Thank you both for your input.

Couple of thoughts

I think that Ryan’s third point is crucial. You look at a forum like ACM MM and they still keep things separate: the Art (the light track) on one side, the Computing (the “true” work) on the other side. Can we imagine/promote a true cultural forum that goes beyond these distinctions? I use the word culture here in its true etymological meaning (and the way we use it in the digital culture curriculum). It refers to an integrated understanding of the processes and artifacts of living, learning, creating, communicating. So in a true digital culture forum the creative process is not separate from the living, learning or communication process; they are all integrated. It points back to Hari’s approach: true cultural products are about improving human condition not products for the sake of the product. So ideas for how we create/foster/propose an integrative digital cultural forum welcome . Of course this also talks to the other point Ryan had: true cultural products for an integrative cultural forum must take many a forms; beyond just publications.

Both Brandon and Ryan are accurate in pointing out in their own ways the complexities of academic life and how we use our time. This is why it is important to possibly not look at one administrative solution for promoting some “space for catching fresh air”; a regular, supported forum at AME for unbounded, undirected creation and research. May be the solution lies more with the approach that we agree that we want to do something like this, suggest few solutions for putting this into student/faculty life (research credit, course credit, integrating in research deliverables, making it part of teaching/research load for faculty and staff etc) and then students negotiate with their advisor(s) the best solution for them per case/point in time and faculty/staff do something similar at the chair level.

Thanks for conversing folks

So, if we do decide to take the route of supporting more “discipline-specific” activities (which, I don’t even think they need to be discipline-specific: I think they just need to be a bit of fresh air from the daily grind), I don’t think something like devoting 1/6 or 1/5 of our research hours toward them is going to work, as clearly none of us (students and faculty alike) clock in. If something like this happens, I feel it needs to be negotiated in terms of our project deliverables and expectations rather than time.

My two cents.

1) How can AME encourage community members to continue their work outside of the meta-research, without directly supporting it (financially, etc) and/or without sacrificing the quality of the meta-work that we’re doing in the AME community? We need to grow our expertise both in meta-work and our own various specialties, which must come together collaboratively to approach the meta-work from the multiplicity of angles that makes AME work special. I think it comes down to “it’s on us as individuals to draw a divide between external work and AME work, such that we can fully meet both sets of commitments, and/or to integrate our disciplinary interests into ongoing AME work in ways where AME benefits from the disciplinary work.” This is Todd’s “seek external funding,” or Thanassis’s “build an installation that explores sensing and feedback with micro-scale movement in public places.” We can’t reduce the quality/quantity of research deliverables, because those deliverables put food on our collective table, so solutions must either build synergy between personal disciplines and AME research, or be balanced such that we can still fully satisfy both our personal desires and AME commitments.

2) How can AME recognize the contribution of deliverables other than research papers to AME’s profile in such a way that these products are incentivized? One challenge is that AME cannot determine how externals (ie, hiring managers, search committees, grant evaluators) interpret our CVs, and we must continually impress those externals in order to function. In terms of traditional research papers, it seems that the community agrees that the Best Student Paper in ACM Multimedia is a Big Deal, and a short paper/poster in ACM Multimedia is pretty good. There is a clear progression in publishing (publish a poster! expand it to a conference paper! Expand several of those to a journal article!) It seems that installing a design/art project in a major conference (e.g., ACM MM Arts Track; Ars Electronica) is a Big Deal, but it’s less clear to me how to grow a project from something like the incubator projects to a Big Deal, while providing enough value to the AME mission to ensure continued support. What’s the equivalent of a short conference paper for an installation that supports the AME meta-work? I hope that we can use the new expertise in our community (David, Grisha, Byron, etc) to help explore potential paths for non-paper deliverables to reach the coveted high-impact status. This is the challenge that the three Incubator projects face now — we have what amounts to a poster presentation under our belts; what’s the next step?

