A Hand-Made Portrait of a Software-Generated Relationship
Java software, Fimo clay (2008)
This is a portrait of a person who I found using a custom software program that ran for ten days analysing over 600,000 New Yorkers on FaceBook. I was looking for someone with the fewest friends who in turn have the most friends. If Paul Revere were on FaceBook, I might have found him.
The software identified this person and helped me contact them. My discovery turned out to be a female a stage actor, undoubtedly a social fulcrum and probably a word-of-mouth marketer’s dream come true. This portrait depicts me as much as it depicts her and her friends. The portrait depicts our email conversation, in which she described how she wanted to be portrayed.
Shown in 2008 at the NYNYNY group show at the FluxFactory in New York, in which artists contributed scale models of their favourite real and imaginary places in New York City.
However, we challenge the notion that spatial interaction requires a screen and propose a method for bringing spatial interaction to screen-less devices.
We present Imaginary Interfaces, screen-less devices that allow users to perform spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback. Unlike projection-based solutions, such as Sixth Sense, all visual “feedback” takes place in the user’s imagination. Users define the origin of an imaginary space by forming an L-shaped coordinate cross with their non-dominant hand. Users then point and draw with their dominant hand in the resulting space.
With three user studies we investigate the question: To what extent can users interact spatially with a user interface that exists only in their imagination? Participants created simple drawings, annotated existing drawings, and pointed at locations described in imaginary space. Our findings suggest that users’ visual short-term memory can, in part, replace the feedback conventionally displayed on a screen.
Imaginary Interfaces is a research project from Sean Gustafson, Daniel Bierwirth and Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Link via K21st
As the proliferation of tablet computing and mobile browsing has developed over the past two years, I’ve begun to notice an aesthetic shift in the visual vernacular used to describe our surrounding non-technological environment. The emergence of gesture based computing and mutli-touch screen interactivity has become such a powerful common pantomime that even popular advertising has begun to adopt these movements to signify more than just a way of paging through your apps collection.
From A Case Study on the Influence of Gestural Computing
By Nicholas O’Brien
Central Office. [Gruffly.] Hello!
I. Is it the Central Office?
C. 0. Of course it is. What do you want ?
I. Will you switch me on to the Bagleys, please ?
C. 0. All right. Just keep your ear to the telephone.
Then I heard, k-look, k-look, k’look— klook-klook-klook-look-look! then a horrible “gritting” of teeth, and finally a piping female voice: Y-e-s? [Rising inflection.] Did you wish to speak to me?”
Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world,—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted,—for you can’t ever persuade the gentle sex to speak gently into a telephone:—
“
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A Telephonic Conversation“I touched the bell and this talk ensued” By |
Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is an Internet meme that originated in 2003 on theimageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.[2] It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people in an environment where their actual identities are not known.[3]
http://www.jillmagid.net/EvidenceLocker.php
“In 2004, Jill spent 31 days in Liverpool, during which time she developed a close relationship with Citywatch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council), whose function is citywide video surveillance- the largest system of its kind in England.
The videos in her Evidence Locker were staged and edited by the artist and filmed by the police using the public surveillance cameras in the city centre. Wearing a bright red trench coat she would call the police on duty with details of where she was and ask them to film her in particular poses, places or even guide her through the city with her eyes closed, as seen in the video Trust.”
Human Powered Chatbot was a workshop of 17 people who were given simple rules for processing text and working together. This system created a writing machine that was connected to the Internet. Source material was programmatically mined from the Twitter and New York Times APIs based on feedback from the participant’s input. The result was a chatbot running on twitter that could interact and respond to conversations online under the guise of a “computer simulating intelligence”.
— David Elliott
