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http://acmmm05.comp.nus.edu.sg
Sponsored by ACM SIGMM, SIGGRAPH, and SIGCOMM.
In collaboration with
with support from
LASALLE-SIA College for the Arts
The ACM Multimedia Interactive Art Program 2005 took
place in Singapore on Nov. 6-11, 2005. The art program included long and short
paper presentations, and research-art jams at the ACM Multimedia conference
[list below]. The exhibition at
LASALLE-SIA College for the Arts, which was open to the general public,
consisted of a wide range of works using various techniques and creative
approaches at the intersection of multimedia art and technology [descriptions
below]. In addition to an engaging
performance (Body Degree Zero at the exhibition opening reception), demos,
talks, and discussions, there was a strong social component as artists and
researchers explored all the possibilities, at the beach banquet, and at other
venues throughout the city [pictures below]. It was a blast.
[The ACM Multimedia Interactive Art Program 2004 took
place in New York City, USA]
[The ACM
Multimedia Interactive Art Program 2006 will take place in Santa
Barbara, CA, USA]
INDEX:
Exhibition, Long+short papers, Photos
EXHIBITION
PRESENCE/ABSENCE
For centuries, artists and philosophers have
explored the notion of presence from multiple perspectives, considering its
physical, psychological, and cultural dimensions. In that exploration,
technology has played an important role, not only in the development of the
tools used for the “representation” of presence, but also in defining it: from
the revolution in painting brought by photography, to the new concepts of
presence brought by technological advances in the last sixty years (virtual
reality, telepresence, immersive presence, experiential systems, etc.). Such
technologies, and in particular those that combine multiple media (video,
images, computer graphics, audio, haptics), seem to increase “presence,”
questioning our embodied, singular sense of being in this world as the only way
of positioning ourselves. That questioning is closely linked to cultural,
social, and economic factors: presence can be used to reaffirm power or control
structures; it can multiply our sense of being by erasing distance barriers and
allow us to take on new, virtual identities, or it can be interpreted as
leading to absence as in the belief in some cultures that photographs steal the
soul.
Artists have worked with “technologies of
presence” (e.g., image, light, reflection, emotion), in traditional art for a
long time. However, while the rapid spread of technology has brought
unprecedented changes in the very basic notions of presence (“being there” can
be interpreted as being “on-line”), advances in transportation have lowered
costs and changed the physical landscape: those with enough resources are able
to travel to be “anywhere” in short periods of time, and opportunities for the
less fortunate have also opened up, allowing the unprecedented movement of
people creating great challenges for humanity in the 21st century.
In the scope of these new challenges and
opportunities, we selected inter-disciplinary works that address the issue of
presence both in artistic and technological, but even more, in political
(migration, home, sense of belonging and identification) contexts.
Exhibition
Curatorial Committee
Jeffrey
Shaw [*] [*] University of New South Wales Australia
Yukiko
Shikata NTT InterCommunication Center Japan
Eugene Tan
LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts Singapore
Wolfgang Muench Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts
(Singapore)
Alejandro
Jaimes [*]
[*]
FXPAL Japan, Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. Japan
Andrew Senior
[*]
[*]
IBM T.J.Watson Research Center USA
Selected Exhibition Works
Note: each work
has a 2 page publication associated with it which describes motivation and
technical details. Most papers are available at the artists’ websites.
Immersing ME-the disappearing digitize presence
by Yu-Chuan Tseng and Chia-Hsiang Lee
Jason Lee
Artists try
to represent existence and indicate the meaning of presence by a variety of
practices. However, when a figure is created by bits and composes hyper-real
information, the existence information has become fragments of fake existence.
Presence has become a form of absence. Absence has become a form of presence.
The work ‘Immersing ME’ is an interactive art work inviting participants to
perceive the process of dissolving from presence to absence.
by Yu-Cheng Hsu
Tangible
Weather Channel is a sculptural apparatus that enables the participant to input
the remote location of a loved one and interprets its real-time weather information
as a way of creating an emotional connection. Rather than employing traditional
graphical representation, Tangible Weather Channel renders weather information
into a multi-sensory experience by using natural elements such as water, air
and sound. By materializing weather dynamics on intimate sites to mediate what
occurs in another place, Tangible Weather Channel encourages the participant to
establish links with his/her experiential memories of a specific place and to
create a sense of closeness to via touch and contemplation.
