#Blog 13 Final Project–PREPARATORY RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Interactive projects
1. An interactive art installation that transforms your expressions into scents
The “Synesthesia Device” is an AI that can perceive human expressions and emit the corresponding unique scent accordingly. Through the expression recognition algorithm, it can analyze the audience’s facial expressions and output the values of different emotions. And based on these emotional values, it drives the device to extract different proportions of scent liquid to be atomized and mixed, transforming the audience’s expressions into unique scents.
The success I think is it creates unique experiences for not only different people, but also for every different expression one person make each time. This can strongly “sustain” and “relate” the audience by tempting them to make different expressions and are always curious about thee result. And the output is rather unique. I believe many of us would consider perfume as a very personal thing, and in this project, the device is kind of offering people a chance to have a glimpse of what their “the perfume” might be. The takeaway for my future project is that a sense of personal and privacy may be a direction to create experience and when thinking of the output, I might as well think more creatively from the perspective of five senses.
2. 40 Hertz——Lucid dreaming, knowing that you are dreaming a dream when the EEG of the frontal part will show electrical activity at about 40 hertz
This project is based on the classic Peter Pan story in which Peter Pan leaves the Never Land and chases his own shadow. This is an experience that allows visitors to fall into the dream world where one’s shadow is not controlled. When participants stand in front of the wall, two shadow’s will be projected–the person’s original shadow and another animated and twisted shadow that cannot be completely controlled by the participants.
I think the successful aspects are the atmosphere it creates—something out of the common knowledge, fairy-tale, weird, and naïve, and it engage all parts of the human body (see video). My takeaway is that something “relating” doesn’t have to be something “meaningful” to the reality, it can also be something that simply leave people with a lingering memory.
3. Old Theme, New Design: Disruptive Devices vs. Arctic Melting
3.1 Melting Arctic
(Not satisfying, listed as a comparison with Disruptive Devices)
“Melting Arctic” simulates ice, snow, aurora borealis, wind and water, which are symbolic of the Arctic, through sound and light. Through the interaction between the audience and the installation, the artist expresses his thoughts on the relationship between man and nature.
When it is turned on, the “Aurora Borealis” appears and the light cube takes on an icy white effect, accompanied by the sound of a cold wind. When the audience appears, the sound of water drops slowly dripping down appears and the light cube shows a slow dynamic change from cold white to light blue, simulating the state of an Arctic glacier starting to melt. As the viewer approaches the installation, the sound of dripping accelerates and the speed of the light cube changes even faster, showing a dynamic change from white, light blue to dark blue.
The work allows the viewer to interact with virtual wildlife, allowing the viewer to consider the relationship between humans and ecology through a surreal perspective. It uses rudder-like handle to enable interaction. When people turn the rudder, hands that represent human intervention will appear and move in the box that contains a miniature scene of nature to remind people of people’s negative impact on wild animals.
Although different people’s output is similar, the delicacy of the device can add to the fun. And it definitely will make people consider more about the environmental problem in the long wrong. The takeaway is I think solid device can facilitate better interaction than simply digital device like LED screens or other light and sound effects, like the project Melting Arctic. Something 3D and touchable is really important to make people feel engaged. And even if some themes may be constantly talked about and people may feel tired of reflecting again and again on them, we still can and need to use novel ways to emphasize on them until the problem is resolved.
Contributors of a successful interactive experience
According to my previous research (See more in Blog 1), I have defined interaction as cyclic conversation in general, which involves two or more actors, or purposeful creature (Crawford, p.3).
Those actors collaborate to carry forward the process back and forth in which they take turns to listen, think, and speak, or put it in more general terms—input, process, and output—which Crawford considered to be “gauchely techie”. In addition to the 3 things that I emphasized previously — “simply react doesn’t count”, “individuality and uniqueness”, and “variability of interactivity”, with my learning throughout the semester, I have come up with the following 2 more elements that contributes to a successful interactive experience.
1. Sustaining and Relating
As mentioned in Ernest Edmonds’s Art, Interaction, and engagement, “‘sustaining’ is the process of retaining that attention for a period of time, and ‘relating’ is developing a long-term interest, which occurs when the audience wants to experience the work again and again, perhaps over many years.” The idea is to keep the audience away from boredom and hopefully can leave them wondering or yearn the experience artists provide, “sometimes extending to hours or days”. When we do the midterm project, we used two levels of games to give the audience new stimuli gradually and make them curious about what will happen next. Also, we tried to send the message of job sexual inequality in a less obvious way, the theme is gradually revealed through the 2nd level of the game. Another example is the project 40 Hertz as mentioned above.
2. Input and Output Formats
In the first recitation, we learned about the importance of choosing the right input and output. In other words, how increase the level of creativity and enjoyment of ‘happenings’, in which direct and physical audience participation became, at times, an integral part of the artwork. As I mentioned in the project Disruptive Devices, from my perspective, it’s always good to make people moving physically instead of just seeing or hearing stuff with a relatively still status similar to that we are under when facing computers or smartphones. So, from my perspective, creating experiences besides vision and hearing can be a punchline of a project.
April 16, 2022, Jinqiao, Younian Liu