Very cool! Lots of interesting work. The science toy work looks really fun.
I'll do everything I can to evolve our projects here.
Best,
Byron
For those of us interested in animate materials, responsive environments, sonic interaction design,
Prof. Karmen Franinovic is a friend and alumna of the pioneering TGarden and txOom responsive playspace environments who’s become a world authority on animate materials and responsive environments. Karmen is probably coming with students to TEI from Zurich.
Shall we plan on having work on animated light, animated materials, puppetry ready to show Karmen by February? It would be marvellous to connect with that network of creative researchers in the EU.
Xin Wei
Begin forwarded message:From: Franinovic Karmen <karmen.franinovic@zhdk.ch>
Subject: Re: Arizona in March
Date: November 23, 2018 at 9:36:06 AM EST
To: Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com>
Here is the test for the one we would showand the one we wouldn’tYes, it would be really great. I have a parallel line of work wich goes more open environments - we did a research project on airand worked with students at Stomboli and this year in Pula, and plan to do a course on underwater environments!So desert is also appealing - have been looking at the work you did with Maja and RonHugs and looking forward to exchange soon!KarmenOn 23 Nov 2018, at 15:11, Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:Hi Karmen,Wow That'd be great to see!You know, it’s been incredibly gratifying and inspiring to see the marvelous trajectories of work that we each have done since the TGarden....Including the state-engine work we’ve finally matured in a fresh generation with the “sc” responsive media environment that now works with all sorts of variable fields of light, sound, video, mist, water, and air. We’d love to work with your poetic materials — maybe when you’re out we can see if we can join forces to make some inspiring events or installations!By the way we’ve re-launched a new search for Expressive Mechatronics and Robotics. I’ll send out the job call asap!Xin Wei
Hi Everyone,
Let's do as we can an extended campfire Tuesday Nov 27 afternoon 1:30 - 3:30 in iStage / Lounge to demonstrate what’s been done this semester.
For example:
Stauffer
• Cafe / Leslie, Connor, Yanjun, Christy (walk to Stauffer Lounge)
• Stauffer Lounge tour / Byron
• ? Lamps / Alexia
iStage
• Cafe / Leslie, Connor, Yanjun, Christy (walk to Stauffer Lounge)
• Lamps / Alexia
• Thermal economies; light games / Garrett, Andrew
• Modalys instruments; physical modeling / Emiddio
• State engine workshop: Brandon (bring your own laptops + sc)
Please add to this what else you’d like to see / show from this Fall.
Since this week we don’t have Synthesis ops — American Thanksgiving! — confirm by email.
Megan, can we document this? Everyone do also take your own pictures for respective project pages…
From steam to fusion to alchemy
Final keynote for the
Leonardo 50th Anniversary Convening
San Francisco Art Institute
4 November 2018
sensor data ≠ emotions!
sensor data ≠ emotions!
sensor data ≠ emotions!
sensor data ≠ emotions!
sensor data ≠ emotions!
Piet Hut
astrophysics, computation, awareness
Institute for Advanced Studies
Princeton
YHouse Research
The main theme of YHouse research is the study of the origins and nature of awareness. Awareness is an umbrella term that includes consciousness, cognition, intelligence, and similar terms that have more specific meaning in particular academic fields, and sometimes rather different meanings in different fields.
Consciousness is clearly correlated with brain states, but is it produced by brains? If so, it's very different from the way an organ like the liver produces a compound like bile. What does it actually mean to use the word production to talk about consciousness? It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking about consciousness as a kind of subtle substance.
Cognition is a term that covers more than consciousness, applying to unconscious processes that lead to knowledge. But it is also less complete in other ways; typically studying consciousness from the outside, from a third-person view, leaving out the perspective of first-person direct experience.
Intelligence is often seen as highly successful logical inference, as in the term artificial intelligence, thereby excluding notions such as emotional intelligence, or street smarts – behaviors that can be associated with intelligence, but in a way that cannot be easily quantified or formalized.
Five Modules
What should a university look like in the 21st Century? Part of the YHouse mission is to explore that question, to find a better way to do research, and to help grow a brand new generation of thinkers. At YHouse, modules are not traditional departments, they are low-walled zones of focus, specifically designed to foster abundant interdisciplinary collaboration, coexisting beneath one physical roof.
Individual modules have a strong disciplinary core of three senior researchers carrying out top-level disciplinary work together but also pioneering explorations in novel interdisciplinary directions across modules. A larger number of early-career researchers and postdocs divide their efforts according to their interests at any given time, either focused within specific modules or linking across few or even many.
In their investigation of awareness, Modules 1, 2, and 3 represent the three main stages of biosphere evolution: from the origins and major transitions of life, to culture, and to technology. These stages date back, roughly speaking, to four billion, forty thousand, and forty years ago, spanning the first living cell, the first cave paintings, and the first practical applications of artificial intelligence.
Modules 4 and 5 reflect on the similarities and differences between the structures studied in the first three modules, in pursuit of the origins and nature of awareness, as well as the nature of the transitions between those modules. Module 4 focuses on philosophy, in the widest sense of the word, while module 5 has more directly practical aims; bringing science, philosophy, and wisdom to bear on the major problems currently facing the world.
Here are two examples of Tech Riders two kinds: the abbreviated TR you send to a potential venue / curator and the full TR you send to venue to do the actual exhibit/ show. PLUS it’s good to add team contact info: name, cell phone number, email
Hi Yanjun, Leslie, Ben, Christy, Cafeists!
(0) Can we set more concretely some social conditions in the two settings of “bar” + table for 4, e.g.
