CASY: Contextual Asynchronous System

In recent decades families have become more geographically distributed, making it challenging for family members to maintain a feeling of intimacy. Distributed families face many challenges trying to maintain a sense of intimacy: Different time zones, limited conversation topics, and limited knowledge of the other’s availability and mindset, to name a few. Distributed family members tend to share information, practical issues (when and where to meet next time), as well as special occasions (e.g. birthday events or job promotion) and less emotional information. The result is a more fragmented relationship, which gradually leads to less intimacy. Modern communication technologies (phone, cell phone, email, instant messaging) improve communication, but in most cases, do not achieve the same level of intimacy and connectedness as in face-to-face communication.

CASY: Contextual Asynchronous System is a new communication technology integrating audio/video messaging, asynchronous communication, and context-based delivery. CASY is designed to enhance connectedness between children and their distributed family members such as grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.

CASY enables family members to send ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ asynchronous video snippets into a shared family database. The recipient views the snippet in-context of going to sleep or waking up.

Influence

Influence is an interactive artwork visualizing how collective behavior emerges from decentralized interaction in a small social network. Individual people are affected by the behavior of people around them, and as a result, they influence the people around them as well.

We are all unique individuals. There are no two people alike. Nevertheless, other people around us affect our behaviors, thoughts and emotions in the most simple and unconscious ways. This interactive video piece presents 16 people as black and white “moving portraits”. Each portrait has a set of gestures, such as looking to the right, looking to the left, yawning, falling a sleep etc.

Each portrait has a predefined threshold level for “catching the yawn virus” from a neighbor portrait. The viewer interacts with the portraits by selecting the first portrait that will yawn. The first yawn starts a unique chain reaction of yawning, based on the predefined threshold levels and some randomness. A cycle ends when the “yawn virus” has finished spreading. Portraits that yawned “fall asleep”. A cycle might end with some portraits unaffected just as people resist influence in real life. At each cycle, the yawn spreads among the portraits at different patterns and rates.

Moving Portrait

The moving portrait is based on a set of black and white portraits, comprising a rich library of photographic sequences. The portrait resides in a picture frame and interacts with its viewers using a variety of sensing techniques (vision, ultrasonic, RFID etc.). The sensing architecture enables the portrait to be aware of viewers’ presence, identity, distance, speed, and body movements. The cognitive architecture controls the portrait’s reaction, taking into account the viewer’s behavior, the portrait’s mood, as well as memory of previous interactions. All of which contributes to a complex, believable behavior.

A portrait is an inseparable part of our emotional life, but it is also a part of our environment. It represents a part of our life and a reflection of our feelings, however it is completely oblivious to the events that occur around it or to the people who view it.

By adding interaction, dynamics, and memory to a familiar portrait we create a different and more engaging relationship between the viewer and the portrait. The viewer gets to know more about the subject and in addition the portrait’s responses are adapted to the viewer’s behavior and to prior interactions with current and former viewers. Just like in real life, where every person reveals a different side of his/her personality to different people and situations, the evocative portrait reveals different sides of its own personality.

Portrait of Cati II

Portrait of Cati 2 is an homage to the project "Portrait of Cati" done by Stefan Agamanolis. This portrait reacts differently to a man or a woman. While reacting to a woman in a more natural way, Cati's image is more of woman's icon as a reaction to a man.

Spotlight

Spotlight is an installation of 16 interactive portraits. Each portrait has a set of 9 "temporal gestures" - photographic-quality sequences of human gestures such as "looking up". The portraits are networked, and placed in a 4X4 layout.

Every few seconds, a randomly selected portrait is looking towards a neighboring portrait. In turn, the neighboring portrait will look back. To a viewer of the installation, these "random discussions" create a sense of "social dynamics". The viewer can interrupt the group dynamics at any time, by selecting one of the 16 portraits. The remaining 15 portraits automatically react and direct their attention to the viewer-selected portrait, which reacts with a special gesture - "being the center of attention".

Spotlight is about an artist's ability to create a new meaning using the combination of interactive portraits and diptych or polyptych layouts. The mere placement of two or more portraits near each other is a known technique to create a new meaning in the viewer's mind. Spotlight takes this concept into the interactive domain, creating interactive portraits that are aware of each other's state and gesture. So not only the visual layout, but also the interaction with others creates a new meaning for the viewer. Using a combination of interaction techniques, Spotlight engages the viewer at two levels. At the group level, the viewer influences the portraits "social dynamics". At the individual level, a portrait's "temporal gestures" expose much about the subject's personality.