Interactive Media Dan Collins

Interactive Media

Dan Collins

New Media and Social Networking

The dissonance at the heart of the debate surrounding the use of digitalmedia resonates with other historical moments that produced newtechnologies--such as photography or video. New media are disruptive of existing practice, and thereby highlight both the invention of newpractices and throw into relief the methods we have used in the past.

In the 21st century, computers, digital media, and social networking have become integral parts of contemporary experience. Digital technologies have radically changed how we make and distribute artwork, exchange information, and construct and maintain identities and relationships.

Dan Collins, Professor, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, 2009

Woody and Steina Vasulka

Steina Vasulka, Violin Power, 1970/1978

Myron Kruger – “Artifical Reality”

Myron Kruger: Video Place 1972 – 90s

Jeffrey Shaw, Legible City (1989)

Jeffrey Shaw: http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/html_main/frameset-works.php

Mirage: Tempe Center for the Arts

A virtual pool of water “dries out” in response to user interaction. As more people enter the space, the more a cracked landscape is revealed.

Details from Mirage by Dan Collins (2007).

New Media Technologies used in Mirage

• Remote sensing via Infra-red Spectrum and IR Video• Interactivity and Motion capture via MaxMSP• 3D graphics and animation• Digital Photography

Jennifer Steinkamp: Mike Kelley 13, 2008,computer video installation

Part of a series, Steinkamp honors past teachers with trees. The works are algorithmically generated (sets of rules are fed to the computer) allowing the artist to program various movements and dynamic effects into each tree. As far as I know, the work plays a set number of routines—canned performances if you will--hence the work is not interactive (no live, mutual exchanges with a user). Nevertheless, it is a beautiful and lyrical example of how the computer can be used to generate form and feeling.

New Media and Social Networking: Guiding Questions

What is Social Networking? Social Networking refers to our newly expanded ability to

rendezvous, connect, or collaborate through computer-mediated communication, and to form online communities.

What are some of the pertinent questions raised by the use of Social Networking?

• What are the technologies and when, where, and by whom are they used?

• What “digital ecology” emerges by their wide spread use?• What social interactions are desired...and enabled?• What skills and professional roles are rewarded?• What new social dynamics or order are served?

Christa Sommerer / Laurent Mignonneau

Verbarium (1999)

• Web-based interactive "text-to-form" editor.

• On-line users type text messages into a small pop up window which function as genetic codes for creating a visual three-dimensional form.

• An algorithm translates the genetic encoding of text characters (i.e., letters) into design functions.

• The system provides a steady flow of new images that are not pre-defined but develop in real-time through the interaction of the user with the system. Each different message creates a different organic form.

• Text images are used to build a collective and complex three-dimensional image.

Christa Sommerer / Laurent Mignonneau

A-Volve (1994-95)

Golem Project

Jordan Pollack / Hod Lipson

Brandeis University (2000)

• Computerized system automatically generates a set of tiny robots—very nearly without human intervention.

• First time that robots had been designed by a computer and robotically fabricated.

• Robot offspring “bred” for tasks using a set of artificial life algorithms—evolutionary instruction sets—that allowed researchers to evolve a collection of “physical locomoting machines” capable of goal oriented behavior. Processing done by thousands of networked individuals from their home computers. A Golem prototype negotiates a bed of sand

Dan CollinsReturn to the Garden 2003 – 2004Mixed media installation with webcam

Dan CollinsReturn to the Garden (Panoramic photograph)2003 - 2004

Adriene Jenik

• SPECFLIC is an ongoing creative research project (2003-present) in a new storytelling form called Distributed Social Cinema. Jenik integrates cell phones, laptops, mp3players, etc with live tele-matic performance, pre-recorded media elements, street performers and the audience's own social activity to create a multi-modal story event. Each iteration of the series is held in an iconic public space and is free and open to the public. SPECFLIC stories are all set in 2030, and arise from research-based speculations about the near future of that particular public institution.

Eduardo Kac: Teleporting an Unknown State, 1994 - 2003

• The installation Teleporting An Unknown State creates the experience of the Internet as a life-supporting system. In a very dark room a pedestal with earth serves as a nursery for a single seed. Through a video projector suspended above and facing the pedestal, remote participants send light via the Internet to enable this seed to photosynthesize and grow in total darkness.

Gene Cooper: Thundervolt, 1994

• Thundervolt, performed at the Deep Creek School, Telluride, CO in 1994, involved a connection between the electrical system of the body and the electrical system of the earth. Real-time data on lightning strikes around the US were relayed to a computer via the National Lightning Detection Network. As the lightning strikes registered on the computer, muscles n the body were involuntarily stimulated via a series of TENS (Transcontaneous Electro Neuro Stimulators). In the background, audio stories from students about body and lighting experiences filled the room as the gentle sound of rain fell on the tin roof above.

