Been spending a bit of time getting ready for an event in Brighton UK this Saturday night.
http://www.phoenixarts.org/events.html
http://www.whitenightnuitblanche.com/brighton/events/like-shadows-a-celebration-of-shyness/
The event is at Phoenix Brighton
http://www.phoenixarts.org/contact.html
Phoenix Brighton
10–14 Waterloo Place
Brighton BN2 9NB
East Sussex
UK
I will be presenting 2 prototypes of new works in the Nowness Series – a series of projects that disrupt habitual communication.
For Present, Perfect, Continuous, this will be the first external testing session. We are discussing whether I will chat from Beijing, early Sunday morning.
For Percolate, a work developed with Nokia Research Center, I will just show documentatio of the first user session which took place at Nokia Research Center in 2010. We just found out our paper we wrote was accepted at http://www.mum2011.org/ MUM 2011, Dec 7-9, 2011, Beijing, China
“The International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) is a distinguished forum for presenting the latest research results in mobile and ubiquitous multimedia”. Katja, from Tampare University of Technology in Finland will come over to present it.
To be presented at Pheonix:
Nowness Series, Tina Gonsalves
Present Perfect Continuous. Prototype 01 Tina Gonsalves/Matt Iacobini
At WhiteNight, Tina Gonsalves and Matt Iacobini present the first prototype of Present Perfect Continuous.
Liveness involves action in the present, an awareness of now. Speaking in present tense is effective for conveying the immediacy of emotions and sensations. We do not know from the information that is given exactly when the activities started or when they will end.
This chat program will disrupt habitual conversation strategies, only allowing users to speak in progressive present tense. Anything written in past tense or future tense gets converted to present tense. The prototype program works through Skype receiving the chat messages and making subtlechanges before relaying them to the other person. The other person only receives the changed message without being aware of the original one, while the sender is not aware of the changesthat have been made to the original message. A custom built natural language processing engine, designed by Matt Iacobini, identifies parts of the text and changes them in ways that concentrate the communication in the present, giving it a more immediate and continuous feel. The sentences in the past and future tenses get changed into the present and the ones in the present tense get changed to the continuous form, this process is designed to deviate the flow towards a more intimate communication that situates the peoplein the moment together.
Nowness Series, Tina GonsalvesPercolate, Prototype 01, Tina Gonsalves/Nokia Research Center/Tampere University of Technology (Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila , Katja Suhonen, , Martin Schrader, Toni Järvenpää)
At white night festival, Gonsalves shows the documentation of the first user session of Percolate, which took place at Nokia research center in 2010. Percolate uses eye display technology developed by Nokia Research Center. As a phone call begins, a captured image of the conversants’ eyes is transmitted to each conversant via the eye display technology. The conversants look probingly into each others eyes as they converse. After analysing the results of the user study, the overall experience of using the system was reported by the participants as personal, intimate and feeling like being close to the other person. The most used terms to describe the system were interesting, different, intimate, new and surprising. Users described the experience as “a strange sense of intimacy”, “pleasantly strange” and “tranquil”. These terms resonate well with the original artistic motivations of the system: Taking the people out of their ordinary conversation situations and habitual responses, and to create intimate communication. The eye did not reveal too much of the communication partner’s emotional state – a broader view of facial gestures would be needed to interpret those emotional cues. Still, the eye seemed to function as a means to prevent distractions from the focus of the discussions, and thus helped users to stay in the moment. “You couldn’t get distracted visually to anything. It kind of helped you to focus on the matter at hand. … It is not as if you could start reading a newspaper, which I sometimes do when I’m using Skype. I’m beginning to wander off to other things.” another reports “It felt a bit like being closer to each other than in normal telephone conversation.” and a “A strange sense of intimacy.”