by Hisako Kroiden Yamakawa
Human voices
are invisible and easy to forget, yet I often have the feeling that voices are tactile
and occupy a certain space that I
want to artistically represent as various volumes or solid shapes. I created
"KODAMA" to demonstrate my sensation of solidified human voices in
conversation. This work enables me to demonstrate to an audience the existence
of "voice" as a physical object and how it floats through space. The
work creates a world by capturing voices of the visitors to the installation
and representing them as bubbles in a forest.
by Raquel Renno, Rafael Marchetti and
Gonzague Defos du Rau
Non_sensor is
a digital art project that makes use of a Polhemus motion tracking system to
create a electromagnetic field which is disturbed by metallic objects that are
manipulated by the visitors in the installation. This disturbance is
interpreted by the system as movement, and presented in the interface as lines
that create trajectories according to the distortions. Visitors can therefore
design different graphic patterns in the interface by playing with objects. This work subverts a magnetic position-sensing
device using everyday electrical or metallic objects as impromptu tools of
artistic expression.
by Miha Ciglar
“Tastes Like…”
(a composition for two monitors, mixing board and human body) is an interactive
audiovisual work implemented without computers and common sound/picture -
synthesis/processing techniques but exclusively with low-tech analogue
equipment. Basically it can be perceived as a new instrument, representing a
product of creative misuse and combination of objects mentioned in the
subtitle. The monitors, mixing board and the player’s body are connected in a
specific constellation, which causes an audiovisual feedback, activated only
through the presence of the artist and controlled by the location of his body
inside the two dimensional, electrodynamic field, created by the two right
angle positioned monitors. The work does away with technology altogether―the
body itself serves as a conductor of electrons to generate audio-visual
collages.
by Keiko Takahashi and Shinji Sasada
Diorama table
is an interactive table installation. People place physical objects on the
table and projected elements such as trains, cars, houses, and trees appear and
are interacted with physical objects.
by Martin Pichlmair (with Laura beloff,
and Erich Berger)
The project
SEVEN MILE BOOTS is a pair of interactive shoes with audio. One can wear the
boots, walk around as a flaneur simultaneousy in the physical world and in the literal
world of the internet. By walking in the physical world one may suddenly
encounter a group of people chatting in real time in the virtual world. The
chats are heard as a spoken text coming from the boots. Wherever you are with
the boots, the physical and the virtual worlds will merge together.
by Jack Stenner, Andruid Kerne and Yauger
Williams
Playas:
Homeland Mirage is an interactive installation and video game that conflates
issues of security within the context of suburbia and our recent obsession with
terrorism. A person plays a video game, in which the goals are to stay alive
and explore a simulation of Playas, New Mexico, USA. The presence of others
within the installation space transforms the game image into a mirage, which is
projected into the exhibition environment. Playas has always been a virtual
construct. With past lives as a railroad town, mining town and ghost town, it
is slated to be used as an anti-terrorist training facility for the Department
of Homeland Security. This work creates a virtual reality game environment from
real and synthetic images of a town in New Mexico
Ere Be Dragons: an Interactive Artwork
by Stephen
Boyd Davis, Magnus Moar, John Cox, Chris Riddoch, Karl Cooke, Rachel Jacobs,
Matt Watkins, Richard Hull and Tom Melamed
Ere be Dragons, a collaborative project
between artists and health scientists, uniquely combines live heart-rate data
and location-awareness in a pervasive game-like artwork. The emerging audiovisual
map, created by the player’s actions and presented through a Pocket PC,
responds to their journey through the physical world and to the state of their
body. It generates levels of meaning by visualising the playe’s personal
physical involvement in their journey through the landscape, building traces of
their action in the environment. The project was supported by the Wellcome
Trust SciArt programme.
by Petra Gemeinboeck, Mary Agnes Krell
Impossible
Geographies 01: Memory is an interactive installation in which memory becomes
the metaphor for the fluid boundaries between the physical and the virtual. It
dynamically traces visitors’ actions and mixes them in unexpected ways with
memories captured by the physical space. Threaded with a network of laser
beams, the space encloses a series of implied and shifting geographies,
signified and made ‘tangible’ only by beams of light. When crossed, visitors
trigger a fracture through which memories can seep into the physical present,
creating a virtually woven fabric of events that grows and evolves over time.
The
Bomar Gene: fictiobiography, digiart, hypertext
by Jason Nelson
The Bomar
Gene is a new media, digital fiction hybrid that explores the speculative
concept that within us, the codes governing our bodies, is a single unique
gene. This gene gives each person an individualized ability, a singular talent.
