Laboratoire Art&D, SAT, Montreal
On Wednesday Christoph Brunner from the SenseLab invited me to go along with him to the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) to see the Telepresence project that he is involved with there. We met just outside the Art&D lab – no public access – and met with Mark who is working on the technical side of things. He showed us the contraption they have assembled (I’m not sure it has a name) and how it worked. Christoph is presenting a paper on the project in early December and is interested in the philosophical aspects of the device, how it might offer new ways of experiencing and interacting with the world. It’s very much a work-in-progress and although it is driven by practical concerns (for example: how might you be able to chat to someone and see more than just their face, how might you be able to collaborate differently on projects, how might conferences work if they weren’t limited to lecture theatres) but there is room to play with the settings to create novel situations or environments. The machine (see below) is large and can shut once you are inside. There are cameras filming you and videos move around as you move yourself. So, if you were talking to somebody, their video would follow you around and you wouldn’t have to worry about where you looked because there would be cameras able to film you from a variety of angles.
Telepresence project, SAT, Montreal
A day earlier, on Tuesday, there had been a ‘Show and tell’ session in the TML. Adrian Freed had been invited to talk about his work in experimental music. Adrian is part of the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT), which is based on IRCAM, where he used to work 1. We heard about some of the projects Adrian had been involved in and he had many interesting things to say (including about music and space). He is currently playing with e-textiles as the flexibility of fabric offers him more freedom. Naveed and Laura presented some of their work as well (on ambisonics and magnetism respectively) and there was plenty of discussion afterwards. The rest of the week was fairly quiet and I spent most of my time in the lab, either reading (all sorts) or writing (in my diary, or on a series of short essays I hope will feed into my work).
Show and tell, TML
—————————————————————————————————————————–
- It turns out that Adrian figures in Georgina Born’s seminal work ‘The Rationalization of Culture‘, although not under that name! ↩
This post is tagged experimentation, immersive, interactivity, music, SAT, TML
I’ve had a few questions about e-textiles and I confess, I wasn’t clear. I have copied-and-pasted from wikipedia below for some sort of introduction:
—
E-textiles, also known as electronic textiles, are fabrics that enable computing, digital components and electronics to be embedded in them. Part of the development of wearable technology, they are referred to as intelligent clothing or smart clothing that allow for the incorporation of built-in technological elements in everyday textiles and clothes. It does not strictly encompass wearable computing because emphasis is placed on the technology not being visible on the fabric and a computer is not actually embedded into the fabric. While not part of the mainstream form of fashion, its popularity is increasing and more research is being devoted to it.
I like the contraption with no name… a sort of claustrophobia-inducing panopticon. I wonder about Christoph’s wanting to experience and interact differently in the world, in so far as the machine seems to ‘shut out’ a particular world (though i realise this relies on a crude distinction between an external reality and a lived space).
It turns out it does have a name (drumroll…): it’s a panoscope! I think it might appear claustrophobic from the outside but strangely doesn’t feel that way once you’re in it.
I think that Christoph is not looking to shut out the world (singular) but create other worlds where things are not quite what they seem, where we are forced (or simply encouraged?) to react, to think, to live differently. For example, it might be that in the panoscope, gravity could work differently to what we are accustomed to. How might we move if the tendencies of the world are not what we expect? That’s perhaps too simplistic an example but I was trying to get at how the panoscope might offer the chance to experiment and challenge the very notion of ‘lived space’…