Final project papers and videos from the Spring 2005 Recombinant course.
In this paper, we present new types of buttons, choreographic
buttons, and an interactive art application, collage application, to
highlight features and abilities of this new type of button. A
person’s presence in an environment is often determined by
physical action. Emotional presence can be delivered by physical
action as well. A person’s movement can convey a specific
meaning to other people without using overt lexical expressions
such as speech or written language. This is one of various types
of interactions that people use in a typical social setting.
Choreographic buttons were developed to assign meanings to
people actions, and the collage application was programmed to
generate interactions between people that are part of a physical
environment and an art installation in a virtual environment. This
artistic application is based on the idea that physical actions affect
the various forms of person’s presence such as physical or
emotional presence. In collage application, the actions of jumping
and crouching are choreographic buttons used for latching and
fast-forwarding, respectively. Additionally, users can understand
the meaning expressed in their actions by seeing the changes in
the projected display.
In this paper, we describe Censor Chair, an art installation that
creates a shared experience addressing forms of censorship
including self-censorship, censorship of a group upon an
individual, visual and auditory censorship in digital media, and
censorship in society. We are taking a playful position in
considering relationships between censorship and sensors that
monitor physiology. Censor Chair makes use of a galvanic skin
response (GSR) sensor, live video feeds, and a barcode reader to
drive the presentation of a digital media library.
In this paper, we describe an interactive installation that
allows participants to use gesture-based movement to
manipulate a recombinant information space consisting of
news media. By recombinant information space, we mean a
composition of media elements (text and image) from various
sources with a navigable, visual representation. The
participant experiences a hyperrealistic representation of
current events. By a hyperrealistic space, we mean an
experiential space in which digital representations take on
significance which immerses the participant in a mediated
reality. We employ the combinFormation project to retrieve
and present semantically significant media elements. The
participant interacts with the system by walking in a physical
space that is mapped to the information space and gesturing
with colored paddles. The system employs Max/MSP, Jitter,
and a custom Max/Java patch to process video input,
recognize gestures, and relay messages to the
combinFormation system. By permitting participants to
interact with visual compositions in a kinesthetic manner, the
installation physicalizes and socializes the experience of
authoring visual compositions with combinFormation. The
installation draws audiences through the inherently social
aspects of gesture and image. Participants can take turns
manipulating the information space, allowing for collective
authoring. The goal of our project is to encourage many
participants to join together in a social setting to create
collective meaning through visual composition.
This paper describes an interactive installation that addresses
issues of presence and absence by creating a virtualized
representation of the abandoned town, Playas, New Mexico.
This town is slated for conversion into an anti-terrorism
training facility by New Mexico Tech University in
conjunction with the United States Department of Homeland
Security. Using the metaphor of the mirage, it functions as a
critique of our understanding of “reality.”
