humanaquarium at CHI 2011

I had the opportunity to attend the presentation session of humanaquarium: Exploring audience, participation, and interaction at CHI 2011, and also experience humanaquarium's compelling interactive performance along with a crowd of CHI 2011 attendees. It was one of my favorite events.



What I liked about humanaquarium is that it is a good example of how music, the arts, and technology are converging, on many levels.  It is encouraging to know that this sort of interdisciplinary, creative collaboration is evident at a number of university research centers. humanaquarium was developed with the support of Culture Lab, Newcastle University (UK),  the Advanced Man-Machine Interface Laboratory, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.


According to the abstract for the CHI 2011 paper, "humanaquarium is a movable performance space designed to explore the dialogical relationship between artist and audience. Two musicians perform inside the cube-shaped box, collaborating with participants to co-create an aesthetic audio-visual experience. The front wall of the humanaquarium is a touch-sensitive FTIR window. MaxMSP is used to translate the locations of touches on the window into control data, manipulating the tracking of software synthesizers and audio effects generated in Ableton Live, and influencing a Jitter visualization projected upon the rear wall of the cube."

To learn more about humanaquarium and catch a glimpse of the performance, take a look at the following video clips.  The first video clip was produced by Nick Barber, who was covering the CHI 2011 conference for IDG News Services. (Nick is also the host and co-producer of World Tech Update.)  I produced the second video clip.

humaniquarium:  Robyn Taylor/Guy Schofield/John Shearer

RELATED
humanaquarium: exploring audience, participation, and interaction
CHI EA '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human  Factors in Computing Systems
CHI 2011 The User in Flux
humanaquarium YouTube channel
Humanaquarium blends art and tech, attracts crowds
Nick Barber, Computerworld, 5/13/11
Humanaquarium: Two musicians, one box
Nate Lanxon, Wired, 3/16/10

Christopher Baker Revisited: Resident Artist at Kitchen Budapest

I first learned about Christopher Baker when I was taking an information visualization class. I was impressed by his work, My Map: A Self Portrait, which was created from his archive of 60,000 e-mails:

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Here is more of Baker's work:

Baker's Murmur Study is a live visualization/archive of Twitter:


"One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause." -Baker

Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo. (The paper is recycled.)

HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome)

HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome) from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

"HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome) is a kinetic sculpture that considers the subtle, often-subconscious ways that mobile communication technologies shape our senses. The title references the recently discovered Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome -- a syndrome wherein mobile phone users become hyper-attentive to their mobile devices, often experiencing phantom ringing sensations even in the absence of incoming calls or messages. This work carefully orchestrates the vibrations of a collection of mobile phones to produce a familiar yet quietly-disturbing cacophony."

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise "An immersive video installation featuring over 5000 video diaries found on the internet."

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

"Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard." -Christopher Baker

Christopher Baker's blog

Christopher Baker's Projects

About Christopher Baker:

"Christopher Baker is an artist whose work engages the rich collection of social, technological and ideological networks present in the urban landscape. He creates artifacts and situations that reveal and generate relationships within and between these networks. Baker recently completed his Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Media Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is now the senior artist-in-residence at the Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media arts lab in Hungary. In his previous life as a scientist, Christopher worked to develop brain-computer interfaces at the University of Minnesota and UCLA." (taken from Christopher Baker's website)

Christopher Baker's Artist's Statement:

"My work is fundamentally concerned with the complex relationship between society and its technologies. Trained first as a scientist and only recently as an artist, my practice represents an uneasy balance of eager technological optimism, analytical processes, deep-rooted skepticism and intuitive engagement. Much of this practice is inspired by the interconnectivities – visible and invisible – present in the modern urban landscape. I am energized by the diversity of human expression that continuously activates our vast communication networks. I am awed by the scale and varied histories of the built environment and urban infrastructure. As technologists make daily promises to improve our lives by uniting these physical and digital worlds, I attempt to make work that examines the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles. Primary to this task is an exploration of the ways we imagine and represent ourselves before (potentially massive) audiences and the ways we navigate and abide in public space. Thus, architecture and place figure heavily into my often site-specific practice. With these interests at heart, large-scale video projections allow me to create works that fuse existing physical spaces with more ephemeral digital elements, resulting in revelatory and sometimes disorienting forms."

Christopher Baker is currently a resident artist at Kitchen Budapest.

