Exploring the Referral and Usage of Science Fiction in HCI Literature

Research on science fiction (sci-fi) in scientific publications has indicated the usage of sci-fi stories, movies or shows to inspire novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Yet no studies have analysed sci-fi in a top-ranked computer science conference at present. For that reason, we examine the CHI main track for the presence and nature of sci-fi referrals in relationship to HCI research. We search for six sci-fi terms in a dataset of 5812 CHI main proceedings and code the context of 175 sci-fi referrals in 83 papers indexed in the CHI main track. In our results, we categorize these papers into five contemporary HCI research themes wherein sci-fi and HCI interconnect: 1) Theoretical Design Research; 2) New Interactions; 3) Human-Body Modification or Extension; 4) Human-Robot Interaction and Artificial Intelligence; and 5) Visions of Computing and HCI. In conclusion, we discuss results and implications located in the promising arena of sci-fi and HCI research.Comment: v1: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, HCI International 2018 accepted submission v2: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, added link/doi for Springer proceedin

Merleau-Ponty and neuroaesthetics: Two approaches to performance and technology

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Creativity, 23(3-4), 225 - 238, 2012. Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14626268.2012.709941.Assisted by the rapid growth of digital technology, which has enhanced its ambitions, performance is an increasingly popular area of artistic practice. This article seeks to contextualise this within two methodologically divergent yet complimentary intellectual tendencies. The first is the work of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who recognised that our experience of the world has an inescapably ‘embodied’ quality, not reducible to mental accounts, which can be vicariously extended through specific instrumentation. The second is the developing field of neuroaesthetics; that is, neurological research directed towards the analysis, in brain-functional terms, of our experiences of objects and events which are culturally deemed to be of artistic significance. I will argue that both these contexts offer promising approaches to interpreting developments in contemporary performance, which has achieved critical recognition without much antecedent theoretical support

A Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems: Computational Creativity Evaluation Based on What it is to be Creative

Computational creativity is a flourishing research area, with a variety of creative systems being produced and developed. Creativity evaluation has not kept pace with system development with an evident lack of systematic evaluation of the creativity of these systems in the literature. This is partially due to difficulties in defining what it means for a computer to be creative; indeed, there is no consensus on this for human creativity, let alone its computational equivalent. This paper proposes a Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS). SPECS is a three-step process: stating what it means for a particular computational system to be creative, deriving and performing tests based on these statements. To assist this process, the paper offers a collection of key components of creativity, identified empirically from discussions of human and computational creativity. Using this approach, the SPECS methodology is demonstrated through a comparative case study evaluating computational creativity systems that improvise music

WHERE DO YOU BREATHE?

The project wheredoyoubreathe.net consists of three elements: a photographic essay, an urban intervention, and a website. The photographic essay forms an investigation of the city through the act of walking. As opposed to the image of the city as a dense world and a conglomerate of vibrant urban spaces full of things, the photographic essay tries to portray it as a tranquilised terrain open to contemplation, a post-industrial and uprooted, yet surprisingly bucolic landscape where one can roam and linger. By walking the landscape, open yet personal spaces get revealed alongside the city’s designated living, working or sociable spaces. They function as possible chill-out spaces for the city walker, and could be called ‘breathing spaces’. The photographic essay is as much a search for this specific urban space as it is an evocation of London as a fluid landscape of possibility

Walking as Do-It-Yourself Urbansim

This article develops a series of theoretical notions arising in the context of an urban art project that took place in London in the summer of 2004 under the title “Where do you breathe?”1 As a participatory urban intervention, the project challenged the notion of authorship in public space by casting the act of walking as a transformation of urban space, and examined the potentials for a practice of photography based on interaction rather than passive representation