CCS Collective Voice » Mike Leggett

Mike Leggett (10 unread)

Creativity & Cognition Studios Research Grant Success

Posted: April 1st, 2008, 4:04pm EST by Mike

searchString = document.location.search; itemId = searchString.substring(searchString.indexOf(’?')+8, searchString.length); document.write(’‘);
Dr George Khut, a research associate with the Creativity & Cognition Studios (CCS) in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology Sydney, and CCS PhD candidate Lizzie Muller, have been awarded a grant of $75,000 by the Art Lab program of the Australia Council for the Arts. The Australia-wide research project will bring together artists and academics under the umbrella of the Campbelltown Arts Centre.”Thinking through the Body”, is an investigation of the use and potential of touch and movement in body-focused interactive art. The collaboration will use a variety of body-sensing technologies to explore the possibilities of interactive art that links technical experimentation and artistic expression.

Currently exhibiting at the UTS Gallery, is “The Heart Library Project”, a new artwork based on body-focused interaction by Dr Khut, with CCS researcher Dr Greg Turner, Caitlin Newton-Broad and David Morris-Oliveros. A previous body-focused work “Cardiomorphologies”, was shown in Beta-Space, the CCS “public laboratory” at the Powerhouse Museum, prior to exhibitions at Arnolfini (UK) and PICA (Western Australia).

Work on “Thinking through the Body” will begin later in the year and also involve PhD candidate Lian Loke (University of Technology Sydney, Interaction Design and Work Practice), Dr Garth Paine (University of Western Sydney, Virtual Interactive Performance Research), Jonathan Duckworth (RMIT, Spatial Interaction Architecture Lab), Catherine Truman (Grey Street Jewelers, SA), Somaya Langley (independent researcher) and Maggie Slattery (certified Feldenkrais practitioner and sustainability consultant, SA).
Frantic Friday

Posted: August 21st, 2007, 3:08pm EST by Mike

CCS hosted Steven Dow, who some of us met at CC07 in Washington. He gave an illustrated talk about his PhD work in AR at Georgia Tech in Atlanta (the home of hypertext in the 90s), that builds upon the Facade system. That evening he joined several of us at an invite only occasion at the Dome Bar in Surry Hills, where the Federal Minister for Communication, Information Technology and the Arts (DoCITA) Sen Helen Coonan launched a joint ANAT and OzCo funding initiative, from a television studio somewhere in Canberra - seems to be a popular method for government involvement with its electorate these days - tempus fugit nix.

Meanwhile, back at base, the new issue of the journal Leonardo arrived V40 N4. It includes the first of the Transactions, with an editorial and papers edited by Ernest including: Zafer, Linda, Joanne Jakovich and Kirsty, Brigid and Dave Burraston. There’s also a book review by Mike, and a fascinating section on the Burning Man Festival outside Reno, Nevada, which Damian has attended and Les Green used to attend each year….
Report:Creativity&Cognition 2007

Posted: July 19th, 2007, 12:24pm EST by Mike

‘Seeding Creativity: Tools, Media, and Environments’
ACM/SIGCHI Conference, Washington DC
June 13-15th 2007

The Conference General Chair, Prof Ben Shniederman, introduced the event as demonstrating “…that innovative research methods can be developed to study creative work that spans disciplines from arts to sciences.”
I was one of fourteen in the Demonstration and Poster papers presented in a room adjacent to the conference room and attended by all the delegates during the 90-minute lunch breaks on each of the days. I used a poster entitled Mnemovie Models containing images gathered during recent PhD research, and a laptop on which four of the interactive Models could be demonstrated. The short paper published in the Proceedings had the following Abstract:

A series of Models were built to explore and test the precept of navigating movies using gesture to control both forward and backward movement, and to launch movie files linked using visual elements associatively and semantically related to the knowledge domain represented within a movie collection.

