Back again. After the overview on Frontiers of Interaction V in the previous article we’ll present our contribution to the event.

Fake Press. Ubiquitous Publishing.

Ubiquitous publishing and Ubiquitous Anthropology. The next-step in publishing practices and platforms, united with a research on the possibilities offered by location based technologies and by novel approaches to knowledge dissemination, communication and expression. We (Luca Simeone and Salvatore Iaconesi) presented our research at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome (June 2009), together with the first two applications and an open call.

Everything starts off from the idea of a contemporary evolution of publishing practices. Technologies, the possibility to create platforms to enable relation, expression and emotion and the availability of tools to share, disseminate and interact on knowledge and cultural productions, are all factors that made us feel the fundamental importance of designing new concepts and practices.

The scenarios described by location-based media, by the possibility to mix and cross the borders across different media, and the infinite spaces created by augmented reality were the influences that shaped our research.

We investigated on how technologies and new forms of interactions with other people and with places, time, architectures and objects would change the ways in which information can be created, communicated, shared and distributed. From an anthropological point of view we asked ourselves where would faces and voices emerge from, the self-expressions and representations of people and of their identities. And we also questioned the destinations for these informations, observing the fluid, mutating scenarios that surround us, with wireless, localized, immaterial, augmented layers of reality stratifying on top of the merely-physical one, creating totally new worlds in which information can become part of bodies, of architectures, of spaces, walls, trees, objects.

Displays, interstices, coordinates, tags And gestures, natural interfaces and moving, walking. Using the body to move through space as in an action of reading. We were truly intrigued by the transofrmation of space, by its augmentation with new narratives, new possibilities for the expression of the multiple voices and points of view that constitute the world.

So we designed our very own interpretaton for the idea of Ubiquitous Publishing. Cross-device, cross-medial, multi-author, emergent narratives.

The first idea was iSee, an application that allows for the creation of narratives on logos and brands. The application allows people to use their mobile phones to extract information directly from logo images: take a picture of your favourite detergent and, if the logo is already part of the collaborative database, you can get information from it.

Logo identifies brand, identifies company.

We suggested some possibilities, showing informations on social responsibility, on environmental policies, on the pollution rates connected to product manufacturing. Products come alive and communicate, in a simple, accessible form of augmented reality in which information is embedded into objects.

The second idea was Ubiquitous Anthropology.

A location-based platform allows for the positioning of the expressions, emotions and perspectives of multiple voices. These can be accessed through mobile technologies directly from the geographical locations, allowing people to experience and come in contact with other’s points of view and ideas.

In this form the world itself becomes “readable”. Reading by crossing spaces and architectures.

Reading other people’s texts, watching the images and videos they captured with their cameras, observing their evolution through time an through relations with other people.

The first application shown on this theme, was created by positioning onto the territory the results of a foundamental research by professor Massimo Canevacci and several students and researchers, who travelled many times to Mato Grosso, Brasil, and performed researches on the Bororo. Videos and images created by the Bororo were positioned onto the geography, thus creating a layer of interpretation of land, events and relations that is not covered in any way by classical media, and that allow us to “read” directly on the territory how the members of these populations interpret their land, the other populations they interact and relate with, their culture.

The system has provided as a incredibly useful tool to communicate these population’s political instances. The Bororo are not represented in Brasil’s institutions, allowing for unlimited exploitation of their lands and people. The possibilities offered by the platforms allowed us to write Bororo’s political instances, their desires and expectations, directly in the “places of power” of Brasil’s government. In Brasilia, several institutional buildings have been tagged with the videos and texts of their political demands, thus creating the only form of institutional presence that is currently allowed and accessible for them. In the idea that giving people the control on media and on their own expression and communication is possibly the only viable way to freedom and auto-determination.

The two examples constitute real applications that will be made available and downloadable online on the FakePress website in just a few days from the date of creation of this post. They are currently being enhanced to form functioning frameworks that can be used for these and other projects.

Some of the application’s content is already available on FakePress, and the full applications for web and iPhone will be available for download in a couple of days.

