Telematic Embrace: a Love Story?

According to Ascott, cybernetics and the creative process would not conflict but would rather work together. Ascott’s appreciation for Duchamp’s “Large Glass” stemmed from the fact that it was able to draw all this positive attention by pulling viewers into his artwork and allowing their own reflection of the piece. “The Large Glass, like the vitreous surface of a computer terminal, reists a consistently transparent view because it includes the reflection of the observer and his/her environment in its image.” Ascott was very impressed by the fact that Duchamp allowed the viewers the chance to interpret the artwork for themselves.

This leads us into Fluxus, John Cage well known for his art 4’33”, which saw us watching 4 minutes and 33 seconds of John Cage standing in front of his silent orchestra. The idea was not to focus on a regular orchestral performance but rather what goes on while they would have been performing. Those in the audience were able to interpret the artistic performance however they wished. Duchamp’s ready-made items such as a bicycle wheel and a urinal were put on display and called art. Both Cage and Duchamp take the word art to a new level, letting the viewer in, giving them the chance to interpret and experience it in any way. This reflects (so to speak) Shanken and Ascott’s metaphor of the mirror. The viewers are able to look deeper into the artwork and see for themselves. For most artwork there is hardly ever just one meaning to it, so artists are able to create something, that just like a mirror, will be a different reflection looking back at each person.

Just like Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala state in their article “Windows and Mirrors” the computer is simply just a new medium in art. A chance for “new forms and genres for artists and designers.” Applying the same mirror-like response to Duchamp’s “Fountain” is no different than looking at and interpreting a computer game online. It is art, and it can be interpreted in so many different ways. Everyone sees something different when they look into the mirror, same is true with art.

The Dis-Embodied Re-Embodied Body

The two opposing ideas about the body that seem to emerge in discussions about the interface, that Jeffrey Shaw speaks about in his article, are that “the sensual body constitutes our very being and the mortal body is what sentences us to non-being.” Basically his opposing ideas are your own self vs. your mortal self. Are you still ‘you’ when you are in the virtual world. I think the only chance for an interface to be seen as an opportunity to reinforce the message of a certain piece of work is by making sure the interface is creating something to the best of your ability to allow your message to be the main focus. The interface cannot take over the meaning of it all. The idea of our installation is to allow those who are visually impaired the chance to play our air hockey game. This is our purpose, if our interface is so complicated or too hard to understand; such as what sound goes with what, or it begins to be taken as a musical game of air hockey that you control with your game play; we lose our message. Our message is that we want this game to be interactive for the visually impaired; not to say it is strictly for them, but this is our main focus. While the player or participant is virtually controlling the sounds being made, they are still playing as themselves. Physically they are standing in front of the table and physically moving their “goalies” and striking the puck. So looking at Shaw’s two opposing ideas about the body, we are focused on an “actual” self.

Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments

“No one is ever sure of the outcome of the interaction between device, wearer and participants” would definitely apply to our project. We must rely on the participants to pick up on the sound that we plan to have help them detect where the puck is in the air hockey game, with their eyes closed/covered. It is unsure if some of our participants will pick up on the sounds quickly and actually be able to successfully play the game and if some of our participants will struggle tremendously with the interaction. There is also the fact that there may be advantages and disadvantages to having played air hockey before partaking in OUR air hockey game. I think that if our technology were to be portable it would not be portable in the way that you would be able to take and play it on the go. Rather it would be portable in that your could take this game into your home. Portable in that, a person would not have to come to a certain place just to participate. The type of information we may collect from people would most likely be how the participant reacts to the game initially – are they struggling? What are they struggling with? What are they doing to help themselves? How quickly do they begin to pick up on the different sounds? How long does it take for them to actively recognize the sounds? The participants must first come familiar with the sounds and what sound is associated with what. Once they are aware of all the sounds and what they represent the participants will slowly be able to improve at the game. While we want this game to help everyone with using their different senses, ultimately we are trying to make the game of air hockey accessible to the visually impaired.

