"Portfolio 2point5"
Meeting spaces of the artist, the audience, and the machine
Christopher James
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Human-computer interaction occurs on many levels and in many ways. Artists utilize many forms of software to explore and express their concepts, and often get new and unexpected ideas from discovering and practicing with the possibilities of today's software tools. I am interested in extending the possibilities of such tools through the creation of my own software mini-applications, with the purpose of creating new forms of display, interactivity, and performance using selected original media and writing. The applications, and the programmed parameters within them, therefore make up additional, essential layers of the portfolio.
Why 2.5?
In one standard conceptualization of a digital portfolio, the "viewers" --- meaning any audience participant experiencing one's works, whether visual, auditory, or both --- has limited interaction. I call this Portfolio 1.0: pieces are essentially unchanging, completed, and arranged in a relatively linear or categorical display. This provides an effective, assured means of displaying one's work, is well-suited for the Web, and is commonly found; such a configuration provides the starting point for this project.
Taking a rather large step further, Portfolio 2.0 provides the media as well as supporting applications to interact with the works. These inline mini-applications are designed to seamlessly and intuitively provide a means for manipulating and remixing the material, thereby creating the space for new configurations and combinations of the existing media. These applications form another layer of the portfolio, as their design significantly influences what new processes and products can be created.
Once this level of interactivity is established, we can take another step to 2.5: the applications "play themselves" by utilizing carefully-created "process presets". These settings are designed to generate new and interesting combinations of material, or at the very least, to illuminate specific functions of the applications so that viewers can understand what is happening --- and therefore what is possible. Such presets form yet another level of the portfolio: through experimentation, I have determined a variety of settings which I feel have the potential to create effective or interesting new works. This aesthetic therefore is less concerned with what a media piece is (as traditional evaluations generally focus upon); rather, it considers what might possibly exist through dynamic, generative, and interactive processes.
While results from such processes may often be chaotic, unrefined, or otherwise ineffective compared to completed works, experience has shown that practice rapidly refines such output, therefore making the viewer a "performer" of sorts. Additionally, the variety and immediacy of performance possibilities are nearly endless, and flow much more intuitively than many other applications do. The particular strength of real-time interaction, at the expense of detailed composition, is readily evident once one begins to play; while many elements can be saved in some fashion, these modules are probably best-utilized in improvisatory, transitory ways. Save detailed editing for the wealth of commercial applications which already do these such tasks well…but generally cannot easily provide the kinds of real-time experimentation these modules can.
Where to go from here?
Though not included in this project as of this writing, "3.0" is the next logical step --- adaptive machine intelligence. In other words, based upon how viewers interact with the media and tools, the applications would evolve over time towards the most "appreciated" configurations and processes (or if one wishes to make a different point, to the least appreciated ones). Intelligent tracking and analysis of interaction gradually strengthens certain possibilities while weakening others, mimicking evolutionary processes, neural networks, or ratings systems found on many websites: popular items "bubble to the top", are therefore more visible to new viewers, and give the system the appearance of a higher level of quality. Human preferences, combined with machine intelligence, therefore co-create new works based upon short- and long-term interaction by individuals and groups; viewers knowingly and unknowingly "steer" the machine's performance and the interaction of future viewers, while themselves having been steered by prior interactions and the machine's evolutionary processes. It should be noted that like all parameters in this project, the "rules" and restrictions upon these evolutionary processes (which will generally boil down easily-manipulated numerical probabilities) can themselves be refined, even self-evolve, through experience.
Specifics of the project
A series of interactive modules, each dealing with a specific form of media --- text, images, video, synthesis, audio, MIDI, 3D, and several mathematics-education modules --- will be bundled into one main application. Viewers will have a full range of interaction available: they can control every parameter of every module, they can simply watch the processes programmed into the modules unfold, or participate anywhere in between. While it is possible to include hundreds of parameters, this project will include a small set which should be readily understood by most viewers, and will be accessible by intuitive sliders, knobs, and other interface objects. Additional, more precise parameters (the actual numbers generated by the interface objects) will be visible in "Advanced" mode, can be set exactly, and will have more extreme ranges. In this manner, new viewers can get a feel for what is possible without being overwhelmed, then when they feel ready, enter Advanced mode and explore further.
The media itself will be comprised of a selection of works by me over the past five years or so. These include many examples of composition, audio, images, videos, and 3D modeling. Also included are a number of textual works: research interests, course papers, Artist statements, and many other examples. All included elements are selections, as there are far more than needed for such a project to be effective. Additionally, most of the audio and video examples will be relatively short, as this keeps processing requirements more manageable. As described above, the intent is not to display all my works in linear, completed fashion --- rather, it is to see what new configurations are possible.
All the interfaces shown in the screen shots are functional, though I plan to refine many of them for appearance and ease of use. Additionally, as of this proposal, I have not combined them all into a finalized main application --- at this point the project is at about "2.2" (to stretch that concept to the point of breaking, perhaps ;-) Between now and the opening I plan to select and incorporate all the media (all of which is ready to include), refine and integrate the various modules into a main application, design the overall automation, then create a large set of "process presets" which I feel effectively show off the possibilities. In this way, the portfolio can run on its own for long stretches without repetition, all the while generating new media from the wide variety of included media. Viewers will be immersed in a large-scale, dynamic, interactive portfolio of my best works --- which include the application modules themselves.