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FYI
Experience and Abstraction:
Bodily Knowledges and Interaction
A Symposium at Arts-Computation-Engineering - http://www.ace.uci.edu/
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Monday May 7th 11am-2pm
ACE Teleseminar Room
Overview
This symposium addresses fundamental questions regarding the creation
of, and theorisation of, interactive artworks, specifically around
issues of embodied engagement. These practices are radically
interdisciplinary, in that they attempt a negotiation between two
world views whose opposition has structured western culture for 200
years: the values inherent in computational technology, structured
around and valorising notions of disembodied information and abstract
symbolic representation, and the traditions of the arts, whose
commitments are towards embodied practices, performative values, and
generation of immediate, affective and persuasive multi-sensorial
experience. The full force of some of these disjunctions is felt most
clearly by the practitioner in the complex process of realisation of
cultural artifacts employing these technologies. Contemporary digital
arts practice is shaped, in large part, by the ramifications of the
disjunctions discovered in a process where technological components
formulated for instrumental ends are applied to goals which exceed
these instrumental conceptions.
Katja Kwastek is an art historian, currently directing the research
project "Interactive Art" at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute
Media.Art.Research in Linz. Her research area is media art history,
focusing on the aesthetics of interaction in digital media art.
She studied history of art, archaeology and history in Muenster,
Cologne and Florence. From 2001 to 2006 she was assistant professor
at the art history department of the University of Munich. She has
curated exhibition projects, lectured profusely and published many
books, including Ohne Schnur. Art and wireless communication,
Frankfurt 2004.
Interactive Art as aesthetic experience
Interactive Art does not only require an action of the visitor for
the work to become realized, often this action is a central aspect of
the work and therefore the focal point of its aesthetic strategy.
This paper asks, how this new form of aesthetic experience can be
described and analysed. Art history needs new methods to approach the
aesthetics of interaction to enable a better understanding of the
artistic strategies and reception processes that determine these works.
The paper discusses examples from different fields of interactive
art, focussing on strategies of embodied experience.
Keith Armstrong is an Australian/English interdisciplinary media
artist, Australia Council New Media Arts Fellow, Queensland
University of Technology Faculty of Creative Industries Research
Fellow and currently a CalPoly Visiting Professor for the Spring
Quarter, working in collaboration with their Liberal Arts and
Architecture Faculties. He is in the US to show, tour and teach
around his internationally awarded work 'Intimate Transactions'.
(www.intimatetransactions.com).
Ecology, Performance and Collaboration - Embodying Intimate
Transactions.
Intimate Transactions is a dual site, telematic installation
currently been shown here in the US. It allows two people located in
separate spaces to interact simultaneously using only their bodies
(predominantly their backs and feet), using two identical interfaces
called 'Bodyshelves'. During a 30-minute, one-on-one session their
physical actions allow them to individually and collaboratively
explore immersive environments. Each participant's own way of
interacting results in quite different, but interrelated animated and
generative imagery, real time generated audio (seven channels), and
three channels of haptic feedback (felt in the stomach and back).
This experience allows each participant to begin to sense their place
in a complex web of relations that connect them and everything else
within the work.
Intimate Transactions is an investigation in creating embodied
experiences that are both performative and improvisational by
harnessing individual, performative languages of 'untrained' bodies
as a means to engender understandings of 'ecological' relationship.
It arose from a deep collaboration between media artists, performance
practitioners, sound artists, hardware and software engineers, a
furniture maker and a scientific ecologist. The entire process was
informed by a praxis-led approach to art making that stressed
embodied connectivity and inseparability. This allowed us to
understand how participants might move within the constraints of a
particular interface, allowing us to shape and form the overall
phrasing and sensibilities of their experiences, whilst maintaining
the unique nature of their collaborative experiences.
Perry Hoberman is an acclaimed media and installation artist whose
work often focuses on the boundaries and battles between art and
technology. Working with a variety of technologies, ranging from the
utterly obsolete to the seasonably state-of-the-art, he has exhibited
widely throughout the United States and Europe. In 2002 he was both a
Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellow. His
installation "Timetable" was awarded the Grand Prix at the ICC
Biennale '99 in Tokyo, and "Systems Maintenance" won a 1999 Prix Ars
Electronica Award of Distinction. "Unexpected Obstacles", a
retrospective survey of his work, was exhibited in 1998 at the ZKM
Mediamuseum in Karlsruhe, Germany, and before that at Gallery Otso in
Espoo, Finland. Hoberman is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New
York, where he has had numerous one-person exhibitions. Since 2003,
Hoberman has lived in Los Angeles, where he is an Associate Research
Professor in the Interactive Media Division at the University of
Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
Interactivity: an abstraction chats up a metaphor
The radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner -- the idea that human
activity can only be understood externally, without recourse to
internal psychological states and processes -- has long been out of
favor. Yet it could be argued that as interaction designers, we are
essentially forced to act as behaviorists; we have no access to our
users' states of mind, only their physical actions. Further, it has
to be admitted that -- given the current state of sensing
technologies -- we can't even keep track of most of these actions,
even when we start to move beyond the one eye/one finger paradigm of
mouse, monitor and keyboard. Nonetheless, we often attempt to
extrapolate some state of mind from our limited apprehension of a
user's actions. It follows that any idea we might form of their
"state of mind" is at best an abstraction, at worst a fraud. In
addition, since we are generally concerned with interaction between
human and machine, it's a given that at least one of the party's
"state of mind" is metaphoric at best. So if interaction is a
conversation (as it is often defined), what are we left with? An
abstraction conversing with a metaphor. Might it not be better (like
the behaviorists) to give up any pretense at dealing with states of
mind altogether?
Simon Penny. Simon Penny is founder of the Arts Computation
Engineering (ACE) program at UCI. He has been making interactive
installations, writing about interactive art and teaching related
issues for over twenty years. He edited an early volume on digital
arts : Critical Issues on Electronic Media (SUNY 1995), curated
Machine Culture, an international survey exhibition of Interactive
Installation in 1993, has had residencies at ZKM, GMD and elsewhere,
won the 1998 Cyberstar award and honorable mention in Prix Arts
Electronica 1999, etc.
Pin the Tail on the Trojan Horse
The computer may be viewed as the reification of a rationalist world
view in that the hardware/software binarism, and all that it entails,
is little but an implementation of the Cartesian dual. Inasmuch as
these technologies reify that world view, these values permeate their
very fabric. Social and cultural practices, modes of production and
consumption, inasmuch as they are situated and embodied, proclaim
validities of specificity, situation and embodiment contrary to this
order. Due to the economic and rhetorical force of the computer, the
academic and popular discourses are persuasive. Thus, where
computational technologies are engaged by social and cultural
practices, there exists an implicit but fundamental theoretical
crisis. An artist, engaging such technologies in the realization of a
work, invites the very real possibility that the technology, as
Trojan Horse, introduces values inimical to the basic qualities for
which the artist strives. The very process of engaging the technology
quite possibly undermines the qualities the work strives for. This
situation demands the development of a 'critical technical
practice' (Agre). This paper explores some of these issues.
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