Dan Collins and Gene Cooper: Bay Model: A Working Prototype

Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA (permanent exhibit)

Interactive 3D models online:Downtown Phoenix Interactive Interface

Augmented Reality:Visible Phoenix

Augmented Reality:Augmenting Indoor Spaces Using Interactive

Environment-aware Handheld Projectorshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=frGEzlrhve0&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL3B252DF694B9D834

3rd ViewMark Klett and Byron Wolfe

Social Networking: Peer to Peer Interaction

Monique Yin, a senior at North Haven High School in Connecticut,

started a talk group for other incoming New York University

freshmen on the Facebook Web site.

See http://www.facebook.com

Facebook and other social networks like MySpace have transformed the social lives of teenagers in many ways, and that includes how they make the transition from high school to college. Hundreds of colleges have their own Class of 2011 groups on Facebook. They are generally not formally affiliated with the universities and are begun by students who want to connect with classmates months before they set foot on campus.

New York Times, March 21, 2007

Camile Utterback

AlluvialCamille Utterback, 2007

Untitled 6Camille Utterback, 2005

External Measures, 2003Camille Utterback, 2003

Camile Utterback• http://www.camilleutterback.com/

• Camille Utterback is a pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive installation.

• Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally

including

- The New Museum of Contemporary Art,

- The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York;

-The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo;

-The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art;

-The Netherlands Institute for Media Art;

-The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; The Center for Contemporary Art,

-Kiev, Ukraine; and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria

Camile Utterback

• Utterback develops permanent installations for commercial and museum settings via her company Creative Nerve, Inc.

• Creative Nerve commissions include work for • The American Museum of Natural History in New

York, • The Pittsburgh Children's Museum, • The Manhattan Children's Museum,• Herman Miller, Shiseido Cosmetics, and other

private corporations.

Camile Utterback

• Awards include

- Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), - Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002)

• Utterback holds a US patent for a video tracking system she developed while working as a research fellow at New York University (2004).

• She was selected as a member of the 'TR100 - the top 100 innovators of the year under 35' by MIT's Technology Review (2002)

Camile Utterback and Romy Achituv

Text Rainhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq4M8XlDa2w

David Rokeby - Taken (2002)

David Rokeby http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/installations.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipsz4ALgUi0

• David Rokeby is an installation artist based in Toronto, Canada.

• He has been creating interactive installations since 1982.

• He has focussed on interactive pieces that directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception systems.

• His work has been performed / exhibited in shows across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia,

David Rokeby - Taken (2002) http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=ipsz4ALgUi0

David Rokeby - Taken (2002)• http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/

taken.html

• "Taken" is a surveillance installation that provides two readings of the activities in the gallery space.

• A large gallery space has one wall taken up by two very large projections. On the left hand side, gallery visitors are extracted from the ground of the gallery floors and walls, and then looped back onto themselves at 20 second intervals.

• The result is that every action that has taken place in the gallery since the computer was turned on occurs together on the screen, repeating every 20 seconds.

David Rokeby - Seen (2002)• http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/seen.html

"Seen" is an extrapolation on "Watch", using the whole of Piazza San Marco in Venice as the source material. The installation is made up of 4 video projections whose video material are calculated live from a single video source. (Due to the extraordinary expense of running a live satellite feed from the piazza to the Canadian Pavillion on the Biennale ground, I recorded about 30 minutes of material and burned it to DVD to be the source.) The first and fourth projections are effectively colour versions of "Watch", in which what is moving is separated from that which is still. In this case, what was moving were the people milling about the piazza and the famous San Marco pigeons. What was still was the architecture of the piazza, and the kiosks selling souvenirs and corn with which to feed the pigeons. The middle two projections offer different perspectives on the patterns of flow through the Piazza. The blue projection (2nd) takes the first image (motion) as a source and feeds it back on itself at a delay of 1/2 a second. This turns each individual person into a Muybridge motion study, or a procession of themselves. Areas which experienced the greateest density of traffic in the recent past would be quite densly packed and less travelled areas would be sparser, providing a kind of probability plot of activities in the space. This video stream has a strangely archaic appearance, looking very 17th century for some reason. The third projection traces the recent trajectory of each moving thing in the Piazza in a colour gradient estqablishing the direction of movement of each thing. The processing was performed at full video resolution, meaning that every pedestrian and pigeon on Piazza San Marco left a trace. Flying pigeons drew the arc of their flight, running pedestrians keft trails showing their dodges and turns as they wended their way through the crowds. The walking pigeons produced patterns looking rather like arabic lettering as they chased after the scattered corn.

David Rokeby - Taken (2002)

• The image stream, can be read both as a statistical plot of gallery activities and as a record of each act of each visitor.

• The right hand side is a cooler catalog of the gallery visitors. Individual visitors are tracked within the space. Their heads are zoomed in on, and adjectives are attributed to them (i.e. 'unsuspecting', 'complicit', 'hungry').

• These individual head shots are collected as a set of the last 200 visitors and presented as a matrix of 100 or occasionally all 200 shots, moving in slow motion.

Interactivity - Scott Snibbe

Boundary Functions1998

You Are Here2004

Scott Snibbe • http://snibbe.com/

• Scott Snibbe born 1969 in New York City is an interactive media artist.