3) Hari raises a good point — AME is trying to create new types of products that completely defy disciplinary boundaries. How do we frame disciplinary work in support of the meta-work such that it doesn’t appear to be “art-lite” or “engineering-lite?” There don’t seem to be traditional venues for the meta-work. I think in part we are creating those venues as we raise the profile of AME projects, and have our faculty and students involved in a wide network of organizations.

For the school, we need to be able to say “this is a successful, innovative high-level meta-system.” I feel like those of us in the concentration need to be able to say “this is cutting-edge research in my discipline that supports a high-level meta-system.” MAS Ph.D students need to be able to say “this is how we integrate our personal knowledge and expertise with those of our collaborators to create a high-level metasystem.” I won’t try to speak for faculty, but I think you get the idea. Am I on-target here?

If you ask a computer engineer, how the presence of the Pentium MMX instruction would be of benefit to the victims of the Chilean earthquake, or ask an information theorist how compressive sensing can help with the with the refugee crisis in Darfur, it is likely that you will be greeted with incredulity.

What we are trying to accomplish within our school, is to make a meaningful difference to someone else’s life, by examining the human condition though multiple perspectives.

We nearly became the “school for experiential computing.” Many years ago, we were provided with an opportunity to change our name (we were then known as “the institute for studies in the arts”). This opportunity naturally prompted debate. One of the arguments advanced in favor of “Experiential computing” was that it was free, unshackled to past narratives in the arts and engineering, giving us the opportunity to innovate, without being judged on disciplinary traditions. The problem with it was that the connection to the arts was not immediately obvious, an important concern since we were in then herberger college of the arts.

“Arts, Media and Engineering Program” was the outcome of the debate. It arose out of a compact amongst the then faculty that the program name with “arts” and “engineering” would suggest our antecedents, form the basis for our navigation, but that experiential media, would be our north pole.

As a PhD student, I became increasingly concerned with methodological issues in my field (and in my own research). Often, what began as an effort to solve a legitimate problem (say x_0), ended up solving problem x_k (k steps away from x_0) which had put down so many conditions x_0 for an elegant mathematical solution, that the solution for x_k didn’t address the key challenges of x_0. The field became obsessed with a delta (even 1%!) improvement to the solution for problem x_k, and engineers would exult with the development of a more sophisticated mathematical argument that addressed problem x_k.
Often the elegance of the math rested on the absence of noisy data in human activity – noise in the sensed data caused by “people who didn’t know how to do it right.” It seemed to me, that the sophistication of the solution rested on the absence of humanity in the data. The idea that engineering was relevant to society, only to be predicated on the absence of human variation, was troubling. The richness and complexity of human behavior was what attracted to me to science and to see its absence in our formulations (or carefully scrubbed away) seemed to make engineering have less of an impact.

One of our intellectual goals for our school is to get away from a Cartesian worldview and embrace Phenomenology to address key societal problems. But to embrace phenomenology as a critical framing to understand the human experience, required us (as a school) to fully engage with embodiment – this is an important reason why the stroke rehabilitation and the k-12 projects which are both physically grounded, were so important for AME in its initial focus.

To accomplish these ambitious goals, one must let go of disciplinary constraints. It is important to realize that the “depth” in AME comes from the complexity of the connections between different disciplines involved in the outcome. If the outcome is judged from the constituent disciplinary perspective, then it becomes “engineering-lite,” “less artistic” and “not science.”

As an example, consider the mixed reality rehabilitation project. In it, you will find complex ideas from machine learning, bioengineering, computer vision, musical form, visual arts, databases and real-time multimedia systems. A few years ago, a stroke survivor told us after she completed a session and where she experienced dramatic improvements in arm movement – “this has been a transformative experience.” This was a beautiful moment for all of us on the team, and an accomplishment that resulted from the integrative approach.

We are still in our early stages of our school – there needs to be strong evidence of balance of disciplines in the research process itself and not just in the outcome. We need to be careful in not thinking of technological aids to support an artistic statement, or using the arts as a window dressing on an engineering outcome – the research needs to answer a much bigger and more complicated question of the relevance of the work to society. This framing (integrative process vs. disciplinary outcome) differentiates AME from schools that solely focus on the arts, sciences or engineering. We are still early into our journey – this balance in the research process will take time but will arrive in due course.