What is Kitchen Budapest?

"The spicy innovation lab Kitchen Budapest, opened in June 2007, is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams"

"Research fields What happens to the net once it meets the urban space? How does private space relate to the saturating wireless networks? Where does user created content gain authority? How does our use of cities alter as we get more and more real time feedback of its dynamics? What makes a home smart? Street-smart?"

"We would like to rethink and remix the possibilities of new media in our everyday lives and to argument connections between new technologies and our society."

I am happy to live in a world where experimental artists can find places and spaces to grow and thrive!

Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering Blog: Great Links, References, and Resources

I really like Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog.

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen who focuses his research on "novel user interfaces and innovative applications enabled by ubiquitous computing." Dr. Schmidt previously headed something called the "Embedded Interaction Research Group" at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

Albrecht Schmidt will be working in collaboration with Chris Kray's group at the Culture Lab at Newcastle University in the UK. The work will focus on creating and building interactive appliances. He also mentioned the work of Jayne Wallace, one of the researchers at the Culture Lab, who creates digital jewelry.

The best thing about Albrecht's recent post was his short list of references:

[1] Wallace, J. and Press, M. (2004) All this useless beauty The Design Journal Volume 7 Issue 2 (PDF)

[2] Jayne Wallace. Journeys. Intergeneration Project.

[3] Kern, D., Harding, M., Storz, O., Davis, N., and Schmidt, A. 2008. Shaping how advertisers see me: user views on implicit and explicit profile capture. In CHI '08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 3363-3368. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358858

Another recent post that I like was "Teaching, Technical Training Day at the EPO". The following topics were covered during a training event at the European Patent Office in Munich, Germany:

• Merging the physical and digital (e.g. sentient computing and dual reality [1])
  
• Interlinking the real world and the virtual world (e.g. Internet of things)
  
• Interacting with your body (e.g. implants for interaction, brain computer interaction, eye gaze interaction)
  
• Interaction beyond the desktop, in particular sensor based UIs, touch interaction, haptics, and Interactive surfaces
  
• Device authentication with focus on spontaneity and ubicomp environments
  
• User authentication focus on authentication in the public
  
• Location-Awareness and Location Privacy

I liked the references that Dr. Schmidt posted, given my growing interest in topics related to interactive wireless sensor networks:

[1] Lifton, J., Feldmeier, M., Ono, Y., Lewis, C., and Paradiso, J. A. 2007. A platform for ubiquitous sensor deployment in occupational and domestic environments In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on international information Processing in Sensor Networks (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, April 25 - 27, 2007). IPSN '07. ACM, New York, NY, 119-127. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1236360.1236377

[2] Naohiko Kohtake, et al. u-Texture: Self-organizable Universal Panels for Creating Smart Surroundings. The 7th Int. Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp2005), pp.19-38, Tokyo, September, 2005. http://www.ht.sfc.keio.ac.jp/u-texture/paper.html

[3] Schwesig, C., Poupyrev, I., and Mori, E. 2004. Gummi: a bendable computer. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 - 29, 2004). CHI '04. ACM, New York, NY, 263-270. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985692.985726

[4] Wigdor, D., Forlines, C., Baudisch, P., Barnwell, J., and Shen, C. 2007. Lucid touch: a seethrough mobile device. InProceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Newport, Rhode Island, USA, October 07 - 10, 2007). UIST '07. ACM, New York, NY, 269-278. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1294211.1294259

[5] Campbell, A. T., Eisenman, S. B., Lane, N. D., Miluzzo, E., Peterson, R. A., Lu, H., Zheng, X., Musolesi, M., Fodor, K., and Ahn, G. 2008. The Rise of People-Centric Sensing. IEEE Internet Computing 12, 4 (Jul. 2008), 12-21. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2008.90

If you take a peek at the Culture Lab website, be sure to look at the Ambient Kitchen, designed to support older people with memory difficulties:

The Ambient Kitchen probably be a great way to help busy families get meals on the table, too!

Also look at Jayne Wallace's digital jewelry website The following pictures are of a neckpiece that triggers digital visits of silent film sequences on digital displays in its vicinity:

Some of Jayne's digital jewelry was created in response to "physical, clinical, social, and emotional dynamics of memory loss".

I hope you enjoy exploring Albrecht Schmidt's User Interface Engineering blog and the Culture Lab website!