Meet the Artists: Music, Dance, and Painting

Mathematicians pursue the perfect theory; engineers, the perfect tool; designers, the perfect experience; and tech artists … well, tech artists are a class unto themselves.

From the perspective of the artist, you’ll have difficulty making the case that directing a virtual orchestra is a richer experience than collaborating with a physical one, or that responding to a virtual dance partner is any more fulfilling than interacting with a real one. This virtual dancer may have learned to listen to the beat, to lead, and to follow, but can she catch your eye from the other side of the dance floor, flash a curious smile, and lure you onto the dance floor in the first place? (…Well, maybe at CHI she can!)

From the perspective of the technologist, don’t even try to argue that mapping a two-dimensional painting into three-dimensional polygons and animating them is anything new. See, tech artists fall in this mysterious space in between anything else at CHI – some would say above. The problem we face is that we are fumbling across one of the most controversial borders between any two fields of study: the line between technology and art. We catch glimpses of a truly immersive, aesthetic personal experience, yet we are always teetering on the brink of what is technically possible. We are limited.

As a result, we study a painting whose characters respond to the movements of our eyes, like the tiny water vessels that sometimes float on the surface of your eye, but disappear if you look at them too long. We watch characters from Hiroshige’s Evening Snow at Kanbara inch across the page.

And yet, through these faltering first steps, we see images of the future: walking through a watercolour painting like Robin Williams in What Dreams May Come or dance that drives music, in the way that music now drives dance, like one of those stand-up comedy acts incorporating sound effects.

We can talk about these things at CHI because, unlike many technologists, we do care about the ‘soft’ topics, like emotion and culture and aesthetics. We strive for a more holistic view of technology and what technology should enable.

But we are not artists. If we were, then these panels would be about the aesthetic composition, about balance and mood and effect. They would be made up of artists baring their souls, and the questions would be, “Who was your inspiration? How did you make this journey?” instead of “Why don’t you use this technology for this other application?”

This session is not about art, and it’s definitely not about technology.
It’s about inspiration.