http://chi2010-cskach.blogspot.com/2011/02/paper-reading-6-shimon-interactive.html
A Note
Well, this is embarrassing. This is actually the same paper I read for the Special Assignment from last week, even though I said otherwise in paper reading #5. It's correct this time. Apparently, I encountered the mouse dancers somewhere else and got them confused with this paper. In my defense, they are somewhat similar in at least the technical aspects and both belong in the artistic category.
Layered Surveillance
Celine Latulipe, UNC-Charlotte and Annabel Manning
CHI 2010 Media Showcase 2, 10-15 April 2010, Atlanta, Georgia.
Summary
In this paper, Latulipe and Manning discuss an artistic presentation, based on interaction by an audience through one of Dr. Latulipe's dual mouse interfaces with images prepared by Manning. The experiment was aimed both to raise awareness about the experience of illegal immigrants and to explore audience interaction.
The format for the Interactive Lenses Work presentation was a video montage of the images, in which three of the four participants controlled lenses with crosshairs that could be moved around the image, lighting the parts they were on but leaving the rest darkened. Stacked lenses increased the brightness.The fourth controlled tonal features with their mice, likened to Photoshop's "levels" tool. The paper details that the montages used the Ken Burns method, and were done with the software demonstrated in class yesterday (4 Feb). I don't feel that a detailed re-description is required here.
The format of the Interactive Layers Work presentation was different. In this one, each member of the audience controlled an aspect of each of a series of images, generally a single figure. They control brightness, opacity, and clarity of their portion of the image, in a manner that was intentionally not completely intuitive to encourage experimentation and curiosity while engaging interest.
The authors emphasize that this is a case of both art driving technology and technology driving art, which they feel is very positive and aids in the development of both fields.
An image from the event, found at
via GIS.
Discussion
Entirely leaving aside the political topic of the work, I think that the presentation of the artwork was well done. I found several things about this interesting and/or warranting further information. First, were the pictures exclusively black and white as depicted or was that also controlled by the audience? If so, was that a stylistic choice or a technical limitation? I ask because I note that yesterday's examples were also black and white.
Second, while I presume that "gyroscopic" implies the mice were not limited to two dimensions, but it would have been nice to actually have that stated. How effective can the mice be used in three dimensions? I know there were issues of precision in using the mice free of the table a year ago, were the mice in the mentioned presentation even that effective, or were they last year's model? I doubt that it matters much for the art here, but the "air mice" are something I find very interesting.
I also noted with the interest the correlation between screen size and audience immersion. I wonder how far that trend is taken; that is, obviously the difference between a wall projector and a 10 inch TV is very significant in such a presentation, but what about the difference between "Cowboys Stadium Video Board" size screens and said wall projector?
The authors do not state which direction they intend to take the work next, but looking at the perspective myself I think the next move I would make would be to try to take the dual mouse approach beyond the application level to the system level. Obviously, this is only a small subset of the work, but the mice are the aspect that captured my interest the most.
I felt that while this was an intriguing idea, I could not see practical applications for it outside of the classroom. If current operating system were changed to support this, I could not see applications for it outside of editing software.
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