Louis Pasteur once said “Chance favors the prepared” – meaning that one isn’t lucky in research, but rather that one succeeds because one is prepared to the see the possibilities that escapes others. In order to succeed with experiential media, this is exactly what we need to do.

When AME was starting to develop we made the conscious decision to take the huge risk of trying to setup something that was not merely an extension of an existing discipline. As Thanassis has pointed out, that has made AME more difficult for many to understand since it doesn’t fit into an existing box but needs to be judged on its own methods and intentions. If people do that, I feel that they we will be seen in a positive light or at least be judged on our own merits. On the contrary, if people try to judge us as a school of engineering or school of art we will necessarily be seen as wanting because we are not attempting to be any of those things.

In the past I have thought I understood some of the concerns and we have been trying to explore other areas of focus that might acknowledge these. For instance, Grisha and I worked very hard to put together the workshop for the group we are trying to get underway around echosystem. While we initially received interest from many students we wound up having very few participate (those that were there did a great job) and almost none came to the showing. This was setup to expose students to other people working in various fields and to start a dialogue around the project. Grisha and I were certainly disappointed at the lack of interest considering the concerns expressed by some.

I was interested to see the comment above about whether statements such as “people should not come to AME for culture, but that we should seek out other ways to engage community”, and that “we do not make art for art sake” are somehow not valid. I 100% support these statements and don’t see how anything being discussed runs counter to these.

My own personally experience is this – if I want to make ‘L’art pour l’art’ (which even in the art world is a problematic statement, but leaving that aside) I do so and get my own funding and support to do it. No one is stopping me or preventing me from doing so and my doing so is seen as a positive thing. I find it valuable to the work I do at AME because it exposes me to new problems and issues that can help me see our research problems in a different light. However, that doesn’t mean I ask AME to provide support or fund this practice. Not only would it be outside of the mission of AME but it would be incredibly selfish.

In the project Grisha and I are trying to start we are going out and seeking support from different organizations and trying to include many people in the conversation of what the project can be. Still, if the main end results are a great performance/installation piece the project would be a failure as an AME project because we would have failed to find ways of integrating the concerns of our colleagues into the project. Why do I say this? Because at AME a large project that only has significant outcomes in one dimension is a project that is not giving back to the program as a whole and is not successfully integrating into the network and making sure concerns of all participants are being met.

I know this can be a difficult thing to accept for many, but the approach of artists engaging engineers to build there visions or of engineers having artists add sugar to their work is outdated by 50 years and is not a sustainable approach. We need to be aware of that and move beyond it. This means being responsible to our community and not holding a single discipline up as ‘the’ excluded one but rather asking what are the impacts of our words and actions.

This also means not wanting AME to be the arbiter of culture or be expected to financially support the presentation of work. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see an AME show at somewhere downtown that highlighted all our work and I am sure we could find someway to organize that. However, having a yearly series or presenting others’ work is not feasible. On top of the philosophical concerns there are concrete economic realities. We gave up these activities so that we could use the funds to provide for student RA and staff lines to support out core mission.

Finally, as I have said above, I once thought I understood the concerns and have sought ways to address them but now I am wondering if that is so. To further this line of discussion I would like to hear some concrete suggestions about what would address concerns so that there is no more confusion on exactly what is at issue.

I would ask that those who have shared concerns to please setup time with the exec committee – Hari, David B. and myself so we can talk about how to move forward.

Please know that I always have, and will continue do my best to give what strengths and talents I have to this growing community. I just hope that what I have to offer would be good enough for what this program is trying to achieve, and if not, then I could find the support here in others or otherwise be cut free.

As I see new faces in our program, I begin to see that AME is finding and bringing in those whom it needs, and those who it looks for. And it is stronger in stride because of it.

Thank you for taking a chance on me.

All the best,

Lisa

Agency in a collaborative network is set dynamically by the network members. In that negotiation process no one perspective can dominate but no one perspective should get lost either. Within the emergent rules of the network students have the agency to structure customized paths. Like with all networks, the higher the use of network resources by a single member, the higher the member’s responsibility to the network structures that are resourcing it.

