Experiments in Communication

This week I was doing a lot of thinking about interactivity, and a lot of research on Jim Campbell. I read an interview of his where he says he makes work to compensate for his inability to express himself through any other means (at least that was what I got out of it). Maybe I was just projecting my thoughts onto his words. (my language project from another class is bleeding into my observations). The automatic door example, which Despina also mentioned in class is a good example for thinking about whether or not a work is interactive or just reactive. Funnily enough, the same topic came up in my games class as well.
A few of these thoughts that I have been having popped up during my game design class. The automatic door example came up (sort of) because we were talking about how we wanted to use some gestural interface as part of our game. Frank (our teacher) said that making someone make a whole gesture to effectively just turn on a switch is not particularly rewarding, or a very rich experience. There has to be a reason for the input to be analog (and also complicated and difficult), as opposed to digital. Campbell's reflection on his work (how the viewer's distance from one of his works created an analogous response) addresses the same problem and explains how he deals with it. This refinement in the response of the "interactive" object is what I am trying to wrap my head around. I imagine it becomes easier with concrete examples. But the fact that I just called it a "response" and not an "interaction" is a tiny bit disconcerting to me. But maybe that's just linguistics.
Anyway, the other thing I was thinking about is the differences between making a statement, asking a question (dialogue), and testing a hypothesis (experiment): are these the differences between art, interactive art and science, respectively?Are the boundaries not clear? I have the feeling that these correspondences don't really work -- interactive art could take the form of a dialogue, a statement or an experiment, I think. But there would have to be dialogue involved somewhere in the process.

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What do you want to choose? I always am extremely slow in making decisions, so I am making a device that might be somewhat helpful. It is a binary decision-maker, that tries to help you figure out which of 2 options you really want to choose. Cybernetic feedback loops really influenced this project, as it is in itself a feedback loop of sorts.

There are two indicators (LEDs), one for each of the things you are deciding between. (They could be handheld for a "on one hand, on the other hand" metaphor.) The device chooses one of them for you by lighting one of the LEDs up. This choice is random. Then it asks you if you are happy with this decision. You have to indicate "yes"or "no" (possibly with a thumbs up, or thumbs down hand gesture -- I am thinking of this device incorporated in a glove). If you say "no" then the cycle will repeat itself, and if you say "yes" the cycle will end, as you will have found an option you want.

I guess the way the deivce would work is that it would change how you think about the options. Once a decision has been made for you, it's no longer an option, but a given, so you consider all the implications of it more fully and it becomes more real, so it's easier to decide whether it is a good option or not.

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I decided to use the window screen as a place to install my smaller version of the mirror. Most windows have them and they are the outermost layer of the sliding windows, so even if you open the window (or even lift the screen) there won't be a problem.
I bought a small mirror (12"x12") and adhesive hooks, and used some wire from the pcomp lab. I attached the hooks to the four corners of the mirror, and used the wire to attach the mirror to the screen. Attaching the top is a little tricky, and the wire has to be pretty long in order for the mirror to be tilted enough to show you the sky and not the side of the building. But overall it isn't too hard to do. I must say I am curious to see what happens when it rains. If the rain is too hard I imagine I can pull the wire that is attached to the top of the mirror in, so that it lies flat against the screen and is somewhat protected.

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This week's reading influenced my thinking about space a lot. It made me think about the role of "life" (I see it more as energy) in a space -- though I have some issues with his photos: are we judging the space or the photo? I was thinking about the feeling a space gives me, and I really feel best when I am feel some connection with nature. Every summer my family goes sailing, and the experience of living on a sailboat, which is so well integrated into the natural environment, is extremely relaxing and energizing at the same time. I feel connected with nature, like I am becoming a part of the space that I am in.

In New York City on the other hand, I feel very disconnected from the surrounding/natural environment. From inside my apartment I can never tell if it's sunny of cloudy out. There is a tall apartment building across from my building that blocks all the sun and the view, and as a result it always feels the same in my apartment, even if it's the most beautiful day out. This really bothers me, because I would like to spend time in my apartment, but I hate to be missing out on nice weather, and I feel like I really need all the contact with nature (and the sun) that I can get.

So for this week's assignment I decided to intervene in my space and try to bring a sample of what's going on outside to my apartment, thereby transforming the tiny disconnected space of my apartment to a space that is more cohesively bound with the outside world. I am lucky to have a fire escape on one of my windows, and (though I never thought this before) even luckier that there is a broken swivel chair on it (left by the previous tenant I suppose). I took a full length mirror and used the chair and a milk carton to place it so that it leans diagonally on the chair, right outside the window, so that it reflects the sky but faces my apartment. As a result, I can finally see what the sky looks like from my window! It is still not a big change, but it helps. The extra light that comes into my apartment this way is also a big plus. I want to find more discrete ways of doing this, also for people who don't have a fire-escape.

