This is a record of a presentation made at the Testing Testing symposium which shows my initial interpretations of the work in the exhibition, and shows my thinking at that time. This was written up into a chapter in the Testing Testing: Dialogue publication and later revised and integrated into my thesis.

 

 

Interdisciplinary dialogue is at the centre of my research. Intro to my research/practice my own work is concerned with attention and distraction, and compulsive internet and device usage (although it’s moving) all about the capture of attention attention studies is the backbone of the interdisciplinarity in my study UI/UX, stuff from design psychology and the study of behaviour, neuroscience also media studies, sociology, cultural studies, wellbeing – even transhumanism

Impossibly broad, impossible to get full expertise in these areas. Scientific research: like doing a survey, finding an untouched area, drilling for oil

Artistic research: cleaning up an oil spill over a wide area, aggregating and recombining knowledge leaked from other disciplines This is how interdisciplinary dialogue works for me

Wrote about compulsive internet usage, online/offline borders, gamification in the book so won’t repeat that here Online/offline borders led me to use modified Augmented Reality software

Pokemon Go: Augmented Reality consists of live video and digitally rendered elements that ‘augment’ the live scene

The software I have modified uses markers like this to orient the scene.

It uses a modified computer vision system to locate markers in a video scene, which is playing in the background but, based on these markers, it can only make a best guess about the orientation of them,

leading to a level of indeterminacy or error in its interpretation of reality. It wobbles because it’s processing every video frame in sequence, and each one comes out a little different results in a restless image, flickering, and making visual the uncertainty of the computer system

Analysis of form

Installed on infrastructure wall – everything on that wall is supposed to be invisible

As John Durham Peters writes about, infrastructure is supposed to be invisible: “The bigger the infrastructure, the more likely it is to drift out of awareness.” p36 Their invisibility is not accidental: when we consider this, they foreground what they are ‘infra’ to: in this case, the white-walled institutional gallery space with all its structures of engagement, expectations of behaviour, attentional norms it’s a sign that you’re supposed to ignore is it a status readout? is it measuring? What is the subject of the measurement?

Whether they know what they’re comparing or not, making a comparison between two images positions the viewer as an active empowered overseer unlike compulsively designed interfaces, which reduce agency, invoke habit visually, presents the output of a system rather than a visual proposal – the output just happens to be visual. Aesthetics are almost completely incidental to the work, comparisons with Albers, minimalism etc might not yield much. Background slowly shifting to emphasise the passage of time and the focus of attention for the audience

My method – tinkering with existing libraries and reflecting on the results as if they were artworks – allows something like insight to turn up through crossing disciplines, through defamiliarisation . How is this understood? One way: What’s emerging here is the uncertainty of computational representations of reality. If it can’t decide which way up a square is, why defer to it in other contexts? Uncertainty is a false binary in this piece – computational modelling of reality is much more sophisticated than that multiple data points are used to create profiles with which to build things that attempt to grab your attention. One way of understanding this: Louse Amoore, Cloud Geographies: criticises the ‘observational paradigm’ that is present in art, and in fact, all empirical research: argues that the appearance, the making visible, isn’t enough when there are invisible processes that are creating actionable decisions

The question here is ‘how does it work’ not ‘what does it look like’. What is role of the gallery as a context to talk about computational issues ? Next: questions about when UI can’t rely on visual interaction alone to invoke compulsion voice interface Alexa, Siri, Cortana Eliza – that’s what will go into the next book.