But responsibility does not stop at the edge of the AME network; it expands to societal responsibility. An IGERT student at AME that is resourced by our society at 5 times the stipend of a PhD student in music, is expected by our society to produce broadly useful results that go beyond self-expression. At the same time, if self-expression is lost for any one of those students, then their ability to contribute diminishes.

Funding, or any other singular concern, of course should never be placed above the human relationships that make the network function. All complex collaborative processes rely on the health of the human network. At the same time no one should loose site of the effect of any variable on those same human relationships. If someone uses resources that someone else has worked hard to secure, the user has human to human responsibilities towards the provider. If someone uses network resources tied to deliverables and then decides to drop the ball for what ever reason, then someone else, less fortunate than them that does not have the ability to say no, will have to do twice as much work to cover the defaulting member. This again is as much a social justice issue as a funding issue.

We don’t do Art for Art’s sake or pure Science in AME not because that is bad but because it is not what we specialize on. We build experiential media. However, this does not mean that we do not practice art or science in the context of building these media systems. What we are discussing in the past few months is the nuances around that concept. The development of a complex media system requires moments of intense art making or scientific thinking. Those need to be encouraged without of course taking over the media development process. Furthermore, we want to dedicate a part of our action space to a slightly reverse paradigm. We built, play and think in an unbounded space and then ask how what we learned in the unbounded process might improve our media research. This is the key goal of the participatory culture exercise that we are launching. As with everything else, the form of this participatory culture paradigm is to emerge from our network not set by the director.

[A parenthetical point here regarding your mention of Boulez’s point that culture organizations should not function like restaurants: opening from 8-10 to serve culture and then closing. A culture paradigm that is not relevant to everyday living makes itself societaly irrelevant pretty quickly. All we need to do is look at the level of bullet point/sound bite/OMG text messaging discourse currently dominating our culture to realize that Boulez was right. The traditional performing arts paradigm has placed a healthy chunk of our intellectual leaders in a non-relevant space and the everyday cultural discourse is suffering as a result].

By all well-meaning matrices, AME is a successful organization. It does not need to be drastically changed but it does need to keep evolving and does need to keep improving. This complex balance is the one we are working on. For example, it is simply not accurate to say that an organization that successful integrates 15 disciplines on a daily basis is somehow reclusive. At the same time, increasing the diversity of members and functions can only help as long as it does not compromise our core functions.

Let me close by saying that myself and all the AME faculty and staff are highly sensitive to the complexity and anguish of the student experience at an interdisciplinary, meta structure organization like AME. We hear what you and others students have to say and think about it deeply. We might not always agree with the instantiation of what you say or do, but we do believe that it is motivated by a true concern for knowledge and improvement. Please believe me when I say, that faculty and staff alike also go through similar daily agonies. What we are trying to do is new and complex and no one has clean answers on how to do it. We thus keep working and searching together always aware that the answers we will find together although never complete, will be better that what we can find alone. And that the search for those answers, rather than the answers themselves, is what we are all here for. As the poet says:

As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery……

And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Read the full poem at
(http://www.srs.dl.ac.uk/people/pantos/kavafis_ithaca.html)

best
t

The reason I ask for a simple and clear answer is because, in the nuance and complexity of this blog, I am concerned that I might mistranslate or misinterpret the kinds of goals, outcomes, or products that the program would expect from us. My hope is that as this program moves forward, that communication lines always remain open; that faculty and students are listening to each other and responding with authentic and mutual respect; that relationships between the people in our community are always cared for and held above funding or other driving forces; and that we are not quick to judge and categorize one another (faculty and students alike) based on old disciplinary paradigms.

I think that Friday was a great achievement for this program, and I am so happy to see that there were many who could benefit from the Incubator conference. It also made me think about something you had said long ago – that “people should not come to AME for culture, but that we should seek out other ways to engage community”, and that “we do not make art for art sake”. I just wonder if these statements still apply, or if they have now been absorbed or dissolved in AME’s new emergent paradigm.

