People doing strange things with electricity (Toronto Franchise)
Jeff Mann & Michelle Teran - LiveForm: Telekinetics
Rob Cruickshank - Spiral Inscriber
Greg Judelman - Knowledgde Visualization
Digital networks extend communication across distance and time. How might they influence the forms of our daily social interaction? Sharing a meal, a walk in the park, making music, sports or games - these are the kind of social activities and rituals we use to build meaningful relationships. But the technologies of e-mail, chat, telephone, and even videoconferencing are disembodied and isolating experiences, and the typewriter keyboard and computer screen are artifacts of a business machine that seem out of place here. What if the interface allowed for body language, gesture, and physicality? What if you could go out for dinner and dancing with friends, even though you're a thousand kilometers aways? The LiveForm:Telekinetics (LF:TK) project re-imagines the familiar objects and utensils of our everyday social spaces as an electronically activated play environment, capable of transmitting the physical presence and social gesture that comprise such a vital element of human interaction.
In LF:TK, ordinary goods and wares come to life as both kinetic art and telecommunication interfaces. Furniture, decorations, cutlery, doodads, and cultural bric-a-brac are reconstructed as networked conduits for video, audio and kinetic data flows, building a complex arrangement of movement and gesture. Imagine a shared creation, a social ritual, a dance through objects, an electric dinner-table that is played.
LF:TK is an artistic proposition for a humane future of networked reality. It is an intimate dinner party, a picnic intervention in a public space. LF:TK creates these experiences in transgeographic temporary performance zones, centred around wireless Internet access points, ubiquitous in the urban landscape, or anywhere a network exists. Wireless "hotspots" represent convergences between technological and social networks. They are portals, providing the possibility of multi-situated presence, but also placed within a fixed physical location, a social environment rich with familiar objects, rituals and codes of behaviour.
http://www.lftk.orgSpiral Inscriber is a cybernetic painting. It takes a familiar shape: a rotating platter, and a pivoting stylus. This form recurs many times in 20th century media, from the gramophone to the hard drive. It is now obsolete, and already seems quaint. In addition to exploring effects of visual perception, Spriral Inscriber is a celebration of, and a farewell to this form. The platter is hand-painted with a phosphorescent pigment. The stylus is a near-ultraviolet LED, controlled by a servo motor. As the platter rotates, the stylus is moved across its face and illuminates, leaving a vivid, yet ephemeral trace.
www.robcruickshank.netGreg will discuss his design methodology, which centres on the importance of using appropriate structural (informational content) and aesthetic (emotional content) architectures in interaction design. He will introduce his M.Sc. thesis research on knowledge visualization, and will present images and ideas from his recent project work. This includes code-derived images, a garment that detects the wearer's mood using touch and motion sensors and plays appropriate music through headphones in the hood, and an interactive social network and conversation visualization environment.
www.gregjudelman.com
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