Intimacy and embodiment: implications for art and technology

ABSTRACT

People have aesthetic experiences when they manipulate objects skillfully. Highly skilled performance with an object requires forming a highly intimate relationship with it. Aesthetics flow from this intimacy. This paper discusses three works which bring together technology and art to illustrate the issues of intimacy and embodiment. The three works are: Iamascope, video cubism and the forklift ballet.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial, 1990.
• 2: J. Donahoe and D. Palmer. Learning and Complex Behavior. Allyn and Bacon, 1994.
• 3: S. Fels. http://www.ece.ubc.ca/ssfels, 2000.
• 4: S. S. Fels and G. E. Hinton. Glove-talkii: A neural network interface which maps gestures to parallel formant speech synthesizer controls. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 9:205-212, 1998.
• 5: S. S. Fels and K. Mase. Intimacy as an index for understanding human-computer interaction. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive System and Soflware, page p. 211, Dec 1997.
• 6: Axel G. E. Mulder , S. Sidney Fels , Kenji Mase, Design of virtual 3D instruments for musical interaction, Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Graphics interface '99, p.76-83, September 1999, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
• 7: S. S. Fels and K. Mase. Iamascope: A graphical musical instrument. Computers and Graphics, 2:277-286, 1999.
• 8: Sidney Fels , Eric Lee , Kenji Mase, Techniques for interactive video cubism (poster session), Proceedings of the eighth ACM international conference on Multimedia, p.368-370, October 2000, Marina del Rey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/354384.354535]
• 9: MusiKalscope: A Graphical Musical Instrument, Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS '97), p.55, June 03-06, 1997 [doi>10.1109/MMCS.1997.609561]
• 10: F. Richard Moore, The dysfunctions of MIDI, Computer Music Journal, v.12 n.1, p.19-28, Spring 1988 [doi>10.2307/3679834]
• 11: John K. Ousterhout, Tcl and the Tk toolkit, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1994
• 12: Y. Tuan. Passing Strange and Wonderful. Kodansha International, 1993.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Interaction styles (e.g., commands, menus, forms, direct manipulation)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.6 Methodology and Techniques
          Subjects: Interaction techniques

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management, Performance, Theory