Arts and New Technology

Arts and New Technology the special issue described the technology for a sensing floor and touched upon its possible applications This work raises the age-old question of how we reconcile new technology with new media art forms [. How does behavior-sensing technology contribute to a different perspective on art? The questions of how art should be defined and how it should be interpreted are central questions of art history [Gombrich 1995]. As was noted by Crary, the creation of an artwork is not independent of the observer (i.e., the audience), and human culture has developed (or better still, co-evolved) ways of creating and appreciating the arts over many centuries [Crary 1992]. The Umwelt of an artwork defines (to a certain extent) the conditions of its production, preservation, valuation and meaning. New technology enables more physically interactive arts, which is different than the passive audience’s interaction with an exhibited or performed work of art. This development results in a refocusing of the relationship between the artwork and the audience. Through the use of technology, it becomes possible to use cognitive mechanisms of interaction (like mimicry [Castellano et al. 2012], emotional contagion [Samadani et al. 2012], perspective taking [Trafton et al. 2005], and imitation1) more extensively, and the interaction afforded by artworks (or games, for that matter) is not restricted to the kinematics of the physical design. In connection with the sense-making process for artworks in general, attention to making sense of the artistic production—which, in the case of interactive art, includes the ways in which the artwork was intended to interact with members of the public—has been quite important [Foreman-Wernet et al. 2014]. Consequently, interactive technology requires a simultaneous re-evaluation of artistic production and the practice of arts appreciation [Ho¨ok et al. 2003]. ¨ A related question is that of what technology ultimately leads to a shift in art development trends. A clear example of this type of shift occurred when painting technology changed in Europe and artists could move from egg-tempera-based paint to oil-based paint [Mayer 1991]. This move completely revolutionized the practice of painting. By being able to paint on canvas (instead of on plastered surfaces in palaces and churches), the artists could produce artworks for the bourgeoisie, and the entire art market changed. Many old technologies (which are not even seen as technologies today) were new at one point in time. In the context of interactive intelligent systems, can such revolutions still occur? If so, in which directions? We do not seek to answer this question here, but let us consider the sensing floor and the possibilities of interaction that it affords. The cheap production of sensors makes this technology accessible and affordable. The range of possible forms of sensing through this modality is broad: It is certainly possible to sense the presence of the audience, but potentially also soft biometrics such as the weight of the subject, his or her activity level and age (up to a point; it is possible to tell a child from an adult most of the time), and the personal history of interaction with the sensed space. It takes the 1See for instance Daniel Rozin’s interactive mirror series at http://www.smoothware.com/danny/, in which the sculptures react in real time to the viewer’s movements. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, Vol. 5, No. 3, Article 12, Publication date: September 2015. 12:4 A. A. Salah et al. notion of the smart sensing of affective responses of an audience via their spontaneous physiological [Cupchik et al. 2009; Wang et al. 2014] or movement [Martella et al. 2015] behavior beyond existing approaches. Other technologies, like the CAVE, create different possibilities [Cruz-Neira et al. 1993]. The CAVE enables surround-screen projection-based virtual reality, and it creates a vast visualization space, into which dynamically updated content can be placed. We tend to see possibilities and affordances through each new technology, but once the combinations of technology are also considered, the expressive potential of the artist is vastly increased. This is not to say that new media are limitless; each technology brings its own limits. The CAVE is still a virtual environment that requires specialist equipment to be experienced; and by design, it is an exclusive medium, which makes co-experiencing difficult. Part of the general challenge is to overcome these limitations by integrating technologies that complement each other or make up for each other’s limitations. In addition to critical content (discussed in the next section) and aesthetic value, the spectacle aspect is also boosted through technology. It becomes possible, for instance, to turn a large public artifact like the London Eye into an interactive and social spectacle [Morgan and Gunes 2013]. Behavior analysis can not only incorporate awareness of the reactions from the audience into the experience of the spectacle itself [Salah et al. 2013a]; it can also provide means for behavior change in artists’ creative pursuits [Morgan et al. 2015a]. It is by no means a coincidence that many artists explore new ways of expression and interaction, gaining mastery in one or more technology along the way, and collaborative projects (see for instance Numediart2) are initiated to bring artists and engineers together. We discuss some issues related to such exploration next.