(0.1) How can/ should the space bring people into common vulnerability (Christy can phrase it better)
(0.2) Social settings :Alone in hubbub | Meeting friend(s) | Meeting stranger(s)
To eat | to drink | to talk
(1) Attached is the extended abstract from the “Suturing Space” paper (HCII 2015) from the portals research stream, with some design desiderata, questions, aspirations that would be useful to pursue in Cafe project.
Suturing Space: Extended Abstract, HCI International 2015Typically video-conferencing technologies focus on provide 1-1, person to person links, usually showing the heads and shoulders of the speakers seated facing their cameras. This limits their movement and expects foveal attention. Adding people to the conversation multiplies the complexity and competes for visual real estate and video bandwidth. Most coronal meaning-making activity is excised by this frontal framing of the participants. This method does not scale well as the number of participants rises.In our approach to augmenting collaboration and learning, we take a different tack. Instead of projecting people to remote spaces, we make furniture and objects that effectively exist in two (or more) locations at once. We ask, how can such shared objects provide a common site for ad hoc activity in concurrent conversations among people who are not co-located but co-present via audio?We entirely side-step the problems of representing people, tracking gaze and focusing cameras or microphones etc. by focusing attention on a common table and not people’s faces.
Our Table of Content (TOC) uses tables mated with two way, continuous live-video. Each table has a projector and a camera beaming down onto the surface of the table. Objects placed on one table appear projected on the other. This focuses attention on what is being discussed and on a common tabletop on which props, diagrams and simple gestures can be used with ad hoc freedom. (Should the collaborators wish to see their remote counterparts, they can add a standard technology like Skype.) We provide an omni-directional microphone and good speakers so that people can speak at any time in the flow of conversation without having the overhead of human gaze tracking. Most importanly, bypassing telephones’ noise suppression logic allows people to hear remote ancillary sounds while one is speaking. This conveys everyone’s presence and enables ad hoc concurrent engagement.We emphasize the design metaphor that the TOC is furniture existing in two or more places at once. It is not a “communication channel” that requires dial-up protocols for initiating or terminating a device. Just as a table does not need to be “turned on” before people gather around it, the TOC is engineered to run continuously so that people can gather around it and start using it at any time. We leverage all the existing social and technical protocols people use to get together around, and for sharing a table. Rather than treat collaboration as a telecommunication problem, we build furniture as sites of common activity.The video (Montpellier 2014) shows how this technology works. We implemented our common table in our labs in Montreal and Phoenix to serve several series of seminars. The seminars vary in format between round-the-table verbal discussions and single- speaker presentations.Aside from the engineering problems, some of the questions we address with this platform include:• How should people coordinate and interleave their interventions using tokens, gesture, vocal signals, etc.?• How can we handle time zone differences: three hours between Montreal and Phoenix, 8 or 9 hours between Phoenix and London or Athens?• How do people mix live events with recorded audio, video or documents?• How do people mix the table with “foveal” media such as the talking-heads videos of remote interlocutors?AntecedentsVideo-walls (Johanson 2004, Abel 1990, Fish 1990), and shared displays for collaborative work have a long history going back at least to Xerox PARC’s work in the 1980’s. In particular, tabletop displays engineered with various functions have enjoyed several waves of attention (Müller-Tomfelde 2010, Tuddenham 2009, Pauchet 2007, Bekins 2006, Poupyrev 2001; Microsoft Research Lab, Rekimoto Lab Tokyo). This combines mixed reality (Costanza 2009, Ehnes 2009, Verlinden 2006) and studies of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), ubiquitous computing and place (Greenberg 1989, Harrison 1996, Ekman 2013, Fitzpatrick 2003, Gaver 1992, Gaver et al. 1992). Our emphasis to un-mark the shared surface and de-escalate it as much as possible to a tabletop that is not to be taken as computer technology to support specific genres of activity, but as generic furniture that ties two parts of the world together. We call this technique for conditioning spatial experience, suturing.Implications for interaction designWe rethink the process and methodology of designing for shared spaces. Rather than fixing on tele-projecting people or transporting things and data objects from location to location, we think of a single place that exists in two locations. We call this technique suturing borrowing consciously from topology. There is no need for mated objects be the same size or shape so long as symbolic and social activity coordinate those objects. Just as in topology one can suture two manifolds together by a “gluing map” that identifies dissimilar shapes, designers can identify objects that are quite different.
(2) The effects we can achieve using techniques and skills to which we have access greatly exceed what we demonstrate in a specialized project (like EMA steerable weather or time lenses). For example, it’s easy (straightforward!) for us to project canned video onto a surface.
Le Petit Chef
(3) Especially as one acquires more technical mastery, a healthy ethico-aesthetic aspiration is minimax – maximum experiential impact for minimum computational technology. (This resonates with Grotowskian poor theater’s choice of a minimalist technology of mise-en-scène … a minimalism which in fact constitutes theatre’s magic.)
So, a minimax tactic is to imagine design starting from the “unplugged.” First imagine, how can you achieve your desired experiential effect without electricity? Second, for that which you cannot achieve “unplugged", what can you do given electricity? Third, for that which you still cannot achieve, what can you do given coding? Fourth, for that which you still cannot achieve, what can you do given custom electronics? In other words, use the simplest tools and techniques first, but be ready to use the most sophisticated techniques in our collective as warranted by its impact on the quality of the resulting experience.
Xin Wei
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Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Biosocial Complex SystemsAffiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Associate Editor: AI & Society Journal
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
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Paper Actuator 2017
Morphing Matter Lab, Prof. Lining Yao, CMU
Guanyun Wang*, Tingyu Cheng*, Youngwook Do, Humphrey Yang, Ye Tao, Jianzhe Gu, Byoungkwon An, Lining Yao (* Contributed Equally)
https://www.wired.com/story/prepare-to-be-hypnotized-by-these-delicate-paper-robots/