Interactive Art and Speculative HCI
Speaker
Golan Levin
Director, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and Associate Professor of Electronic Art, Carnegie Mellon University
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Video
Video link
Description
I am interested in the medium of response, and in the conditions that enable people to experience “flow”, or sustained creative feedback with reactive systems. In this regard I have found inspiration in the engaging interactive artworks of Myron Krueger and Toshio Iwai, and in the research of cognitive psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. I am drawn to the revelatory potential of information visualization—whether brought to bear on a single participant, the world of data we inhabit, or the formal aspects of mediated communication itself. Here I have drawn from many teachers in the disciplines of conceptual art and information design. And I am fascinated by how abstraction can connect us to a reality beyond language, and the ways in which our gestures and traces, thus abstracted, can reveal the unique signatures of our personalities. My past projects have explored the gestures of the hand and voice; in my new work, I have turned to the gestures of the face and eyes, with the aim of creating engrossing, uncanny and provocative interactions structured by gaze. This presentation will discuss a wide range of my own works, with a particular attention to how the use of gestural interfaces, visual abstraction, and information visualization can support new modes of interaction, play, and self-discovery. I introduce the term speculative HCI to frame a mode of inquiry in which novel interactions are proposed, implemented and evaluated, not for their applicability to solving problems, but for their inherent potential to pose new ones. I conclude with a brief overview of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a unique meta-laboratory at Carnegie Mellon which supports atypical, interdisciplinary, and inter-institutional projects at the intersection of arts, technology and culture.
Speaker's Bio
Golan Levin’s work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to new technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity. Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied in the Visible Language Workshop and the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Between degrees, he worked for four years as an interaction designer and research scientist at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto. Presently Levin is Director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Speaker's Website
http://www.flong.com
Host
Eric Paulos