Images of the Church and the Christians' Imagination in Java

We have reams of ideas about the church. We like to talk aboutthem, amazed by their resourcefullness. But these are ideas. When itis the ideas that are touched upon, the actors on the stage are not theordinary people. They are intellectuals; indeed, theologians. It is achurch-talk. However, when it comes down to the faithful, thechurch becomes churches. The ideas become images. The talkbecomes imagining. For Christians in Java, togetherness in thecircles of friends and families has always been an everydayness.And in this togetherness, what is spoken about is not the idea, butfirst of all the 'image' of a familial community. These people have alot of time to share how they can live their lives at each moment.They are not very much 'systematic' in their way of sharingexperiences, and they do not want to complicate things, for theyalready think that things have always been complicated enough inlife. Their simple hopes and concerns are always oriented towardsthe harmony of their community life. They imagine, interpret andevaluate many things, so as to find the relatedness of realities intheir togetherness. In this sense, this paper wants to capture thosemarvelous moments driven by the believers' imagination on the epistemological level of the believers' experience

The theatre and its screen double

This essay offers a close exploration of the live filming and sound production in the schaubühne berlin staging of strindberg's Fräulein Julie (directed by Katie Mitchell, shown on tour at the barbican, london, in 2012). It provides a series of theoretical and critical angles from which to discuss contemporary intermedia performance and audiovisual scenography. After a brief evocation of Artaud's writings in "theatre and cruelty" and on raw cinema, the essay builds on a historical understanding of Western theatre's evolving and hardly settled relationship to cinematography and moving-image technologies, as well as the "choreographic unconscious," as examined in contemporary dance and technology, before delving into an analysis of Mitchell's dramaturgy of real-time film construction and her use of the "camera-actor." A particular emphasis is placed on the question whether the live mediatization of realist drama, under Mitchell's direction, deliberately weakens the theatricality of the physical body and spoken language while proffering an extenuated, if uncritical/unpolitical modulation of digital prosthetics in a superbly crafted, seamless intermedial performance

Talking to Boxes, Hugging Robots

Relationships between humans and technology are at the core of my artistic research. Human-machine communication is defined by the technological level of the machines, but even more so by the way they are perceived by humans. Concepts of artificial life and artificial intelligence gradually have become part of the everyday life of growing numbers of people, and while there is an ongoing effort to design an increasingly anthropocentric technology, our minds also adapt to the new technological reality. Through immersive installations and sculptural objects my practice explores this reality. My artwork is designed to communicate with and stimulate the viewers, allowing them to examine their own perception of phenomena such as behavioral algorithms, artificial life and artificial intelligence. Not only does it provide an opportunity of self-analysis, it also facilitates a change in the way people conceptualize communication with machines

Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think

This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think

Anatomy of a failure: how we knew when our design went wrong, and what we learned from it

In this paper, we describe the failure of a novel sensor-based system intended to evoke user interpretation and appropriation in domestic settings. We contrast participants' interactions in this case study with those observed during more successful deployments to identify 'symptoms of failure' under four themes: engagement, reference, accommodation, and surprise and insight. These themes provide a set of sensitivities or orientations that may complement traditional task-based approaches to evaluation as well as the more open-ended ones we describe here. Our system showed symptoms of failure under each of these themes. We examine the reasons for this at three levels: problems particular to the specific design hypothesis; problems relevant for input-output mapping more generally; and problems in the design process we used. We conclude by noting that, although interpretive systems such as the one we describe here may succeed in a myriad of different ways, it is reassuring to know that they can also fail, and fail incontrovertibly, yet instructively

Sketches in Voice User Interface: Relational Conversations with Virtual Personal Assistants in Domestic Spaces

Sketches in Voice User Interface explores the conversational and evocative aspects of peoples’ interactions with no-screen embodied voice user interfaces (VUIs) in domestic spaces. The project uses an annotated research through design methodology to create a series of Sketches in Voice User Interface for relational conversations with users. The research involves an autoethnographic study of existing voice-based virtual personal assistants (VPAs). Informed by these precedents Sketches in VUI are designed through iterative prototyping to explore ways in which VUIs can go beyond the existing virtual personal assistant in our everyday conversations. Unlike the conventional voice-based VPAs (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) operating on the commands of the user, the Sketches in VUI drive conversations and take an agentive role in human-computer conversations. Using the design research approach, this project serves as a bridge between two key contextual voices in the domain of conversational technologies. On one hand, is the tech industry’s case for usability that VUI is ‘the most natural interface.’ On the other hand, is the social sciences case critically calling VUI ‘an artificial nature’ and questioning if conversations with a machine are conversations at all. The project concludes with an ‘experience study’ to enquire into the experience of participants as they converse with the designed Sketches. The study observes how participants react to the Sketches (behavioural response) and how they feel (emotional response), comparing them to their experience of existing voice-based VPAs, captured via videography and qualitative interviews. The study findings along with the designed Sketches form an annotated portfolio of generated knowledge about relational conversations with embodied voice user interfaces in our intimate spaces

Interactive Digital Technologies and the User Experience of Time and Place

This research examines the relationship between the development of a portfolio of interactive digital techniques and compositions, and its impact on user experiences of time and place. It is designed to answer two research questions: • What are some effective methods and techniques for evoking an enhanced awareness of past time and place using interactive digital technologies (IDTs)? • How can users play a role in improving the development and impact of interfaces made with IDTs? The principal creative and thematic element of the portfolio is the concept of the palimpsest, and its artistic potential to reveal visual and aural layers that lie behind the landscapes and soundscapes around us. This research thus contributes to an evolving cadre of creative interest in palimpsests, developing techniques and compositions in the context of testing, collating user experience feedback, and improving the ways in which IDTs enable an artistic exploration and realisation of hidden layers, both aural and visual, of the past of place. An iterative theory-composition-testing methodology is developed and applied to optimise techniques for enabling users to navigate multiple layers of content, as well as in finding methods that evoke an increased emotional connection with the past of place. This iterative realisation cycle comprises four stages – of content origination, pre-processing, mapping and user interaction. The user interaction stage of this cycle forms an integral element of the research methodology, involving the techniques being subjected to formalised user experience testing, both to assist with their further refinement and to assess their value in evoking an increased awareness of time and place. Online usability testing gathered 5,451 responses over three years of iterative cycles of composition development and refinement, with more detailed usability labs conducted involving eighteen participants. Usability lab response categories span efficiency, accuracy, recall and emotional response. The portfolio includes a variety of interactive techniques developed and improved during its testing and refinement. User experience feedback data plays an essential role in influencing the development and direction of the portfolio, helping refine techniques to evoke an enhanced awareness of the past of place by identifying those that worked most, and least, effectively for users. This includes an analysis of the role of synthetic and authentic content on user perception of various digital techniques and compositions. The contributions of this research include: • the composition portfolio and the associated IDT techniques originated, developed, tested and refined in its research and creation • the research methodology developed and applied, utilising iterative development of aspects of the portfolio informed by user feedback obtained both online and in usability labs • the findings from user experience testing, in particular the extent to which various visual and aural techniques help evoke a heightened sense of the past of place • an exploration of the extent to which the usability testing substantiates that user responses to the compositions have the potential to establish an evocative connection that communicates a sense close to that of Barthes’ punctum (something that pierces the viewer) rather than solely that of the studium • the role of synthetic and authentic content on user perception and appreciation of the techniques and compositions • the emergence of an analytical framework with the potential for wider application to the development, analysis and design of IDT composition

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement