatLynn does as eradicating the narrated space in a complex cultural context. The experienceis brought down to a very basic showing of one's own reactions, rather than a complexintegrating of them into a cultural narrative. There is no "false sense of experience in aconstantly changing world".

These are the kinds of art pieces that demand a lot of a user. They must engage with thepiece, but it is a different kind of time than one would have with a video game, it is notstrategic. We don't know as yet what the speed of technology will do to interconnectionswith it. We are able to experience or toy with reactions. The participant uses theinteraction with the technology as a way of focusing attention on the breath and the body,oxygenating blood and slowing the heart rate. The artist cant control what the user does.They may pick up the sensor and blow in it and walk out.

One other piece will explore the function of people in sympathetic relationships, of


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biological phasing where the heartbeats are in synch. The work monitors two bodies onthis unit, by measuring brain waves, alpha, beta, and gamma.

Translations: Space, 3D and Beyond

Joy Mountford

Joy Mountford is a professor in the media lab at Tisch School of the Arts at New YorkUniversity. She spoke on some design with technology in general and specifically onsome of the work that her students are doing at NYU.

She titled her presentation Interactive Design Obsessions

Her company name is IDBIAS They do a variety of work from interaction design tousers studies to software prototypes, and hardware. In her work she is looking for more"sensual connections" more "emotional connections" in design than what we have come

to define computing as which she sees as the box with a keyboard. Objects, even camerasand credit cards, have more emotional connections as they are more intimate when theycan be held like a toy in one's hand; computers dont have that kind of sensual connection

At NYU the students come in without programming and deal with a basic microprogramming environment. They have shows and design without screens, and attain aheightened awareness of design without display screens. She works with the studentsinterests not their technical acumen. A dancer worked with physical form relations to thescreen, where the camera picks up picks up outline form of someone standing in front ofit or when rubbing the image the video feed is darkened and a smearing charcoal likeeffect is created. The dancing toaster from ITP 99 jumps and sings or participants playwith a cloth which activates a virtual screen that tosses falling virtual words on the cloth.In another project they worked with the Coevolution Institute, where the challenge was toshow new types of visitor experience. They created butterfly boxes, in which bugs weregiven the ability to jiggle and move around and use wings and set them into a box .

Music was another featured component of their work. They used this hand heldtechnology to approach people with musical interests which is a large potential moneymarket. 70% of the population are amateur musicians and it cuts across market, age, sexrace. Their approach was to build an interdisciplinary team and they created theHoneycomb Bead Box(Bead and Plug. With the Plug and Play Honeycomb, Max allowsinteraction when squeezing little plug in objects into box space. The sound will loopwithout any pause or break - with a four to five second delay. The beads are embeddedin a patented grid reading device and sounds go off by closing the box.

The holding nature of it adds intimacy while the light in the bead has a seductivetranslucency. There are genetic mutations of variation. The group uses the internet tocollect new audio samples and they build on the collectibles trading culture. Bead boxevaluations were done to test different ages all over the USA. Different groups wanteddifferent but like reactions from the box - children wanted Mama, women wanted


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husbands saying " I love you". There was some work done on the nature of the soundseffective to the listener and allowance for control by the user.

This kind of design changes the scale of computing, its look and feel, the degree ofpersonal connection. There is room for ongoing improvement.

Frank Thomas a Disney animator speaking at 89 years old explained the problems withcomputers today. That

in his day one had to "know one's animated characters

whereas computers are shallow and empty

Her conclusions were:

That windows are changing to mirrors

New physical forms are shapes - not flat glass

Feeling of audio affordances is combined with tactility

Constraints help design new experiences

Slow has its place so one can reflect better. What interests her is ubiquitous computing and tagged object IDS and smart soft

materials

Denis Gadbois UofC

Industrial Design Faculty of Environmental Design

Denis is working on transferring the three dimensional world of our daily reality, timeand space, to that of the screen where everything is two dimensional. - a new way of

representing experience on a screen.