Interest from delegates was tangible and included lengthy discussion with, among others: Noriyuki Fujimura from the Real World based Interaction Group in the Information Technology Research Institute of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tokyo; Otmar Hilliges, from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Institut für Informatik, München; Deborah Fels, Ryerson University, Toronto; Stefan Schutt, Victoria University, Melbourne; Michael Century from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY; Margaret Dolinsky from Indiana University Hope School of Fine Arts; Frieder Nake from the University of Bremen; and Jack Ox from University of new Mexico.
The single track enabled attendance at all the sessions and the keynotes. The keynote by Mitchel Resnick from MIT Media Lab on modes of creative thinking was of particular interest and the question about programmable media and the lack of ‘a literature’ of accessible programs to enable novices to improve and develop programming skills. Other memorable papers pertinent to the collaborative aspects of my research included: Ina Wagner from the Institute of Design at the Vienna University of Technology describing their work on the roles of materiality for collective creativity and the ideas on ‘spatiality as a thinking tool’, which in several ways parallel my own research linking (movie) objects as stimuli for memory; and Michael Century from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developing Adorno’s concept of the ‘exact imagination’ as a means of configuring collaborative project teams in the field of animation.
Evaluation paradigms and techniques featured consistently in the range of papers, which was of particular interest to me being in the process of completing some user testing and analysis. Two exhibitions linked to the conference gave depth to these proceedings: Speculative Data and Creative Imaginary – shared visions between art and technology’, was accommodated in the National Academy of Sciences, clearly not accustomed to presenting artworks, using a small space and some corridors of this large building. In the Corcoran Gallery nearby a large retrospective survey of works of Modernism demonstrated many more instances of engaging outcomes of the collaborative efforts of artists and technologists in the earlier years of the 20th Century.
The overall event in Washington highlighted technology, science and art in that order. We saw and heard that ‘…computational models provide us with techniques that enable us to capture certain keys aspects of the creative process’, without the full affect of that process being tangible. I concluded that defining methodologies and developing techniques is at the risk of loosing the spark, generated either by the artist or the audience, that the irrational and the gestural can add to the full effect of an art work. But perhaps as the Conference Chair observed, we are still at the stage of defining the research methods that need to be applied to study the broader aspects of ‘creative work’.
Report:Creativity & Cognition 2007

Posted: July 19th, 2007, 12:24pm EST by Mike

‘Seeding Creativity: Tools, Media, and Environments’
ACM/SIGCHI Conference, Washington DC
June 13-15th 2007

The Conference General Chair, Prof Ben Shniederman, introduced the event as demonstrating “…that innovative research methods can be developed to study creative work that spans disciplines from arts to sciences.”
I was one of fourteen in the Demonstration and Poster papers presented in a room adjacent to the conference room and attended by all the delegates during the 90-minute lunch breaks on each of the days. I used a poster entitled Mnemovie Models containing images gathered during recent PhD research, and a laptop on which four of the interactive Models could be demonstrated. The short paper published in the Proceedings had the following Abstract:

A series of Models were built to explore and test the precept of navigating movies using gesture to control both forward and backward movement, and to launch movie files linked using visual elements associatively and semantically related to the knowledge domain represented within a movie collection.

Interest from delegates was tangible and included lengthy discussion with, among others: Noriyuki Fujimura from the Real World based Interaction Group in the Information Technology Research Institute of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tokyo; Otmar Hilliges, from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Institut für Informatik, München; Deborah Fels, Ryerson University, Toronto; Stefan Schutt, Victoria University, Melbourne; Michael Century from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY; Margaret Dolinsky from Indiana University Hope School of Fine Arts; Frieder Nake from the University of Bremen; and Jack Ox from University of new Mexico.
The single track enabled attendance at all the sessions and the keynotes. The keynote by Mitchel Resnick from MIT Media Lab on modes of creative thinking was of particular interest and the question about programmable media and the lack of ‘a literature’ of accessible programs to enable novices to improve and develop programming skills. Other memorable papers pertinent to the collaborative aspects of my research included: Ina Wagner from the Institute of Design at the Vienna University of Technology describing their work on the roles of materiality for collective creativity and the ideas on ‘spatiality as a thinking tool’, which in several ways parallel my own research linking (movie) objects as stimuli for memory; and Michael Century from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developing Adorno’s concept of the ‘exact imagination’ as a means of configuring collaborative project teams in the field of animation.
Evaluation paradigms and techniques featured consistently in the range of papers, which was of particular interest to me being in the process of completing some user testing and analysis. Two exhibitions linked to the conference gave depth to these proceedings: Speculative Data and Creative Imaginary – shared visions between art and technology’, was accommodated in the National Academy of Sciences, clearly not accustomed to presenting artworks, using a small space and some corridors of this large building. In the Corcoran Gallery nearby a large retrospective survey of works of Modernism demonstrated many more instances of engaging outcomes of the collaborative efforts of artists and technologists in the earlier years of the 20th Century.
The overall event in Washington highlighted technology, science and art in that order. We saw and heard that ‘…computational models provide us with techniques that enable us to capture certain keys aspects of the creative process’, without the full affect of that process being tangible. I concluded that defining methodologies and developing techniques is at the risk of loosing the spark, generated either by the artist or the audience, that the irrational and the gestural can add to the full effect of an art work. But perhaps as the Conference Chair observed, we are still at the stage of defining the research methods that need to be applied to study the broader aspects of ‘creative work’.
Video Art at ACMI

Posted: March 28th, 2007, 12:13am EST by Mike

The survey of the Centre Pompidou’s collection reached Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image at the end of March, following a run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. On Sunday 25th at the invitation of curator Mike Stubbs, I contributed to an afternoon of exposition and discussion related to video art, presenting a series of slides of publications from the early 1970s. As a film-maker and artist working with film at the time, video was a very atractive technology for working in time-based media: it provided immediate evidence of the image and sound the camera was capturing and the media for capturing the data, videotape, was re-usable. This was in complete contrast to the expence associated with exposing, processing and duplicating film, and hoping that the exposure had been set correctly for a good result…..