• He often works with projector-based interactivity, where a computer-controlled projection onto the floor or ceiling changes in response to people moving across its surface.

• Snibbe received undergraduate and masters degrees in computer science and fine art from Brown University

• Snibbe has taught media art at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.

• He worked as a Computer Scientist at Adobe Systems from 1994-1996, where he contributed to Adobe After Effects.

Scott Snibbe Snibbe's work has been shown at the

• Whitney Museum of American Art, (New York)• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, • The Kitchen (New York), • Eyebeam (New York), • The Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel), • The NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo, Japan) and • The Institute of Contemporary Arts(London).

His work is also shown and collected by science museums, including

• The Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), • The New York Hall of Science (Queens, NY), • The Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Paris, France), • The Phaeno Science Center (Germany).

Scott Snibbe – Deep Wallshttp://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=uio1mp5df4g

Scott Snibbe - Deep Walls , 2003

Scott Snibbe - Deep Walls , 2003

• Deep Walls creates a projected cabinet of cinematic memories.

• Within each of 16 rectangles, the movements of

different viewers within the space are projected, played back over-and-over, and reduced into the space of a small cupboard.

• Initially, when a viewer or viewers move into the larger rectangle of the entire projection, their shadows begin to be invisibly recorded, and one box within the projection (the eventual destination of the current movements) is cleared out.

Scott Snibbe - Deep Walls , 2003

• When all of these viewers leave the larger frame, their shadows are re-played within that smaller, single box, looping indefinitely.

• Thus the work presents records of the space, organized and collected into a flat cinematic projection.

• • By collecting the viewers’ own shadows, the piece

reveals how individual objects gain in symbolic meaning, while losing literal meaning, through organization, repetition and display.

Golan Levin

Golan Levin• Golan Levin –• http://www.flong.com

• Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Lab where he studied in the Aesthetics and Computation Group.

• Between degrees, he worked for four years as an interaction designer and research scientist at Interval Research Corporation, Palo Alto.

• Levin is Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also holds Courtesy Appointments in the School of Computer Science and the School of Design.

• His work is represented by the bitforms gallery, New York City.

Golan Levin – The Dumpsterhttp://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=qKzQywUeyyE

Golan Levin

• http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/

• The Dumpster (2006: Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg) is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers.

Golan Levin

• Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another.

• The project's graphical tools reveal the similarities, differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

• Jonah Brucker-Cohen • http://www.coin-operated.com

• Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, and Ph.D. candidate as an HEA MMRP (Multimedia Research Programme) fellow in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

• He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program(ITP).

• He worked as an R&D OpenLab Fellow at Eyebeamin NYC from 2006/7

Jonah Brucker-Cohen POLICESTATE - 2003

• Overview of Carnivore•

Carnivore is the third incarnation of surveillance software such as Etherpeek and Omnivore created by the FBI to snoop data (email, urls, Instant Messages, etc...) sent through ISPs.

• Despite the FBI's justification that using Carnivore advances the war on domestic and foreign terrorism, its use has unearthed many questions regarding its constitutionality. Infringements on personal privacy, free speech, Internet regulation, and the formulation of Echelon - a parsing agent for suspicious words, all bring Carnivore's existence into question.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen POLICESTATE - 2003

• Client Overview

PoliceState is a Carnivore client that attempts to reverse the surveillance role of law enforcement into a subservient one for the data being gathered.

The client consists of a fleet of 20 radio controlled police vehicles that are all simultaneously controlled by data coming into the main client. The client looks for packet information relating to domestic US terrorism. Once found, the text is then assigned to an active police radio code, translated to its binary equivalent, and sent to the array of police cars as a movement sequence.

In effect, the data being "snooped" by the authorities is the same data used to control the police vehicles. Thus the police become puppets of their own surveillance.

This signifies a reversal of the control of information appropriated by police by using the same information to control them.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen POLICESTATE - 2003

System

The project consists of a software and hardware component. • The client connects to CarnivorePE and grabs incoming packet

information from the local network. This data is then parsed and checked against keywords having to do with domestic US terrorism.

• If a word is found it then assigns a police code to all 20 RC cars all tuned to the same 27Mhz frequency which allows them to move together as one.

• All police codes called refer to possible threats of domestic U.S. terrorism such as "10-79" for bomb threat or "1000" for plane crash.

• The cars move in tightly choreographed patterns for each police code while sirens sound and a police officer's voice relays the message over loudspeakers.

Rafael lozano-hemmer 

• http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/eprlh.html

• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967.

• In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

Rafael lozano-hemmer

• He develops large-scale interactive installations in public space, usually deploying new technologies and custom-made physical interfaces.

• His installations use robotics, projections, sound, internet and cell-phone links, sensors and other devices.

• His work has been commissioned for events such as the – Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999),– the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), – the United Nations' World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003),– the opening of the Yamaguchi Centre for Art and Media in Japan

(2003)– Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Eye Contact, 2006

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTL9DX6uz5I