We are curently promoting the call for participation to the project, stimulating the discussion on the next products to publish with Fake Press.

So, if you have a book, research or other content you are going to publish, and you want so explore with us the possibilities to publish it in these ways, don’t hesitate to contact us.

- below a surreal interview I had to suffer from at the end of the show -

while in Mexico we did quite a few things.

possibly the most difficult one was the creation of an architectural installation called rel:attiva presenza.

rel:attiva presenza in Mexico City

the installation constituted a practical example of the theories we exposed at this congress and it was created in the beautiful cloister of the Italian Cultural Institute in Mexico City, in the colonia Coyoacan.

The concept behind the installation was a contextualization of an architectural intervention we designed by the same name, transforming a public square into an interactive location for mixed-media urban dialogue.

The installation show/performance took place together with the inauguration of the exhibit “El viaje en la mirada: dibujos italianos de dos arquitectos mexicanos” from which some drawings were taken and virtually re-interpreted for the installation’s components.

The installation was built using the openframeworks programming libraries, and it featured 2 network synchronized computers handling the sides of the visuals and the spatialized sound.

A narrative was created by juxtaposing 7 scenes projected on a cylindrical artefact hanging on top of teh cloister’s fountain.

Each of the 7 stages featured a methodology for layering virtual and physical domaind of reality.

The sounds from other spaces/times that were recreated in spatialized form in the environment.

The images from various locations of Mexico that were morphed into each other together with their localized sounds, to form new, virtual places.

The drawings exhibited, taht were used to create narrative voyages that superimposed the palces that inpired teh drawings with fantastic, non-existing ones.

Virtual architectures that were projected onto real ones, creating hybrids.

Interaction was assured by means of teh environental sound and by a simple cloister-wide motion capture system that used people’s movement to generate sounds and parameter values for the various algorithms involved in the software.

A special thanks must be given to the people at the Italian Cultural Institute, especially to Franco Avicolli, the institute’s cultural expert and responsible for inter-universities relationships, appointed by Italy’s Ministry for Foreign Relations, and to his assistant Valeria Ricci Apiròz: their enthusiasm was probably the most enabling technology that we used for this installation.

An enormous “thank you” goes to the Institute and to its director, prof. Marco Bellingeri, and to Felice Scauso, the Italian Embassador in Mexico, who gave us an incredibly warm hospitality.

Istituto Italiano di Cultura, colonia Coyoacan, Mexico

check out the review on ArtsBlog

the review on Networked Performance ( turbulence.org)

people using DpSdC

ABSTRACT

Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi (DpSdC) investigates on interaction mechanisms created using low cost DIY technologies, aiming at the creation of emotional environments that can be used to break the users’ inhibitory barriers to narratively access dialogue on socio-political issues.

Categories and Subject Descriptors:

J.4.3 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences – Psychology, Sociology.

General Terms:

Algorithms, Performance, Design, Economics, Experimentation, Human Factors, Legal Aspects.

Keywords:

interaction, emotion, design, copyright, perception, inhibition.

Links:

the report from (re)Actor3 with some videos

the original version of the installation

INTRODUCTION

In DpSdC common household gestures become extraordinary ones. DpSdC is an experiment in interaction design using an emotional approach to technology to break the inhibitory barriers commonly found in the visitors of an exhibit. Classical arts and media left their mark on the fruition processes of contents and experiences: visitors embrace passive roles and limit themselves to visually browsing what they see shown in the museum, festival, or movie theater. This passive condition propagates to everyday life, where the audiences of the information flows (be them on television or on the internet) only partially grasp the possibilities for interaction. Socially, interaction with information and with experiences means the possibility for critical mindsets to form in the users’ perception. Contemporary technologies offer the possibilities for these forms of social activeness to develop and to be truly accessible. Yet streams of inhibitory and practical barriers have to be bypassed to let these possibilities be broadly available. This is true for all the parties involved. The developers of technologies must gain the technical competences needed to create effective products. The skills involved are not only to be found in the technical knowledge needed to create hardware and software, but also the ones needed to research on the neuro-psychological levels of user interaction, on product design, on the economic and production models that the new technologies enact. Also, technologies can be expensive, and the alternative, more accessible techniques, often embracing “Do It Yourself” production paradigms, can only be learned by social interaction of some kind with other developers, building communities and communication channels based on open source practices and free licensing schemes.
The users of technologies are often faced to systems/interfaces/artifacts that they don’t technically or conceptually understand, or that they find boring or only partially engaging, or that don’t confront with issues that they perceive as relevant or, even, interesting. Or, on the other side, they are sometimes simply used to having passive experiences with contents and information. DpSdC is an experiment trying to assess all of these issues. A low-cost, low-technology, recycling, DIY approach is used to create an interactive environment that uses common, well-known household gestures to create a fun, entertaining, engaging tool that is used to establish a dialogue on the international debates on the issues related to copyright and intellectual property.
DpSdC has been shown for the first time at the Live Performers Meeting 2008 in Rome, where it was used by hundreds of visitors, with amazing results.
Technique
Visitors can approach the installation from all sides.
The floor of the space is filled with an overhead projection, coming from a standard Personal Computer running a custom software. A standard, low-quality, webcam connected to the PC looks at the installation floor. The camera’s optics have been prepared by removing the infrared (IR) filter, and replacing it with a small square of black photographic film, effectively turning the webcam into a basic, low-cost, IR-sensible device. The scene is lighted by the standard light provided by the projection, by the rest of the environment’s lighting, and by a custom-built IR light source, created by assembling the printed circuit boards (pcb) of 5 recycled television remote controls, hooked to a simple on/off switch and to a power source created by using a series of 9V batteries and a couple of simple electronic components (resistors, capacities, an inductor).

Cleaning up art history

As visitors approach the installation’s floor they are presented with various common household tools: a broom, an ironing board, a feather duster, a vacuum cleaner. Visitors could freely grab any one of these tools to perform the simple gestures we all performed once in every while to tidy up our homes.
The gestures of sweeping the floor, of ironing a t-shirt, of dusting a piece of furniture, were immediately and reactively captured by the installation’s software – constituted by a truly simple set of motion capture algorithms – and mapped to curves and strokes of varying pressure and width on the projection.
The calculated strokes were rendered on the projection by cutting up pixels from the digital images of the paintings coming from the last 300 years of Art History. A stroke with the broom would mean, for example, the “magical” appearance of an equal stroke of a painting by Andy Warhol or by Salvador Dali, as if removing the dust from the floor revealed the paintings underneath. Continuous interaction created a progressive overlay process, revealing the parts of the (about) 1500 paintings included in the installation, creating visual remixes that the users created, in delight, by brooming the floor, ironing, dusting and vacuuming.
Emotions and aesthetics

The first exhibition of DpSdC was in a very specialized setting: an international VJ meeting. People walking around the event space expected to see very “standard” presences: MIDI controllers, laptops, projectors, knobs, DJs, VJs. Arriving at the installation space, and confronted with a broom and with a vacuum cleaner, various expressions emerged from their faces, showing curiosity, interest, laughter and, sometimes, diffidence. The question clearly appearing along their facial traits was: “What the hell is this?”.

the installation

The installation was anything but neutral. The presence of household objects that were immediately recognizable within a setup that had definite aural components created different  kinds of approaches: people asking for explanations; other people asking if they could “touch it”; some other people asking what the “objective” was. Everyone eventually grabbed the broom or the feather duster and started dusting the floor and the furniture.
As soon as this happened the change in attitude was immediate. The simple gestures became extraordinary: the way in which well-known material actions acted on the immaterial plane created by the installation was fascinating, and had a light psychedelic feel to it.
The interaction was captivating and people stayed at the installation for dozens of minutes, eventually returning, hours (or even days), later bringing their friends with them to show the “magical” installation.
The installation was designed so that the technological elements disappeared from perception. The resulting environment featured a minimalistic representation of a house, with two recycled TV sets taken out from their case, with the circuits exposed, a small cabinet with the feather duster on top, and the projected floor with the broom and the vacuum cleaner. No technology was visually present to distract the visitors from the household setting. The projection and interaction were, thus, perceived as additional, immaterial, levels of a physical reality to which they were accustomed. The familiarity and “friendliness” of the aesthetics immediately lowered inhibitions: once they started interacting, people just kept on going, even starting to experiment with lighters, or by rolling their bodies on the installation floor to see what effects it would produce.