The slide images showed the video equipment available to artists - the Portapak , the television monitor, the close-circuit camera - and the range of responses to the arrival of the ‘new media’ as evidenced in pages from the catalogue of The Video Show (London 1975) and Video Art, published in the USA by Radical Software in 1976. My experiments with the new technology, some of which were included in the Show, were in contrast to my work with film which responded to the material and structural aspects of film. In a poster I published in 1973, the several reports described an approach to video as system, determined largely by the context of its reception.

A recuring realisation throughout the afternoon was that the state of archiving of video art by Australian artists in the 70s and 80s was patchy and uncordinated. In Britain, the REWIND project at the University of Dundee, funded by the Humanities Research Fund, is a ten-year long project to archive work by artists from that period. Meanwhile, the Pompidou video collection will have to suffice, though no Australian or British artists are included, the large American and European representation exhibits a worthy clutch of ideas.

http://www.acmi.net.au/pompidou.jsp
2006 Gwangju Biennale, Korea - 5

Posted: March 23rd, 2007, 6:26pm EST by Mike

Dear Mike Leggett and Alastair Weakley,

The Gwangju Biennale has now closed and the computer equipment which constitutes the work has been returned to my home here in Canada. The weather data provided by the sensing device on the roof of the University of Sydney played a major roll in the editing of picture and sound and provided the global context for the Installation.

The opening weekend of the exhibition was attended by an estimated 10,000 people, numerous Asian television and radio networks and the American ambassador to South Korea. The Ambassador’s “surprise” visit was accompanied by a massive military presence and a series of spontaneous anti - American demonstrations. Once the dust had settled however, the more serious business of the Biennale commenced with a series of press conferences and symposiums and, for the artists, an endless ordeal of press interviews. Fortunately the exhibition was also attended by curators from all over the world and particularly from Asia and the burgeoning Asian Biennales such as Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.

Tree Studies was very well received and I am extremely pleased with the results. The weather data supplied by the sensor on the roof of the University of Sydney played a major roll in shaping the installation. The interactive software worked perfectly and on the weekend of the opening a wind storm in Sydney, had a very dramatic effect on the work. We had not seen it working with 30+ knots wind speed and it was a strange and very strong physical experience to be in the room with it! Indeed the planetary wind seemed to breath vitality into the space and the tree shook itself to life and danced to the tune of it! A few days later a blustery south westerly in London took over from Sydney and as I left Gwangju to return to Canada an uneasy equilibrium between the weather on all four continents, Asia, North America Australia and Europe, was giving rise to some very dynamic cross cutting and some unanticipated combinations of sound and image.

The list of participating academic institutions include the following: Slade School of Fine Art, UCL London, UK. University of Technology – Creativity and Cognition Studios, Sydney, Australia. University of British Colombia – ICICS (Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems) Vancouver, Canada. And The School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

Please find enclosed the following materials for your records:

One DVD documentation “Tree Studies” at the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea 2006
One catalogue which accompanied the exhibition.
One catalogue listing the works exhibited plus sponsors and credits.
One Project description written by myself.

Further information is available on my web site: http//www.sfu.ca/~welsby

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and the University of Technology Sydney for taking part of this international research project and for your contribution to the success of Tree Studies.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Welsby.
Professor of Fine Arts.

CC Dr Mario Pinto, Vice President Research
Dr John Waterhouse, Vice President Academic
Owen Underhill, Chair, School for the Contemporary Arts

Simon Fraser University
School for the Contemporary Arts
8888 University Drive, Burnaby
Vancouver BC
Canada V5A 1S6
ENGAGE…… and 2006 Gwangju Biennale, Korea - 4

Posted: December 4th, 2006, 2:39pm EST by Mike

Congratulations to everyone involved in organising and making a great success the CCS hosted ENGAGE Symposium. There will be many follow-throughs from this event, the first of which may well be a link up with one of Garth Paine’s many projects: MeteroSonics. From the website can be downloaded the application for setting up some tunable sound instruments. These respond to data from a weatherstation running in Garth’s Blue Mountain backyard. The weatherstation CCS installed on the roof of Building 10 for Chris Welsby’s installation in Korea will shortly become another data provider to enrichen the audio ambience of your desktop. Indeed Chris’s various internationally scattered weatherstations may well join the mix. Try out the sound mix yourself - my first setup was reminiscent of the song of the European skylark full of the joys of summer. Fitting really, as it’s summer here and winter in Europe!

