Unifying interaction across distributed controls in a smart environment using anthropology-based computing to make human-computer interaction "Calm"

Rather than adapt human behavior to suit a life surrounded by computerized systems, is it possible to adapt the systems to suit humans? Mark Weiser called for this fundamental change to the design and engineering of computer systems nearly twenty years ago. We believe it is possible and offer a series of related theoretical developments and practical experiments designed in an attempt to build a system that can meet his challenge without resorting to black box design principles or Wizard of Oz protocols. This culminated in a trial involving 32 participants, each of whom used two different multimodal interactive techniques, based on our novel interaction paradigm, to intuitively control nine distributed devices in a smart home setting. The theoretical work and practical developments have led to our proposal of seven contributions to the state of the art

Everything and Nothing

Everything and Nothing is an exhibition of auto-biographical narratives embodied by immersive installations of intermedia assemblages. I display compositions of my personal documents and accumulated ephemera allow their audience to inhabit my experience in a way that evokes multi-dimensional sensation. Through nuanced engagement with media, personal accounts, vision, interpretation, and memory. Everything and Nothing is not a self-indulgent tell-all and certainly not an act of bravery for the sake of showmanship. My relentless exposition of information and exhaustion of access to memory is necessary in order to see beyond it. My seen to its furthest extent makes absence observable. A phantom-limb suspicion catalyzed an excavation of selfhood and being, done in the hopes of generating what my observable absence articulates with its abstraction. The work defies social conservatism and appropriateness to give form to unknowable abstraction

From the Internet Text: Gender, Embodiment and Ontology

The Internet Text is an extended analysis of the environment of Internet communication, an extended meditation on the psychology and philosophy of Net exchange. As such, it is concerned primarily with virtual or electronic subjectivity – the simultaneous presence and absence of the user, the sorts of libidinal projections that result, the nature of flamewars, and the ontological or epistemological issues that underlie these processes. Internet Text begins with a brief, almost corrosive, account of the subject – an account based on the concepts of Address, Protocol, and Recognition. This section “reduces” virtual subjectivity to packets of information, Internet sputterings, and an ontology of the self based on Otherness – your recognition of me is responsible for my Net-presence. The reduction then begins to break down through a series of further texts detailing the nature of this presence; a nature which is both sexualized/gendered, and absenting, the result of an imaginary site. Eventually, it has become clear that everything revolves around issues of the virtual subject, who is only virtual on the Net, but who has a very real body elsewhere. So Internet Text has evolved more and more in a meditation on this subject – a subject which will perhaps be one of the dominant modes of being within the next millennium. Finally, it should be noted that there are no conclusions to be drawn in Internet Text, no series of protocol statements or declarations creating any sort of ultimate defining or explanatory position. The entire history of philosophy mitigates against this; instead, I side with the Schlegels, with Nietzsche, Bataille, Jabes, and others, for whom the fragment is crucial to an understanding of contemporary life... It is dedicated to Michael Current and Clara Hielo

The Populist Imaginary in David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and The Chosen

Benedict Anderson has argued that the modern nation-state, theorised as an "imagined community," is founded on the rise of a secular media, a media that not only provides a universal form of communication but also provides the stories that provide the basis of everyday ritual and shared community

Process as Outcome: Methods of Engagement with the Nonhuman Object/thing/material

Through creative practice and exegetical writing, this research communicates two main propositions: 1) objects, things, and materials of the material world should be seen as “nonhuman”; and 2) doing so impacts the methods that come to be used in thinking, making, and showing art