Collaborations
EMDialog
EMDialog is an interactive installation that was commissioned by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada as part of the Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon exhibition. It is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Holly Schmidt, a practicing artist, and Uta Hinrichs, an engineer for computational visualistics and PhD student at the University of Calgary.
Responding to Emily Carr’s life and work EMDialog invites museum visitors to explore the extensive discourse about Emily Carr in an interactive manner. The installation consists of a large interactive display showing two interlinked visualizations that present commentary and imagery about Emily Carr’s life and work along temporal and contextual dimensions. Visitors can explore these visualizations through direct touch interaction. The content of the display is cloned and projected on a wall making the visualizations and the interaction with the display visible to a larger audience. Speakers embedded in the display provide ambient forest sounds of birds, water, and wind to convey Emily Carr’s experience of painting in-situ.
The project was funded and supported by the University of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, and SMART Technologies Inc. who designed and provided the interactive tabletop display that was used for the installation.
EMDialog was a finalist at the Canadian New Media Awards 2008 in the category Excellence in Culture, Lifestyle, and Arts.
memory [en]code
memory [en]code is an interactive tabletop installation that visualizes the dynamic character of human memory in an interactive manner.
The installation is the result of a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist, Holly Schmidt and Uta Hinrichs, an engineer for computational visualistics. They explored different concepts of memory found in their respective disciplines of art and computer science as well as the fields of neuroscience, psychology and sociology.
The resulting installation, memory [en]code, invites participants to enter an immersive contemplative space where they will encounter a visualization of memory on a tabletop device. Here, participants can recall and share narratives of their memories. Entered on the tabletop interface, memories take on a cellular form that contains the entered text. These memories can be interacted with in a number of ways.
Participants can release and read the memories contained in the cells. They can also merge cells, thereby merging the memory narratives. Overtime the memories begin to shape one another becoming a collective memory of those that interacted with the system.
To read more about memory [en]code, see our publication. memoryencode
Holly Schmidt, Uta Hinrichs, Alan Dunning and Sheelagh Carpendale. Memory [en[code –Building a Collective Memory within a Tabletop Installation. In proceedings of Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging 2007 (CAe’07). Eurographics Association, pages 135-142, June 2007.
Also visit the website of Uta Hinrichs at http://www.utahinrichs.de/
Bio Circuit
Dana Ramler and I are on the program to present our project at TEI 2010.
We will be presenting our collaborative project Bio Circuit.
Bio Circuit – a wearable soundscape from dana ramler on Vimeo.
This video depicts the collaborative wearable technology project of Bio Circuit in action. Bio Circuit was created at Emily Carr University by myself (Industrial Design student Dana Ramler), and MAA student Holly Schmidt.
Bio Circuit is a vest that provides a form of bio feedback using data from the wearer’s heart rate to determine what “sounds” they hear through the speaker embedded in the collar of the garment. The wearer places the heart rate monitor around the ribcage, resting against the skin and close to the heart. An MP3 audio player embedded in the vest plays the audio track related to that specific heart rate. The audio tracks are soundscapes mixed from a range of ambient sounds. If the wearer’s heart rate is low, the soundscape will reflect a quiet natural area with sounds such as water, birds and insects. If the wearer has a high heart rate then they will hear a cacophony of urban sounds such as people talking and traffic.
Bio Circuit stems from our concern for ethical design and the creation of media-based interactions that reveal human interdependence with the environment. With each beat of the heart, Bio Circuit connects the wearer with the inner workings of their body. In this sense the garment functions like other biofeedback devices that use sensors to provide a person with information about their physiological state. With Bio Circuit, we are proposing that these kinds of devices could extend a person’s awareness to include the environment.
* A special thank you to Suzi Webster, Bobbi Kozinuk, Emily Carr IDS, Bryan Rite and Angela Henderson.