Interactions, a multimedia, interactive installation
Interactions, a multimedia, interactive installation |
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Interactions is a multi-media interactive installation which was premiered at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in July of 2000. The piece addresses issues such as competition in art, machine learning in art, the role of popular acceptance in art, and the relationship between raw materials and style in creating art.
The installation begins as a blank slate, but through multiple interactions with audience participants, and under the guidance of two neural network agents, it soon acquires content and a perpetually evolving means of presenting that content.
The installation is interactive in two respects. Firstly, audience participants can influence the content of the installation. To do so, they need only type in an internet address to the console of Interactions. Then the piece will contact that website, download both images and text, and will add those new materials to the repository of content requested by other participants. Interactions manipulates these texts and images to create a visual and sonic collage.
Secondly, audience participants can interact with the installation to influence the ways in which the content is presented. Interactions makes use of two neural network agents which are simultaneously controlling the individual presentations of the body of content. Each neural network manipulates parameters such as the rate of change, the size of the image, the distortion of the sounds, and color filtering of the images. Audience participants can influence the presentations methods by 'voting' their preference for one neural network agent or the other. If an agent receives positive reinforcement, it will maintain its methods of presenting the content, while the other agent will attempt to make its presentation more like the other. However, if the two artist/agents converge on presentation methods which are too similar, one agent will radically alter its sound and look. Thus, the installation is in constant flux as the artist/agents explore all means of manipulating an ever expanding body of raw materials. In Interactions, the two agents are constantly interacting with each other in an artistic competition to gain the attentions of audience participants.
The way in which the images are presented is also the result of viewer interaction. As discussed in the introduction above, the neural network artist/agents draw from the same bank of images, but each has separate control over how the images are presented. Parameters such as the speed at which the images display, their placement on the screen, and the total size of the images, are all discreetly modified by each side of Interactions. When an audience member indicates a preference for one presentation method or the other, the manipulation parameters are altered not just in regard to the current statee of the display, but also in regard to the competing artist/agent.
Just as the downloaded images are incorporated into the visual aspect of Interactions, so are the downloaded texts. Both the right and left sides of Interactions are constantly scanning through the corpus of texts looking for keywords which then appear on the screens as part of the visual collage. Again, parameters such as color, size, and placement of these texts are individually controlled by the competing sides, and are influenced by audience input.
As mentioned above, the two artist/agents of Interactions are constantly scanning through the downloaded texts looking for pre-defined keywords. These keywords were chosen by the composer and help to broadly shape possible 'topics' for the piece. When a keyword is found among the texts specified by audience members, the corresponding text is displayed on the monitor, and the corresponding sample is triggered. Often a lyric of the sample contains the found word, but the relationship can also be more abstract.
The presentation of the samples is discreetly controlled by each side of Interactions in a fashion analogous to the way images are manipulated. The speed at which the sample plays, how much of the sample is read, and how much the sample is filtered, are all dependent on the style of the respective artist/agent and can be influenced by audience members indicating their preferences.
Just as there are two windows that correspond to the two neural network agents, the left and right speakers of the audio system correspond to their respective agents. As with the visual realization, one can listen to the sides discreetly, or simply enjoy the more cacophonous composite soundscape.
Click here to download and run Interactions on your machine!
Here are some of the technical requirements
and instructions for installing the piece in a venue
Click here to View the Interactions image gallery
View the projected output from Interactions