Interactive Art and Culture
Monday, 8th November 2004 Christa Sommerer, Associate Professor, IAMAS Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, Gifu, Japan. Professor, University of Art and Design, Linz, Austria Download video (wmv) In the past we have developed several interactive computer art systems that use artificial life principles in combination with user-machine interaction. The underlying aim of these systems is to study the application of Artificial Life principles to the creation of self-sustaining and evolving interactive works. The interaction of the audience with these works has a significant impact on their evolution; by linking the interaction parameters of the users’ interactions to the evolutionary software structure of the system, we aim to create artworks that can interpret and visualize the users' interaction with these works and furthermore enable adaptive evolution within these works. To provide the users of our interactive systems with non-linear and multi-layered interaction feedback we often apply genetic programming to produce software structures that can recombine, develop and evolve. These structures will be described in this talk in more detail. To capture the users various interaction parameters and to link them to the evolutionary image processes of these works we often produce custom designed interfaces. These have so far included living plants (Interactive Plant Growing, 1992/93), a drawing input device (A-Volve, 1994), light (Phototropy, 1995), a gesture recognition system (Trans Plant, 1997), a text input device (Life Spacies II, 1999) as well as multi-modal interfaces that combine various input modalities (Riding the Net, 2001). In this lecture we will present our various interactive systems by describing the custom-designed interfaces which enable natural and intuitive interaction experiences and explain the link between software as well as hardware structures in connection to the conceptual as well as contextual background of these works. |