ART399 - Response Assignment 2

In the art that was given to be appraised, it is here that we will consider the direction of each piece as it pertains to the article written by Erkki Huhtamo, Trouble at the Interface, or the Identity Crisis of Interactive Art. The art pieces include Listening Post by Mark Hansen, The Messenger by Paul DeMarinis, and Park View Hotel by Ashok Sukumaran of Sun Microsystems. Each piece of art has a meaningful direction and essential features and will be compared to Huhtamo’s framework.

Listening Post is questioned in Trouble at the Interface as being truly interactive. The piece is a collection of text displays that supposedly show and speak chat room banter. It can be argued that the piece is not truly interactive because the audience does not affect any change in the action. The phrases are created by the unwitting entries of pseudo-participants in the scattered chat rooms around the world. It should be clear that, though the piece is not by definition interactive, it does have outstanding features such as text capture and speech synthesis. The physical presence of the piece is directed towards an audience of a lucky few, since the installation is in a small room, the screens are relatively small, and the voice is somewhat quiet.

In a similar fashion, The Messenger is also questionable as to whether or not it is interactive. The example again extracts words from the internet, but this time it presents them one letter at a time in tones from bowls and lever pulls with letters. An audience watching this will be inspired by nostalgia, but will not be able to discern the messages sent from the great beyond. It is in this way that the direction is toward pure art rather than voyeurism.

Park View Hotel is strictly an interactive piece of art. A person looks through a telescope that makes rooms and accoutrements of the adjacent building light up and resound. The direction of this piece is virtuous if the scopes can be made to be permanently affixed. It may also be advantageous to make a spray function, which would paint a wide swath of lighting rather than just single shot changes.

Fulgurator by Julius von Bismark is quite ingenious if not actually a work of art, interactive or otherwise. It hijacks surrounding flash photography and injects images into it. The unsuspecting photographer then gets a surprise when he looks at the pictures when he gets home. This could easily be used by companies to add logos and ads to personal photos and therefore should be proceeded with caution.

The Nemo Observatorium by Lawrence Malstaf is a simulated typhoon and has actually been done in the public. One can go to the Medford Mall and pay two dollars to stand in a virtual hurricane machine. It is indeed interactive art which should be repeated.

The current work of making the public interface of interactive art is contemporarily reposited in the rigorous hands of artists such as Hansen, DeMarinis, and Sukumaran and can be summed up by the framework proposed by Huhtamo himself when he says, “The answer may have consequences for the very definition of interactive art, and perhaps even to its raison d’être.”

In conclusion, it is well to propose that the interactive art such as that which we have considered above, continue to push the boundaries of human imagination but specifically make improvements such as permanence and largess.

ART399 - Project 1

This project is of a jwindow that shows the camera image, or a prerecorded video, with the face highlighted and the addition of an angel’s halo or devil’s horns added to the image on key press.

I started out with the basic cv.jit.faces tutorial, and added parts of the 14 Matrix Positioning tutorial. Then I added key which selects ‘a’ or ‘d’ for angel or devil. Then I added importmovie to import the png’s of the images. I added metros to make them work. Then I added a jmatrix to both the imports and the patcher. I combined the two using jit.xfade. I set the xfade to 0.5.

You will find the patch file and supporting png's here:

http://www.bretleduc.com/upload/ART399/BretLeduc-Project1.zip

ART399 - Response Assignment 1

In Jim Campbell’s paper, Delusions of Dialog: Control and Choice in Interactive Art, we are introduced to many concepts in interactive art. We can use these concepts to compare and contrast with other digital artwork to give us a breadth of knowledge with regards to computer-generated artwork. Here we will also compare the framework of the arguments with the secondary artwork, and evaluate how effective and informative the framework was.

The first major argument in Campbell’s paper is the notion that interactive art can be compared to the structure of a computer. He says that a computer is like an empty structure in which a concept can be inserted. The programmer must know the language of the computer as well as the dialect of the user or audience. This concept can be formulated to suggest that our chosen work of art currently being considered, Sawtooth by Christopher Burns, has also been started from an empty structure in which the programmer built and devised an interactive projection of colors and sounds that change with the movement of his arms and hands. Burns must have had the audience in mind, if only slightly, when he set this work in motion, since the music was not very melodic, nor did it change very quantifiably with the movements of his hands. He could have set the threshold higher to make more drastic changes in the display with his movements.

Another argument made by Campbell is that there are problems inherent with reducing the artist’s concept to a mathematical representation, a transformation that is necessary to allow a work to be implemented on a computer. He elaborates by saying that the subtlety of the artwork is lost by having to define that with mathematical precision. We see in Sawtooth that the programmer had a quite limited range of outputs to select from, or which was implemented, because the video only shows abstract lines and squares in the display. It might have included some realistic pictures or even stylized animations to spice it up. The music was also limited to squeaks and squeals that hearken to the days of 56K modems. The programmer could well have been inspired to make a more provocative show just by taking from the beloved old Winamp plugin called Tripex 1.1.

Finally, Campbell wants us to know that he is looking for new and untouched directions for interactive art by discussing the potential of the computer to allow a work to be able to change and grow over time through extraction and storage of information. Specifically, he created a program that puts a second cursor on the computer screen. This was a change and growth that seemed trivial at the start, but proved to add randomness and volition to the inputs. In Burns presentation, likewise, the art being displayed had a strong sense of randomness to it. It is not like Burns was directly controlling the action on the screen, but merely hinting the program along to make shapes and colors come alive. Conversely, he could have programmed the art to strictly follow his movements, paying strong attention to direction and distance of his engagements, to make a more structured exhibit. The Xbox Kinect interface would have been done this by default.