On communication, in no ways do I intend for these comments to be hurtful in anyway, and I would apologize in advance if they are felt in this way or if I have misinterpreted your statements in these past couple of years. I appreciate the opportunities and access to resources that this program has afforded me, and anyone I have worked with outside of the School of AME only respects the work we are trying to do.

Thanks, and I look forward with open eyes to the future of this program,

Lisa

And oh, let’s not forget “problematize”.

However, the phenomena (flickr, youtube, myspace) are far more intersting than what the phrase admits. For the first time, we are are to instrument very large systems, to enable us to gain an understanding of a networked construction of meaning, The networked construction of meaning is a key aspect of the human experiece (e.g. the birth of language). This construction is not only is distributed, but is asynchronous. Through this instrumentation, we can also begin to see the effect of human action (broad definition of action), through the development of communities.

Indeed this is also why i am so excited by the development of media repository at ame. It is meant to not only archive artifacts, but importantly through careful instrumentation, serve as a mechanism to understand the construction of meaning in a small community.

perhaps if the mechnaism of contemplation was consistent the experience of walking in a crwded subway station, then it would be recognized.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

thanks for sharing the article. the sound is also good.

But what’s with the WaPo’s sad and mournful tone about how busy we all are and how no one appreciates beauty anymore?! I mean, really!

(a) Why did they choose classical music considering that not that many people understand/appreciate it? Why not something more popular? I bet more people would stop and listen if someone was singing, say, a Pink Floyd song. (That would also give the experiment more sociological significance, no?)

(b) Seems like people did stop by! He made 50 dollars, didn’t he? I’d say that’s a lot of money for someone playing the violin in a busy subway station.

My relief is indescribable.

However, I still intend to show up for pie (which I assume will now be provided to encourage good habits).

(book and antique geeks may be so lucky to see, up close, his copy of Euclid’s Elements and others)

I was struck by something else though. According to one of the links, everyone assumed that the sponsors had objected to the game, prompting the organizers to take it off. (It turned out that the removal of the game from the competition was pre-emptive, the sponsors were still on). There seems to be universal agreement that in this (hypothetical) case at least, the organizers have a legitimate reason — what can one do against the big bad corporate sponsors? etc. But it seems to me that this version — the corporate sponsors as villains — is not without its own problems. The sponsors — at least private corporations — have a legitimate right to withdraw their sponsorships, for something they believe is inimical to their interests, no? What do you think?

Also, there is access to the full text of many O’Reilley books and books from MIT on CogNet

More here

My favorites:

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

—–Original Message—–
From: Smithsonian Information [mailto:info@si.edu]
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 10:59 AM

Subject: Re: question on claimed exhibit earmarked for Smithsonian

Anne Babcock

Your inquiry of 14 November 2006 concerning a musical instrument made from farm machinery pieces has been received in the Smithsonian’s Public Inquiry Mail Service office for a response.

The web site you referred us to shows a computer enhanced or animated creation – as indicated by the caption “Musique Animation” – and not an actual musical instrument. Further, we were unable to find any reference to a Robert M. Trammel Music Conservatory and the University of Iowa does not have a Sharon Wick School of Engineering nor a Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall.

The Institution cannot accept a donation of something that doesn’t exist.

We appreciate your interest in the Smithsonian Institution

yes, the atlantic article is good. i thought the name andrew stern was familiar. which puts this line in the article into perspective:

Nonetheless, as the three of us talked it was Stern who emerged as the dominant personality, partly because he has an artist’s fierce sense of aesthetic rectitude. Economy, elegance, formal coherence: these are personal matters to him.

there was a lot of “personality” in the “why artists must program” essay too.

you may remember from the class the article we read by Mateas collaborator, Andrew Stern (Deeper conversations with interactive art, or why artists must program).

conference:

CVPR 2007

ICME 2007

ICCV 2007

ACM MM 2007

User Modeling,

Context,

IUI,

AAAI

CVPR

ICASSP,

ICML

TREC2006 (Text REtrieval Conference): http://trec.nist.gov/

WWW2007 (16th International World Wide Web Conference): http://www2007.org/

ICWSM2007 (International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media):

http://www.icwsm.org/

CIKM2007 (*ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge

Management*): http://sa1.sice.umkc.edu/cikm2006/

Hello Dr Sundaram,

Here is a list of the conferences.