Copyright

When asking for information visitors were greeted with the explanations about the basic mechanisms making the installation work, and with the description of the conceptual themes of the installation, regarding the use of interaction design and of emotional approaches to technologies to discuss issues related to copyright and to intellectual property.
The installation allowed to create content by using in creative ways existing contents, bringing them to new forms of life and value through collaborative, accessible practices. This approach was explained as being the metaphor for what is currently happening in the global re-definition of the concepts of intellectual property, of knowledge, of creativity and of legality.
The avant-gardes of the XX century artistically materialized the contexts produced by the industrial revolutions, as described in Walter Benjamin’s theories: art has radically changed, becoming an entity that is characterized both by aura and by reproducibility. The post-industrial revolution brought this change to exponential levels of growth, with the emergence of the communicational metropolis to point out a definitively new concept of production and merchandise.The “remix” has become a formal artistic and creative tool. William Burroughs’ cut up, pop art, conceptual art, situationism, street art, net art, advertising, contemporary literature, performative arts, video-art, DJ-ing, VJ-ing have extensively approached the concepts of re-elaboration, of de-structuralization/re-structuralization, of the “false” and of the “reproduced”, of the augmented and of the degraded, transforming them into practices that are at the foundation of contemporary arts.
Stepping away from arts, and entering into more general contexts, digital technologies have created entire new methodologies that are globally used in cultural production and content fruition: streaming, peer to peer networks, virtual realities, hyperlinking, multimedia processing are all techniques that are used to create content. Many (most) of the times by simply creating new structures, elaborations and connections with existing content. This power, provided by digital technologies in contexts that are social and, potentially, universally accessible, is of fundamental importance for the cultural practices of the contemporary era: knowledge sharing, collaborative processes, free circulation of information and contents are the keys that will enable future philosophical and economic models. Even more, these practices are the only ones that are recognizing the true essence of content, information and production in the contemporary era, providing feasible business models that are rewarding and sustainable, and democratic practices that bring the population to face the need for critical approaches to information and knowledge, and to embrace usable tools to appropriate these spaces and practices.

DpSdC proposed all of these concepts through a simple, interactive experience. By collaboratively interacting on pre-existing (and, in some cases, copyrighted) contents, using widely available, autonomously obtainable, simply enactable technologies they could create beautiful compositions and democratically share a living space together with the other participants.
People had fun and learned many things about fine arts: some people were clearly more acknowledged to the history of arts than others, and could guess a Pollock from a Botticelli with just a few strokes of the broom, revealing even small handfuls of pixels in the global composition of remixed paintings. This proved to be a very interesting collaborative educational experience (”oh! that’s a Hopper!”) in which the “game” was effectively (and autonomously) being used as a tool for knowledge sharing.
People were actually gratified by the beauty of the creations they could achieve by remixing with such a simple technique the paintings of Picasso or by De Chirico. They immediately recognized the importance and value of the original content, but they clearly identified the collaborative compositions as “new” products, as different in essence and in their definition of value itself: an entity created by interaction and communication, by an immaterial level of reality, and “meant” to be shared and communicated.