I found that someone else has made a very clever version of this using suction cups and metal wires to keep a mirror in place, but that might not be very practical with the sliding windows that are on most New York apartments. I will try to design something, possibly using the ledge that most windows have.

the view

the mirror on the chair

the view in the mirror (finally! sky and clouds!)

the whole window

the reflected light that comes into my apartment

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I definitely see some connecting threads in my projects so far. Two of them have involved words printed on little white blocks, and another two of them have involved jewelry made with conductive thread and LEDs. When I made my connector, I was thinking about interfacing it with my module, adding an electrical connection to the physical connection that my modules are designed to make with each other. I have been wanting to further refine my module to make it more like a piece of clothing or an accessory that people would actually wear (a bracelet, necklace, scarf, maybe even a skirt or a bag?). I tried wearing my modules as a bracelet but they were a little ugly, a little too weird to be worn out.

To me the concepts we have covered in the class are strongly related to each other. Open-source perhaps less so, but maybe that is because I haven't really thought about it much yet.

Conceptually, I think my projects have been about two different main ideas: language, and social connections. They are also about materializing/illustrating something that is invisible (I find that phrase in my notes a lot). Interestingly, language is also a means of social connections. Though the approach I am taking to it is a little more introverted perhaps? I'm not sure. I guess the network was quite strongly social.

I feel that it's helpful to take a step back and look for what it is I am trying to do, by looking at what I have already done. I just don't know for sure how it will help me yet. I am not sure how other people respond to my ideas, and if they like them. I don't know which of the main concepts I should keep pursuing, which would engage other people more (if at all).

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This week I had to ask myself "what is energy?" and make something that relates to that. I thought about energy and my main ideas about it were that it is something that you can't see, something that has the potential to become something else, to induce change. I feel that it's also something very "present" (temporally) and transient. I thought about a friend of mine who once told me she thinks about people in terms of energy, and that certain people to her emit a negative energy, and she doesn't feel very good when she's around them. Their energy really interferes with hers. After having this conversation with her, I started paying more attention to that, and seeing it in my interactions with people. I feel like there is certainly some truth in the notion that people have "energy fields," or whatever you might want to call it, that influence their interactions.

I wanted to make something to express that idea. One of the side effects of this "theory" is that there is a sort of feedback loop that is created when two people 's energy fields interact: two positive fields will both become more positive. Two negative fields will both become more negative. A positive field and a negative, I'm not sure what will happen. I guess it depends on which is stronger.

I made two necklaces, each with an LED and a photoresistor. When people wear them, the photoresistor faces the other person's LED. The LED represents the externalization of the person's energy field. A positive energy field (lit LED) will cause the resistance of the other person's photoresistor to drop, making their LED shine brighter (raising their positive energy).

We also had to keep track of our waste for the week. It was a somewhat unusual week for me in which I cooked, and had enough leftovers to keep eating the same food for a few days so I didn't have that much to throw out. I did throw out the peels and pits of the vegetables/fruit, things that are compostable, but in a tiny Manhattan apartment, that's hard to do (and I would have no use for the compost). Maybe ITP should have a floor compost. I also threw out a yogurt container every day. The last day I actually kept it and washed it, thinking I might use it for a project, but I eventually threw it out as well. I used to buy bigger yogurt containers, and scoop out as much as I was going to eat every time, but then I would forget about it, or not feel like eating yogurt for a while and it would go bad and I would throw out the yogurt with the container. So it's definitely a trade-off. I also waste quite a bit of water, and I hadn't been very conscious of that until now. Not having to pay for it has that side effect I suppose. I'm sure I used and threw away many more plastic cups than I should have (on the floor -- it was a bit harder to keep track of my trash outside of my apartment). I should buy a nalgene bottle. I tend to reuse plastic water bottles a lot, but I have heard that's not very healthy.

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Allistar, Eugene, Yan Yan and I were in a group together for this project. At first we had many different ideas, but nothing really seemed like it could lead to a project. At some point, we decided to brainstorm with different ideas and found that we were interested in the relation between the words we were blurting out, and whether or not if we kept coming up with ideas, we would have a set of very similar words.

That was the beginning of our idea. We wanted to see how words relate to each other, and how associations between words can lead different people to come up with increasingly more related words. We were trying to figure out how to visualize this, using the board as a rough prototyping tool. Somehow we decided that people might influence each other too much, if we just ask the whole class to shout out related words, and that we wouldn't be building a particularly interesting network. We then thought about considering each person's associations separately, and then comparing people's networks to each other. We all agreed that this would be very interesting to look at, and then decided to find a way to visualize it. Initially we thought about giving people transparencies with words printed on them, and ask them to draw lines between words that they associate with each other and then overlay them and look for patterns, but thought that the way we arrange them spatially on the sheet might inadvertently influence them. So we ended up giving people independent words (each of us picked 2 words, so we had a total of 8 more or less randomly chosen words), and asking them to connect them to each other with elastic bands if they found a connection between them. We then stacked the same words on the same pole of the wooden device that we built and let the yellow elastic bands illustrate the connections.