(1) CoMoRea 2007, 4th IEEE Workshop on Context Modeling and Reasoning

Deadline: September 29, 2006

Dates: 19 – 23 March 2007

http://nexus.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/COMOREA/2007/index.html

(2) CHI 2007, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)

Deadline:September 29, 2006

Dates: 28 April – 3 May, 2007

http://www.chi2007.org/

(3) UbiComp 2007, 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing

Deadline: —

Dates: 16-19 September, 2007

http://www.ubicomp2007.org/

(4) ICEIS 2007, 9th International Conference on Enterprise Information

Systems

Full Paper Submission: November 23, 2006

Authors Notification: February 12, 2007

Final Paper Submission and Registration: March 2, 2007

Dates: 12- 16 June, 2007

http://www.iceis.org/workshops/csac/csac2007-cfp.html

(5) HCI International 2007

Abstract Length Deadline for

Abstract Receipt Notification of Review Outcome

Deadline for Receipt of Accepted Proposal

Paper Presentations 800 words 30 October 2006

15 December 2006

16 February 2007

Posters 300 words 12 March 2007

30 March 2007

30 April 2007

Tutorials 300 words 30 October

2006 15 December 2006

30 April 2007

Dates: 22- 27 July, 2007

http://www.hcii2007.org/

As opposed to “organic interface” — user control based on actions in the natural physical environment.
in doing a literature search for a recent paper submission, i found that NII was the most common term

2. “hybrid physical-digital environment”

The dual to natural information interface: multimodal feedback display being situated in the physical world

3. “adaptive media”

Media which adapts structurally in response to anticipated user goals

4. “reflective space”

A space which facilitates user awareness of past activity, either his/her own, or
socially networked activity (like a bike path)

5. “activity analysis”

Modeling, detection, categorization, and pattern recognition of human activity. Though not absolutely necessary,
the fact that it happens through multimodal sensing is generally implicit. This would replace
“multimodal data fusion” and related dinosaur categories

6. “experiential learning environment”

A physically situated, interactive media environment which facilitates learning goals of some sort,
even if the learning is reflexive (how to use the system)

vis susan thorpe. no way i’d have thought of them

As for appropriate phrases for AME? I like the participatory knowledge creation vein, but I think it needs to somehow convey an inclusion of multimodal feedback mechanisms, or perhaps dynamic path recognition and display? Hmmm…

I am wondering if we should use multimodal sensing / informational modeling … (reserach axis) as indices, that may allow greater avenues for exploration in addition to the terms originally listed. However, the number of terms will then expand to 12~15. -h

-h

Experiential education, 3d visualization, augmented reality, tangible interfaces, integrated feedback, colocation or telepresent experiences, immersive environments, embodied experience

That’s cool about the LISP and Max object code – should we meet sometime and lay out a directory structure that would make it easy to manage different languages and environments?

i think it is a good idea – there are some max object code that i could put in.

One issue with using /svn/Source is that everyone that gets svn access has write permission there. We might want just a little more control than that? What do you think?

World Congress on Dance Research

National Dance Education Organization

Congress on Research in Dance

Society of Dance History Scholars

International Association for Dance Medicine and Science

International Conference on Digital Live Art

International Conference on Computation Semiotics

Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts

FACETS International Choreography laboratory http://www.narthaki.com/hplinks/ataklri2.html

International Dance Film Festival, Cinedans

http://www.cinedans.nl/

Impulstanz Vienna International Dance Festival

http://www.impulstanz.com/

Journals

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media

Body, Space and Technology Journal

Theatre, Performance and New Media

Journal of Dance Education

Journal of Dance Medicine and Science

Dance Research Journal

Leonardo

Contact Quarterly