Conclusions

Exhibiting DpSdC has been a wonderfully rewarding experience. The installation was extremely successful in implementing a simple mechanism with infinite dialectic possibilities. Two unexpected, and welcomed, results have proven to be quite interesting among the others exposed in the previous sections: the educational perspectives emerged during the interactions and the opportunities to expand the collaborative processes at the base of the creation/implementation of such technologies.
On the educational side the exhibition at the LPM 2008 created the will to define an experimental project to be executed with children of all ages in which the “game” dimension will be expanded to create learning processes that are based on interaction, collaboration and sensorial perceptive levels. On the production side, people clearly felt the value of the DIY methodology: The availability of technologies that are structurable and enactable by individuals and by communities with few financial resources was immediately perceived as a tool that was truly democratic and of fundamental importance. These considerations have produced the ideas to expand on these areas of activity towards the creation of something that, now, is taking the form of an experimental laboratory in which consumer electronics and widely available technologies are (conceptually and physically) disassembled and reassembled in new ways, in a process of “social reverse-engineering” of technology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wish to thank all of the people that made the first exhibition of Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi possible: the staff and organization crew of Live Performers Meeting 20082, Flyer Communications3, DelirioUniversale.com4, PhagOff5, all of the artists at DegradArte6, Nova1007 of the “il Sole 24 Ore” and Art is Open Source.

Just back from Liverpool where Art is Open Source attended the (re)Actor3 and HCI2008 events presenting Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi.

[DpSdC]Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi partecipated at the (re)Actor3 event and at the HCI2008 conference in Liverpool.

[DpSdC]Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi has been originally created for the LPM2008 event to promote the DegradArte artist movement born as a surreal protest when the Italian governmen promoted a surreal law on copyright.
DpSdC originally was designed to interact using the gestures that people perform when seeping the floor with a broom, emotionally linking the experience of interacting with artworks to common movements to which everyone can relate to, effectively eliminating the inhibition barriers that, classically, create distance between users and artworks.
For this version we decided to use another setting, with the same intent: the dinner. People were invited to eat their dinners on the installation, chatting about and laughing amazed at the beautiful things hey could achieve by simply lifting their knives or moving their glasses. Another great experiment investigating on the posibilities for relational dimensions created at the intersections of art and architecture.

Here is a video of the conference we held at the event.

These two videos show the set up of the installation and the evening event, held at Liverpool’s beautiful CUC COntemporary Arts Center

The (re)Actor3 event was organized and sponsored by BigDog Interactive. We had a chance to meet them ad they’re fantastic people, deeply involved in art, technology and in a beautiful perspective on the ways in which technology changes society and cultural practices. Hese is an interview with Jenn Sheridan, one of the founders of BigDog.

check out how it went with full video coverage here:

> report from Liverpool

connect to the events at

> (re)Actor3

> HCI2008

Degradazione per Sovrapposizione di Corpi [DpSC] is an installation in which simple DIY technologies are used to create an interactive floor on which visitors use a broom to sweep their way through 300 years of Art History, creating beautiful cut-up paintings.

Created for the DegradArte event held at LPM2008 in Rome.

more info here:

>> DsPdC website
>> DegradArte
>> videos on Youtube

Also featured on:

>> in Liverpool at (re)Actor3 and HCI2008
>> LPM 2008
>> Nòva100
>> DigiCult
>> HCI2008
>> (re)Actor3

>>Art is Open Source

Famous people come back to life in the Online Virtual World of Second life, in the form of autonomous avatars conducted by artificial intelligence.

A research on identity and on how people relate in the virtual environments that we find online and offline.

Karl Marx, Coco Chanel and Franz Kafka come back to life as autonomous avatars on Second Life. An artificial intelligence software uses their texts and interviews to generate the way they talk to other avatars, giving them a “soul” that is inherited from the mind expression of the famous characters. Their movement in the virtual world, their actions and interactions with other avatars, and their gestures and movements are completely autonomous, making them a digital form of life.

check them out at

> website

> Youtube videos

> PDF Presentation

also seen at:

> Wikipedia

> Played in Italy

> the Grid Live

> Art of the Net

> Weblog Art

> Massively

From CuteCircuit:

The Hug Shirt™ is a shirt that makes people send hugs over distance! Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one.

The Hug Shirt™ has been nominated as one of the best Inventions of 2006 by Time Magazine!

Here is a sneak preview of the new Hug Shirt™ that was presented at Wired NextFest in New York last month. Stay tuned on this page for a complete update and new images later this week!

How does it work?

