Greg J. Smith writes: I’m happy to report that the Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics will be released sometime in the next several weeks. I contributed a chapter entitled “Information Visualization and Interface Culture” to this book and in the space of about 10,000 words I outline a few backstories related to visualization. These include: an survey of early radar technology, Vannevar Bush’s Memex, the Head-Up Display (HUD), an excavation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the obligatory salute to Edward Tufte and an examination of John Maeda’s Aesthetics + Computation Group at MIT. The text isn’t entirely about timelines and technology as I use texts by Lev Manovich and Alan Liu to consider the cultural implications of pervasive interface culture. The chapter also includes some exemplary work by Ben Fry, Stamen Design, Burak Arikan, lab/RAD and a team comprised of José Luis de Vicente, Irma Vilà and Bestiario. More here.

The Khronos Projector — by Alvaro Cassinelli — is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie. Continue reading

PaperTweet3d: Augmented Reality T-shirts from squidder on Vimeo. [via]

V2_Events: Test_Lab: Artistic Interfaces :: March 12, 2009; 8:00 pm :: V2_ Ground floor, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam and Streamed Live.

In this edition of Test_Lab, the outcome of artistic experiments in (counter-) intuitive Artistic Interfaces will be elaborated upon by interaction maker and researcher Kristina Andersen. While designers aim to advance interfaces to more intuitive use, through notions such as metaphor, artists often take a radically different approach, by incorporating counter-intuitive responses. This tension will be exemplified through demonstrations of the intuitive software design of Watch That Sound (Jacques van de Veerdonk and V2_Lab) … Continue reading

Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves by Thomas Dreher :: English :: German:

Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves reviews the actual state of the discourse about the fundamentals of this kind of games. Terms like the “immersion“ and “magic circle“ are transferred from theories on computer games in nearly all articles on the subject. The transferences lead to contradictory arguments in the authors’ efforts to explain the relations between the play actions and the playing field. An ‘interface-model’ is proposed as an alternative to these contradictions. The ‘world-interface’ constitutes the bodily and cognitive access of the gamers to the world. The ‘game-interface’ constitute the participants’ ways to comprehend and to use the elements creating the game´s requirements: the rules and the technical equipment. Continue reading

Emerging technologies have made it possible for artists to use a wide range of live, external data sources to give their work relevance and impact. Works that use these live data sources share certain strategies, values, and influences. Not only does this type of art have much artistic potential, but it can help the Web by encouraging the development of machine-understandable, Semantic data formats. What kind of tools would give some coherence to real-time art and facilitate its creation?

Switchboard is an open-source conceptual level interface to a library of data mining tools and web services, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and many more. It is written in Java and packaged for the Processing environment. Continue reading