Computer Vision for Artists and Designers: Pedagogic Tools and Techniques for Novice Programmers

The four simple detection and tracking methods outlined by Levin are:
Directing motion
Detecting presence
Detection through brightness thresholding
Simple object tracking

One of the major challengers that novice programmers face when working with computer vision techniques is pattern and feature recognition. This can include the fact that computers can struggle to detect a person; maybe due to poor lighting, perhaps it needs to identify a certain person and it is confused. Recently playing Kinect, we found that if there is one person trying to navigate they were unable to do so if a person was standing closely behind them – the sensor is confused on who they are getting directions from and will not work. A way to fix this would be to have an empty background with no distractions for Kinect, in the larger sense however a neutral background that would not be able to be confused with people, clothing or anything of that matter. Another challenge programmers face is distance. The computer has trouble judging the depth of field and so struggles to give an accurate depiction of the scene. However technology is improving. Once again with the Kinect, my roommate and I were racing at a track and field game; we had to run on spot, about 8-10 feet from the television – so the sensor could sense both of us and our movement. Naturally your body starts to move forward as you run on the spot which resulted in the sensor losing sight of us and our avatars slowing down. A third and final challenge is speed and quality. With older webcams, a person was able to look away, then turn back to the screen and would then see themselves looking away on the playback. The pixels were also brutal, your face or the person you were talking to looked like a digital blob. Now webcams are a lot more accurate in regards to playback, as well the quality is a lot clearer.

The History of the Interface in Interactive Art

The six artists Söke Dinkla uses to demonstrate the six categories of interactivity are:
Myron Krueger
Jeffery Shaw
David Rokeby
Lynn Hershman
Grahame Weinbren
Ken Feingold.

The six categories of interactivity are:
Power and Play
Participation vs. Interaction
Proximity and Manipulation
Strategies of Seduction
Nonlinear Narration
Remembering, Forgetting, and Reconstructing

“This may seem complicated, because Interactive uses the same technology it comments upon, meaning, there is a certain lack of distance. The situation of Interactive Art is therefore comparable with Video Art, which had to gain certain independence from the language of television.”

The “language” of television or video art, differs not only from each other but from video games as well. When a cut scene occurs in a video game, someone speaking the television language may look at it as “where can we throw in some product placement here” or “do we really need every bit of this one scene, we only have so many minutes in one television show.” Where as some coming from a video art background will be looking more artistically at the piece. Finally the language of video games would see the cut scene as a way to help further the plot or storyline in a video game.
These “languages” or perspectives are different for a reason. It may seem reasonable to have television and movies compared to video games; they are in fact totally different and should not be compared. You start a movie, you watch it all the way through – your only options are to pause it, skip ahead or stop it and not even watch it. In a video game, you control the character, you are able to decide his or her destiny. You do not know how it ends until you fight that final boss. You are interacting with the game, you are helping to write a story for this game. You have no way of altering a movie, or interacting with the characters. It is these reasons that television/movies and video games are spoken about in different “languages.”

What Gaming can Learn from Installation Art

Dekker asserts that the early experiments in participatory performance by Allan Kaprow ultimately failed to make the audience “co-creators of the work” because the audience was not interested in being apart of the art and most art installations used the viewers as participants, turning them into material in the art.

I agree that the principles of interactivity in gaming have changed. A gamer now has so many different options when it comes to gaming. They are able to interact with consoles such as Wii or Kinect for Xbox; where they are physically moving their body around to control the game. There is also the interactivity between different people in gaming. Whether you are competing against your friend sitting beside you, chatting to a person you are playing against on Xbox live or playing any sort of online game against someone else. Not only are they interacting with the game, they are interacting with other people.

Some advantages of consoles like this are the fact that both young and old find it easier to understand. Give your grandparent or younger sibling an Xbox controller and tell him or her to play, they will have trouble knowing which buttons do what and trying to remember all of it as well. Set up Wii and tell them to bowl as if they were bowling at the alley, now that is a lot easier to understand! As well people young and old are using these games to stay in shape. This takes away from the stereotype of gaming being something lazy. However the fact that these games are being used as a fitness aid, means people need more room to play them and may actually take away from the fact that it is, still a game. There are more than just fitness games however, so Wii and Kinect offer a new way to play video games. Traditional hand held controllers vs. Wii and Kinect; there is no way to say which is the better way to game; it is up to the user to decide.