The Hug Shirt™ is a Bluetooth accessory for Java enabled mobile phones. Hug Shirt™s don’t have any assigned phone number, all the data goes from the sensors Bluetooth to your mobile phone and your mobile phone delivers the hug data to your friend’s phone and it is seamlessly transmitted Bluetooth to his or her shirt!
Sending hugs is as easy as sending an SMS and you will be able to send hugs while you are on the move, in the same way and to the same places you are able to make phone calls (Rome to Tokyo, New York to Paris).

The system is very simple: a Hug Shirt™ (Bluetooth with sensors and actuators), a Bluetooth java enabled mobile phone with the HugMe™ java software running (it understands what the sensors are communicating), and on the other side another phone and another shirt. If you do not have a Hug Shirt™ but know that your friend has one you can still send them a hug creating it with the HugMe™ software and it will be delivered to your friend’s Hug Shirt™!

The Hug Shirt™ can be washed. The smart technology pads (containing sensors and actuators), placed under each red area that you see in the picture, can be removed for washing and placed back in afterwards. The Hug pads are plug and play, so that you don’t need to be an expert to place them and make it work! The Hug Shirt™s are available in many colors, so that you can move the smart pads from shirt to shirt and remain fashionable.

When touching the red areas on your Hug Shirt™ your mobile phone receives the sensors data via Bluetooth (hug pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat rate, time you are hugging for, etc) and then delivers it to the other person.

The hugs shirt is Bluetooth and works with mobile phones on any bandwidth (900 Mhz, 1800 Mhz and so on). Runs on rechargeable batteries. The Hug Shirt™ is built using RoHS components, it means that the Hug Shirt™ is lead-free and non-toxic.

Here below is an image of the Hug Shirt™, presented at SIGGraph in 2005. Images of the new Hug Shirt™ presented at Wired NextFest 2006 and as featured on Time Magazine will be available here soon!

Why the Hug Shirt™?

The Hug Shirt™ is not meant to replace human contact, but to make you happy if you are away for business or other reasons and you miss your friends and loved ones! It also has some very interesting applications in the medical field with the elderly and children. And is fun to use and very soft!

Interfaces and systems must be intuitive, natural, and compatible with our emotional status. Combining emotion and technology should be part of every design process. An increasing mobility of humans throughout the globe, due to business or study reasons, has brought family members to spend most of their time apart from each other. Humans need physical contact with each other. Technology should allow for a pleasant Human-Human Interaction.

Adults, especially elderly people living far away from their families, deprived of tactile contact for a long period of time will tell you just how depressing it feels. A hug, a handshake, a pat on the back, and a kiss are all very important and bring us close to others. People need to be touched at least 70 times a day! Start noticing how many times you shake hands or hug a friend, and you will see that it really makes you feel good, and if you didn’t get enough hugs give us a call and come visit!

Users designed it too!

We involved users in participatory design sessions from the early stage of the design process. This technique allows for faster refining of concepts and prototypes and gives the possibility to bring desirable products to market in a shorter time and with better results.

We also developed a taxonomy of hugs! Hugs come from people that take care of us: mothers, sisters, fathers, grandparents, friends. A hug makes us perceive the tangible presence of the other person, the closeness contributes a sensation of warmth and relaxed harmony. During the hug positive natural chemicals get released within our body, our blood pressure regularizes, and stress soothes. Rhythmic hugs to let a child fall asleep produce soft vibrations that resonate and calm.

Additional bodystorming (people hugging for a long time sessions were done at every stage of the design process. Users tried various kinds of textiles and materials such as sponges, balloons and the likes, wearing them on their body, inside their clothes or outside existing ones. During the hugging sessions we mapped the position of people hands on the others body. Major intensity points were identified on upper arms, on the upper back part of the torso, around the waistline, neck, shoulders, and hips. In these strategic spots, now the red areas, we placed our soft technological pads containing the hugging output actuators. ]]> http://www.neorealismovirtuale.com/2007/09/cutecircuit-the-hug-shirt/feed/ 0 51.5258642 -0.0778425