The work's nine sections chronicle through ficto-biographies how these
abilities separate/isolate us from our cultural/physical landscape. With each story
and the accompanying interactive elements, the project explores how these
genetically derived abilities consequently adjust our internal and external
geographies. Through game, video, sonic and interactive interfaces, the ways these genes both
locate and dislocate the characters are recreated/translated into aesthetic hypertexts. This project isn't as much about the
science of genetics, as it is about human attributes and how those talents and
internal deformities, reconfigure our relationship with "where we
are".
by Krister Olsson and Takashi Kawashima
The
installation The King Has... grew out of a desire to explore the ways in which
people react to knowing the secrets of others, and if anonymity were guaranteed,
the kinds of secrets people would choose to make public. Secrets were gathered
from individuals via SMS messaging, printed on wood panels, and mounted at two
installation sites, creating ever-growing fields of text.
SmallConnection: Designing of Tangible
Communication Media over Networks
by Hideaki Ogawa, Noriaki Ando, Satoshi
Onodera
The concept
of “SmallConnection (abbr. SC)” is creating easy to operate tangible media for
communication over networks. Focusing on the scenario where two intimate people
live in distant places, we developed communication media that can be handled like
tools, and can convey faint information such as light, wind and touch through
the use of a robot technology. The goal of this project is to propose and
prototype new media design for communication between two people. Through
working 3 products derived from SC, we hope to widely propose a future communication
design using multimedia.
Body Degree Zero
by Alan Dunning, Paul Woodrow, Morley
Hollenberg
The
Einstein's Brain Project is a collaborative group of artists and scientists who
have been working together for the past 9 years. A central aim of the group is
the visualization of the biological state of the body through the fabrication
of environments, simulations and installations. The Project has developed
numerous installations using analog to digital interfaces to direct the output
of the human body to virtual environments that are constantly being altered
through feedback from a participant's biological body. The core of the Einstein's
Brain Project is a discursive space that engages with ideas about the
constructed body in the world and its digital cybernetic and post-human forms.
by Mauricio
Arango
Vanishing
Point is a presentation of the world as it responds to international newspaper
coverage – not a measure of what the world is, but of what is most newsworthy.
Consequently, countries that receive less media coverage gradually disappear from
view. It consists of an interactive world map connected to a database fed by
international news sources, and exists both in the form of a website and as a physical
gallery installation. The goal of this piece is to decipher the world that news
media reconfigures and to observe if media coverage, or lack thereof, is creating
a new cartography.
Interactions, an Interactive Multimedia
Installation
by David
Birchfield
Interactions
is an interactive multimedia installation designed and realized by the author.
The installation utilizes two neural network artist agents that act as virtual
artists to manipulate a body of images, texts, and sounds collected from the
internet as directed by audience participants. The piece addresses issues including
competition in the arts, machine learning in media, the role of popular
acceptance in art, and the relationship between raw materials and style in creating
media.
LONG PAPERS
Note: Long papers were presented at the main
conference in three sessions. Papers can be obtained from the authors’
websites.
Interactive Arts (Full-Paper) Session 1: Interfaces for Audio and Music Creation
-
‘flUId streams’: Fountains that
are keyboards with nozzle spray as keys that give rich tactile feedback and are
more expressive and more fun than plastic keys S. Mann (Univ. of Toronto)
-
Facilitating Collective Music
Creativity A. Tanaka, N. Tokui and A. Momeni (Sony CSL Paris)
-
MobiLenin: Combining A
Multi-Track Music Video, Personal Mobile Phones and A Public Display into
Multi-User Interface Entertainment, J. Scheible and T. Ojala (University of Art
and Design Helsinki / Univ. of Oulu) [BEST INTERACTIVE ART PAPER AWARD]
-
Research & Art Jam #1: Can
Artists & Researchers Play Mozart?
Interactive Arts (Full-Paper) Session
2: Performance, Play, and Apperception
-
An Ambient Intelligence Platform
for Physical Play R. Wakkary, M. Hatala, R. Lovell and M. Droumeva (Simon
Fraser University)
-
Generating Dance Verbs and
Assisting Computer Choreography C.-M. Hsieh and A. LUCIANI (INPG Lab.
ACROE-ICA)
-
POEtic-Cubes: Acquisition of New
Qualia Through Apperception using a Bio-inspired Electronic Tissue R. Paricio
and Juan Manuel Moreno (Technical Univ. of Catalunya)
-
Research & Art Jam #2: Can
Computers Dance?