He had been working since the month of June with Softimage, Cad package, and a Campackage - Cyberware platforms, and Powerform. He translates scanned data into patchesso they can animate the scanned data. Technology is time consuming,and it is a long process that achieves expertise in the doing. They are trying to massproduce and use artifacts, to re-create reality in a "3d environment".

The process is about scanning three dimensional objects and capturing that for animation.This process can actually be creative, where one scans and makes mistakes and playswith those. There is a lot of potential from a sculptural point of view. One can get

inspiration from reality, or the technical aspects of the scanning process.

This is an instance where the strictures of technology are evident, when "mistakes" are infact what should be allowed for in the creation or free flow of one's actions for creativity.At the same time, the structure of the technology creates the framework within which anew function in relation to a computer image can be created.


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Pierre Boulanger "Virtual Reality to Virtual Meeting."

Pierre Boulanger is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Universityof Alberta. Prior to that he was a research scientist with the National Research Councilof Canada. His area of expertise is virtual reality. He presentation looked at the bridging

and mixing of the virtual and real environments based in shared human and technologicalinteractions.

Dr. Boulanger's presentation dealt with the new potential for "dynamics" in the use ofinteraction with a virtual reality site. The graphic interaction between persons, virtualreality, and real worlds creates a mix of shared dynamics. He finds that we are better"suited" to deal with and create human interactions by playing with our perceptions,creating fine tunings in these engagements and taking advantage of our range ofmovement. Some of the designs are interactive with reality in another location through avirtual reality interface, others are three dimensional simulations of tomb sites that existelsewhere, that allow one to experience the traces from the three dimensional scanning

of these sites.

He interprets the interaction between man and machine as a real life experience, a " real-time sensory experience of real and artificial worlds" So we are still defining two types ofworlds, yet we are using the same set of "human sensory channels", "Vision, audition,touch, smell, and taste".

"A virtualized reality system is an interface between a man and a machine capable ofcreating a real-time sensory experience of a remote environment from the real-timefusion of various sensors and other information modalities. It integrates all theinformation known about an environment into a realistic immersive sensory experience."The five senses are engaged in the relations of what he calls the three I's:immediate/interaction/imagination

Dr. Boulanger's work leaves the flat screen engagement and allows persons to guide theirown actions and their reactions elsewhere using sensors in the cave. One of the exampleshe used was the control of an excavator in Edmonton by the use of avatars at a virtual sitein Ottawa. The stereo display facilitates a virtual shaping of actions in reality, bystimulating the imagination, enhances the capabilities and is not static. He uses his cave,the cave/wall/projection, to get away from the screen which can't scale to realize what isrequired of the person and he does mapping from the human to the screen. The size of thecave interaction is set up to relate to the size of the object and allows one to choose whatone wants. He uses sensors for the interface with the virtualized allowing for a real timesensory of the remote that is brought over the network.

In what he calls a Yin and Yang relation the physical world and numerical model arecombined where what one senses is built into the digital world. He digitizes the realworld combining object, indoor environments, outdoor environments, and real timedigitizing.


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In other projects he creates a model of a real world site by the use of a three dimensionalscanner. For example the "Tombs of St. James" in Israel. The inside of the structure wasscanned in sections till all of the tomb could be reconstructed in a graphic. They also dida virtual tour of Tutankhamun's tomb for the Canadian Museum of civilization, allowing

visitors to see the tomb as they would "experience it today".

In another usage developing sites for robots, a test room was used for miming theapplication of trucks working under networked instruction underground, in effect a mapwas created of the underground.