The image is a recent one of the Gwangju installation, showing all three screens with the console in the foreground.
ENGAGE.. and 2006 Gwangju Biennale, Korea - 4

Posted: December 4th, 2006, 2:39pm EST by Mike

Congratulations to everyone involved in organising and making a great success the CCS hosted ENGAGE Symposium. There will be many follow-throughs from this event, the first of which may well be a link up with one of Garth Paine’s many projects: MeteroSonics. From the website can be downloaded the application for setting up some tunable sound instruments. These respond to data from a weatherstation running in Garth’s Blue Mountain backyard. The weatherstation CCS installed on the roof of Building 10 for Chris Welsby’s installation in Korea will shortly become another data provider to enrichen the audio ambience of your desktop. Indeed Chris’s various internationally scattered weatherstations may well join the mix. Try out the sound mix yourself - my first setup was reminiscent of the song of the European skylark full of the joys of summer. Fitting really, as it’s summer here and winter in Europe!

The image is a recent one of the Gwangju installation, showing all three screens with the console in the foreground.
Telling Stories: cinema, history and experience

Posted: November 21st, 2006, 11:13am EST by Mike

I’ve just returned from the 13th biennial conference in Melbourne of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (F&HAANZ) where I gave a presentation entitled: Relational Cinema and Hypermedia.

A notable trend of relevance to CCS researchers comes from the history war running for a decade now in film studies circles between hermeneutics and heuristics. There is at last a broadening of the agendas away from the interpretative auteurism of the Director as Hero and the genre studies of Studios and Hollywood towards spectatorship and the role of Audience and exhibition. Several of the keynotes referred to large funded projects looking at patterns of cinema attendance in various places around the world where the data has survived. They proposed that data sets revealing social and commercial practice will be useful for articulating audience responses and expectations and could be used for better understanding film and television production trends and outcomes.

Unusually for the event I did not read out a paper verbatim but based a talk to the room around a powerpoint slide-show. The other presentations were read (sometimes with slides and video extracts), and as is often the case, suffered from the difficulty of combining the complexity of argument with the vernacular. Unless that is, it is now accepted that each discipline has defined its own lingua franca around which communication is attempted. Not having worked in the area of film and media studies for some years, this made following many of the speakers difficult. Keynote speakers were notable as being able to overcome this problem. One other speaker spoke rather than read, and actually apologised for giving a show-and-tell!

This approach is accepted in the humanities and may be to do with papers being largely accepted on abstracts, so that reading the whole paper word for word becomes the peer-review process….. except of course that doesn’t wash with the bean counters these days, so am left wondering, how are the humanities going to manage?
2006 Gwangju Biennale, Korea - 3

Posted: September 15th, 2006, 10:07am EST by Mike

More first-hand accounts from Chris Welsby about the joys and tortures of participating in an international Biennale, and the part the data from the CCS weatherstation had to play:

“Aussie weather really stole the show! It was quite spectacular on the opening day in particular. It felt like the whole room was going to disintegrate and blow away! We had never seen how it performed with those wind strengths. The turbulence was terrific and turned the whole room into a high speed montage. It really showed the work performing at it’s best. Very dynamic and totally fascinating to emerge ones self and watch everything happening. The feed back was very positive, both from the curators and from the other artists. … The public and press showed up in huge numbers, there were anywhere from ten to forty or so people at any one time in my space nearly all weekend, lord knows what they thought of it, they were so overwhelmingly enthusiastic it was very hard to get a sense.

I am very pleased to report that, thanks to Mark [Vancouver-based programmer], the software worked like a dream. It does everything it should and more, and it never falters! Bing Huey [Australian-based curator selecting for the Biennale] seemed very pleased. I also met Nick [Tsoutas, Artistic Director, Powerhouse, Casula; ex Artspace director] who was very friendly and loved the work though he got the wrong end of the stick by thinking that it was he who was affecting the system! It was good to see him though. Your University credits were on the wall tag, they were also in the working catalogue and will be entered in full in the final full colour catalogue due out by mid month. I have taken some DV footage which I will edit and send on DVD.

Installing the work was a really hard four day slog. It was a very ambitious program with 500 artists and the infrastructure left much to be desired. …[details supplied for those who need to know]… But in the end it was a very strong show. … Thanks for the wonderful weather!!”