At described in a previous post, Gillan Smith’s writing set up the challenge to develop an “independent language of interaction” that fully exploits the medium of computers — similar to how the early techniques of cinema eventually stabilized into a coherent visual language. While its contentious that such a singular language can be created for HCI, I think most would agree that because cinema is a more mature medium, studying its critical vocabulary can be insightful.
With this in mind, I think Christian Metz’ article gives an insightful phenomenological account for why the medium of film is so powerful. Central to his explanation is the notion of realism. Basically he argues that by captuing motion, film achieves a level of realism that makes its images present to us. Whereas the static images of photography convey a sense of reality in the past, the moving images of film convey a reality that is ‘here and now’. The result is that the viewer is able to ‘participate’ in the represented reality — by identifying with characters, reacting viscerally and emotionally to the action, etc.
However this degree of realism hinges upon the distinct separation between the represented space and the audience’s physical space. This boundary of the screen allows the viewer to forget the real world and enter in to the diagesis. He contrasts this with a stage performance in which this boundary does not exist. The audience shares physical space with the represented reality and thus, says Metz, the vehicle of representation is too real. The result is that the viewer is all too conscious of the artificiality of the performance and ends up identifying more with the actors themselves than with their characters.
I think Metz’ analysis holds a lot of insight for HCI. Not only has he revealed realism as a powerful aspect of the film experience, he has also illustrated how it is affected by particular qualities of the medium, namely motion and separation of space. I don’t mean that we should simply try to mimic the realism of film–in fact I can see one problem with attempting to do that–but rather we can think about the degree of realism which is most appropriate in particular design contexts, and give consideration to how motion and separation of space affect the experience. As a starting point for this kind of analysis, I’ve placed some different interactive experiences where I think they might fit into Metz’ model:
Original post and comments can be found here.
While I’m a little late getting in on blog action day, I want take the occasion to give attention to an issue of sustainability that I find really important: agriculture and food production. Joel Salatin is an innovative farmer and author whose practices were heavily featured in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In this 2003 essay, Salatin describes the frustrating conflicts between sustainable farming practices and government regulations.
In addition to revealing the darker side of industrial food production, I think his essay also speaks to a larger conflict in achieving sustainability: modern industry (and infrastructure and bureaucracy) is large scale and highly compartmentalized. In contrast, sustainable systems informed by ecology should be small scale and tightly integrated. Developing sustainment means adopting this ecological model in our political, cultural, and economic practices.
On Friday I attended the annual conference of the Humanities and Technology Association, held this year at nearby Rose-Hulman Insititue of Technology in Terre Haute. The conference theme this year was “Sustainable Transformations: Technology and its Environments”, a theme that brought together a diverse collection of presentations. I enjoyed many of the talks and had some interesting conversations with other presenters.
One of the highlights for me, was J. Anthony Langlois’ talk, “Reactive environments through politicized artworks”. Langlois’ argument was as follows: We (as a culture) need to change. In order to change we must have dialogue. In order to have effective dialogue, we need to be informed. He then described artistic attempts to “make the invisible visible” by way of eye-catching (often new-media based) visualization of otherwise unseen data. His examples were diverse and provocative: energy orbs, networked umbrellas, cameras in drag, to name a few. Data visualization has been an interest of mine for some time, particularly persuasive visualization to motivate sustainable behavior. Coming from an artistic background, Langlois’ angle was a slightly different. The examples he gave were not meant to motivate particular behaviors, aid in specific task, or even convey any exact message. Rather they were meant for the viewer to take notice, react viscerally, and then ask important questions. This is an interesting perspective which I hope to explore in my work.
Later in the afternoon, Kristin Hanks and I presented our undergraduate survey research, “attitudes toward sustainability and the material effects of interactive technologies.” While many of the conference goers opted for the other session at the time, we did have a sizable audience of Rose undergrads. As a nice complement to our talk, James Adams of Troy University presented some survey results on undergrad opinions on sustainability. His conclusion was that the majority of students care about sustainability, although they aren’t quite sure what it means. After our presentation, we had some positive feedback from the academics in the audience, which developed in some interesting conversations about the complexity of achieving sustainable technology.
All in all, it was a fun conference with multidisciplinary perspectives on sustainability.