A third aspect of their work is virtual meetings. They create a place where people canhave a discussion. This dynamic mode of virtual meeting will occur more easily oncethey have brought down the cost of machines, the system will be built into a video card."Virtual Meeting" is a merger of VR world and people, whether 1d audio conferencing,2d video or 3d vr. The one at the UofA will allow engineers and scientists to

communicate their design and visualize their data over the internet, producing theequivalent of a virtual meeting place with; live stereo texture and sound, collaborativeobject and data manipulations and interactions, CADModelor, Scientific DATA, andVirtual Actuators. The set up will be used by the I Grid, a collaboration between theUofA, the University of Calgary, the University of Lethbridge, the Banff Centre for theArts New Media Institute, Simon Fraser University , and the University of BritishColumbia.

The technology they have used includes:

the auto-synchronized Range Sensor developed at the NRC and commercialized

by Hymarc Ltd. LFV camera for digitizing large structures

shape capture, creating accurate models interactively from digital images

including photogrammetry for digitizing outdoor environments: texture mapping,surface fitting, meshing of unorganized points, full calibration,

high speed networks allow linkages to sites, for museums and for "wide-areadissemination with real-time collection, graphic reconstruction, archival storageand shared controls".

The discussion focused around issues of using interfaces as creative determinants,for example

how do people use installations for art or interpretive exhibit purposes as isbeing studied by the Arts Council of England.

In the use of the three dimensional scanners, mistakes are often a creativeinitiative; what will allow us to make mistakes, or go from a predetermined usage,while still allowing us to have a base for functioning.

The use of everyday objects, not tied to a screen, with use of our physical rangealso offers a more liberated option for creativity, less mistakes tied to a limited


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frame and a more liberated range of alternate and changing uses. The sensorynonscreen interface is more conducive to the experiential notions of the Buddhistphilosophy.

Moving away from the visual interface we can get a better range of experience,and experience for multi-users.

This session brought out the concerns of making accessible or "externalizing" the bodyfunctions in space, making these functions perhaps more tangible than the form, but alsomaking the dynamics of what the form is accessible. These interfaces are liaised with ourfiner personal perceptions, still mapped on the body but usually requiring meditativetraining, or sensors to define them, such as breath rhythms. As we open space, whataspects of art offer creativity in dynamics, and less of human form, and what aspects oftechnology offers these? How do we use this information in a market driven world,where we manipulate our perception of space to invite sales not analysis? How do wetake advantage and integrate the coming speed of computers?

Friday Night

The Architecture of Communications: Playing With Tools and Environments:

Hands on Show and Tell

Code ZebraJohn Tonkin -Stefan Kueppers UCL

Stefan Kueppers is a Researcher in the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environmentat the Bartlett Graduate School , University College London. His interest is in the spatialbehavior patterns in shared physical and virtual environments.

Tower work group has created a Theatre of WorkStefan's work is a model for graphic representation of what a group of persons areworking on concurrently, so as to clarify relations in the work. It is labeled a "Theatre ofWork " because the graphics are cartoon-like animation figures that represent the actionsof those engaged in work allowing one to track work through the graphics. This wasanother use of creating visual methodologies for integrating notions of creating in a timeand space, present and future reference in an on-line mediation.

This was about telework exampled in the presentation that deals with the.sharing ofdocuments, and document management, communication cooperation and the coordinationof process but it is also about social isolation, planning overhead, coordination overhead,synchronization problems and few situated communication chances. To alleviate theseproblems the team created a shared environment, with shared context and materialmaking available a social presence and chance encounters. They provide context based


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on analysis of shared information spaces. This graphic interface would create an"awareness of group activities for mutual orientations in hybrid working environments byvisualizing some of those aspects of group activities in three d landscape."

They were still creating but for this model they use the notion of a "generic event and

information infrastructure" "providing context for activity presentations" using a "stageset" based on the vision of a theatre structure. They map user activities to symbolicavatars, the "actors" in the work group being present in the space as an avatar with whichthey are interacting. The tower is situated action as is the real office setting. Everything iscontext important and understanding meaning requires a context. Interaction requires co-presence. Tower extends co-presence to distributed teams.

