Avant-garde artists, innovative engineers, and forward-thinking administrators from UC Berkeley gathered recently at the Intel Research Laboratory for a daylong event designed to ignite communication and cross-disciplinary collaboration among the campus' most creative minds. Organized by faculty and staff from the College of Engineering, Department of Art Practice, and the Berkeley Art Museum, under the leadership of digital media professor Greg Niemeyer, 020202: A Social Technologies Dialogue featured a rapid-fire succession of twenty-three ten-minute presentations by the attendees.
The event exemplifies the campuswide explosion of interest in
the intersection of technology and society - from new faculty
hires who are internationally known for their high-tech creative
endeavors to the formation of the Center for Information Technology
in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), a key catalyst for the 020202
event.
"The engineers who carry out this technical revolution must talk with the people who look at how the technology may affect individuals and the society," said CITRIS director Ruzena Bajcsy.
020202 (the palindromic name represents the date of the event) began with electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Anind Dey presenting research on "ambient displays." The systems in development communicate information "on the periphery of human perception, requiring minimal attention and cognitive load." One such display is a mobile that through iconographic shapes would display weather conditions in a windowless environment. Another piece of the "informative art" Dey is helping develop at the Intel Lab is a Mondrian-esque digital painting with shapes that change based on the amount of email in your in-box.
Courtesy of the artist
IEOR
and EECS professor Ken Goldberg's artwork has been exhibited at
the Whitney Biennial and the Walker Art Center. Visitors
inside this installation, called Mori, experience live seismographic
data from the Hayward Fault translated into a visual display
and low-frequency sounds. The 1999 piece was a collaboration
between Goldberg and Berkeley colleagues in Engineering
and Art Practice.
(Click for larger image.)
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Also from the College of Engineering, computer science professor John Canny spoke
about collaborative filtering systems like Amazon.com's automated
book recommendation feature. What sets Canny's approach to collaborative
filtering apart though is that it maintains the user's privacy even
when data is passed between individuals in a peer-to-peer network
setting.
Another topic the 020202 attendees eagerly dug into were design
issues surrounding tighter, more usable human-computer interfaces.
Professor James Landay of the Group for User Interface Research
described a suite of tools developed in his laboratory for Web
designers, including one that tracks and digitizes "Post-it notes"
on a whiteboard to aid in the design of user interfaces. Later
in the day, mechanical engineering professor Paul Wright commented
how new information technologies like wearable computers - earrings
that monitor body condition, for instance - present a host of
"organic design" problems along with engineering challenges.
"I'm interested in working with artists to study the human environment in an ethnographic way and bring that information into the design process," Wright said.
Courtesy
of the artist
"Heptoroid," designed in collaboration by Carlo Sequin and Brent Collins
as a model for a large wood sculpture. (Click for larger image.)
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On the art side of the equation, Professor Shawn Brixey, chair of Berkeley's Digital Art/New Genre Program, previewed his Chimera Obscura, a new biotech-inspired art installation involving a maze shaped in the artist's thumbprint that online viewers navigate with a telerobotic camera. And Scott Snibbe explored notions of body and perception through comments on his piece "Boundary Functions," an installation on display at San Francisco's Exploratorium. Visitors step on a special reflective floor and boundary lines are automatically projected from overhead that divide them from one another. If one person moves, the boundary lines change to maintain an even distance between everyone in the exhibit.
020202 culminated in energized break-out sessions based on the rubrics of education, design, community, and exhibition. At the end of the day, plans were made to keep the dialogue alive through future meetings and informal collaborations with the hope of a public event before the sequel 030303 event in March of next year.
"Berkeley has reached critical mass regarding technology, art,
and culture and 020202 brought the participants into the same
room for the first time - fortunately no explosions occurred,"
says professor Ken Goldberg, who holds a joint faculty position
in the departments of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and helped organize
the event. "But it is very clear that Berkeley is now an international
focal point for ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries."
CITRIS
Intel Research Laboratory @ Berkeley
Greg Niemeyer's home page
Anind Dey's home page
John Canny's home page
James Landay's home page
Paul K. Wright's home page
Scott Snibbe's home page
Shawn Brixey's home page
Ken Goldberg's home page
Carlo H. Séquin's
home page
