hi all,
Thanks everyone sofar for an interesting debate. It is clear that the mind/body and human/machine debates are relevant to the artworks and interfaces which use bodily input and computer controlled output. It appears that most of us don’t adhere to the dualist approach, and are trying to create more interesting systems of combinations of humans and machines, and finding some answers to the question of how we differ from machines could help with this approach. However, rather than get stuck in questioning the terminology I would now like to steer the discussion towards the slightly more practical findings and experiences with using these technologies in creating and curating artworks and experiences.
What seems to come to the fore in several contributions, is that some form of subversion has to take place in order to escape perhaps the roots of the technologies which are built on clear notions of control (as one would expect from, a tool).
Perhaps people can comment on the approaches they take to avoid such linear trajectories. Emerging systems are to greater or lesser degree out of control, before things emerge that were impossible to predict. Perhaps likewise in art novelty can only be achieved when control is given up to a certain extent.
One way to do it is to allow the group of interacting participants to be bigger than one computer and one human at a time. This can get particularly interesting when the humans interact with each other as well as the machine simultaneously. I did this in a recent project, the HEARIMPROV performance, where a large group of musicians interact with each other, a visual score and a visualistion of the sound they collaborative produce (both verbally and with acoustic instruments as extensions of the body) http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/389835 and it worked quite well. Perhaps the hardcore programmers would call this cheating as its’ success is based on the fact that humans are much better at improvising than any computer program I’ve ever come across (sofar).
However, it CAN, I think also be done in the mapping decisions taken within the software of a particular artwork, and I wanted to ask some people to comment on that in relation to their own work and/or works they have curated.
Within this, perhaps the issue of noise in the signal, as brought up by George Khut, could play an interesting role?
Yours,
Adinda van 't Klooster
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