The "Theatre of Work" is a 3D multi-user environment with ambient interfaces, activitysensors feeding the infrastructure, a symbolic acting space module fed by infrastructure.It is an internet based event with notification infrastructure. The graphic relations are

based on a symbolic action system that shows generic actions triggered by a documentmarking so that the person who is linked to the active avatar is using the markeddocument in the graphic. The person narratives for individual people are kept in stock forpeople to review what has happened over the last week. They have avatars in space actingbased on the productivity of what the office participant is doing. Sitting peripherally, youcan look at what's going on, see what people are relating to.

The participants create parallel maps for placing things in the world. The individualbuilds the rule sets of a personal world with multiple representations of different typesspreading with "clustering" related to folder or project context. Could these be justanother indicator for future actions? Do they support mutual awareness and socialinteraction?

They use:

an ENI server

Sensors

A presence and activity indicator

BSCW activities

Windows NT shared file activities

Web activity and a Web content agent

Other projects of Stefan's work with density fields in playing with notions of space. Theycreated a visibility graph as a map of shoppers activities in a department store. Thevisibility graph illustrates the way agents navigate space from an external viewpoint,space defined from what is essentially a camera's point of view.. Peoples' movementscharted on the graphic as figures on a floor map can mimic the pre-determined nature ofpersons' shopping behavior. The exercise plays on the morphology of space and how thataffects behavior which helps to make smart spaces, and smart representation spaces. This


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How are the designers going to deal with social scripting, and the use of the software tofacilitate for example communication systems that allow for gossip or will there be aconstraint on that mentality? At this point they have not done a lot of scripting or playingwith roles, but there is a concern around letting people navigate where they want. Thisrelates to the notion of spatial relations creating narratives, and one can clearly see here

the notion of roles coming out of spatial relation as mapped out by a third eye and playedout.

Likewise is the spatial terrain in the store a map or is it a real event? Framing it as a"terrain", a geographic concept creates of it a map, or is it the event of mapping that is thefocus and this becomes a common point of reference? What are the advantages of usingthree dimensions and color for a distinct human point of view when dealing with aproblem, creating a certain "atmosphere" in a graphic that aids the problem solving?

Code Zebra

Code Zebra is a long term project carried out by Sara Diamond in affiliation with JohnTonkin. John is an Australian artist who works on his own computer animation usingideas of science and interactivity. He is the system architect on Sara's Code Zebraproject. It is both an interactive performance video club and a net based collaborativecommunication system, used to collect, analyze and visualize communications. Theproject is analyzing patterns for such things as emotions, tones, mediation, role and gameplay, and new forms of communication and research again using spatial maps thatrepresent interactions over time.

The internet players' conversations are subjected to a linguistic analysis where thepatterns of the conversation are traced into geometric graphic patterns. Integrated into theproject is the idea of creating patterns of conversation that look like animal patterns,matching the organic in these patterns with those of the linguistic. These patterns alsolook like cells growing in a cluster. Hence these are all some kind of biological or"ecological system" in patterns. Tracing and matching these patterns of animal, and roleplay is also about a certain kind of "switching" or change "driven by ecological irony."As software develops - one can look more at abstract biological aesthetics. The systemscollect and sort various modes including a data topic cluster. There is a conversationview, and a personal history view. The patterns that are created reflect the qualities ofconversation. Zebra stripes or other patterns might reflect word game. The imposition ofthe animal patterns is part of what the creators see as the necessity of visualization to setrules.

The users can track where a conversation is going and break off eg Barbie dolls and thentalking about God through Barbie. This creates a "level of transparency" and one canalso; "Learn about relevant topics in other conversations without having to enter intothem." One can watch for "annoying, repeating, or new sets of meaning." There is a "sense of power structures" that emerges through discourses. Who is making postings


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Emotional Architecture Sep03

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Transcript of Emotional Architecture Sep03