The result was quite interesting. I was a little worried at first that the results would be very uniform, and that the experiment would be a bit of a failure, but I was happily surprised by the outcome. The structure was definitely interesting to look at, and the variation in the connections was pretty satisfying. I noticed that someone interpreted one of the words differently from how we had intended it ("wind", as a verb, as opposed to the noun), which was a perfectly valid thing to do, just one I hadn't anticipated at all. That's just one of the many complexities of language and playing with words and meanings that to me makes it an interesting subject matter to explore.

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Thinking about connectors, my first thought was to make a device that connects people who don't know each other but are in close physical proximity to each other (say, you're walking down the street and want to initiate a conversation with a stranger). I decided that a pretty good way to do that would be to use humor. So my connector is this slightly silly device which you can carry with you and when you want you can unfold it and use it to poke, or point at whoever you want to talk to. They are sure to respond one way or another.

I then thought that this idea might be too foolish, so I decided to work on a different idea of mine. I want to make a connector that can connect two people that already have a connection but are far away from each other. I want it to be a more intimate, subtle interaction that a phone conversation or a text message would be. Because I think that getting a text message that just says "hi! how are you?" can be somewhat annoying, but at times you don't really have much more to say to someone, but you want them to know that you are thinking about them. I want this "message" to have some kind of physical manifestation, such as a gentle vibration. I know this idea isn't totally original; cutecircuit's hug jacket is pretty similar (but it seems like the action of sending a hug would take too many steps. I want my device to have a very straightforward, subtle interaction.), also my idea is very much inspired by Jack Godfrey Wood's allmyfriends idea for a concept phone. I wonder if anyone has made anything like what I am thinking about making.

For the time being I made a simple LED-bracelet made with conductive thread, an LED, and a key-identifier battery holder attached to the conductive thread by a snap button.

on

off

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This week we had to make a module for class. I wanted to make something soft, flexible, and simple. In some ways an extension of my zipwear projet, my module is a unit of a potentially wearable creation. In figuring out what its design should look like, I went back to thinking about cognitive science and the brain and nerves. Nerves have a soma and axons and dendrites. The axons and dendrites are long extensions that connect the nerves to each other and transmit information.
My modules are star-shaped, with long "legs" that are used to link to each other by being threaded through buttonholes that are sewn into the more central part of the module, and then tied into a knot. They can also potentially send information to each other through these longer parts and buttonholes, if both are lined with conductive thread (which would connect them to some sensor or actuator on the central part of the module).

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I was assigned to make an object that expresses a principle of Cognitive Science. I thought of the basic principles of cognitive science (as I remember them at least): modularity, information encapsulation and I am sure others I couldn't remember off hand without my notes for class. I thought these were a bit too abstract to work with. I then thought of inattentional blindness, one of the most fascinating things I learned in my cog sci classes. Basically we often don't see what is in front of our eyes, if for whatever reason we are not paying enough attention. I couldn't really think of an obvious way to illustrate this, so I moved on to the linguistics, the subject I took most of my classes in.

Modularity and Informational Encapsulation reveals itself in Linguistics: Syntax and Semantics are two separate, distinct modules in the brain, located in different areas of the brain and operating somewhat independently of each other. Depending on which area of the brain is damaged, there are stroke patients with different linguistic problems: Wernicke's aphasia patients speak very fluently, but most of what they say is nonsense, while Broca's aphasia patients speak extremely slowly, with a lot of effort, using mostly verbs and nouns, and almost no "linking words" (to, and, if, etc -- words with not much semantic content).

Noam Chomsky coined a famous sentence to illustrate the disconnect between syntax and semantics: "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." I used this sentence as a template for a sentence structure that will always yield a syntactically correct sentence. I made a template out of styrofoam with 5 spaces (adjective, adjective, noun, verb, adverb). I created many different pieces with words that can be used to fill out the template -- each part of speech has a specific size (and the sizes of the spaces in the template correspond to the size of the part of speech that should be used in the particular space). Randomly chosen words form sentences where syntax and semantics are independent of each other (the syntax is correct, but the meaning might not be).

As people in class were presenting their projects, I kept thinking that their project could also satisfy the requirements of my own assignment, because cognitive science is all about studying human behavior and systematically describing the principles that govern it. For example, Alex's project with the lights reveals how we tend to perceive causal relationships (and/or animacy) even when the stimulus is just a blinking light.

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