Camille Utterback gave a talk at UC Berkeley on Monday. A digital artist, pioneer of interactive video art, and one of last month’s awardees of a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. “genius grant”), Camille got her start in digital art at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. There, with Romy Achituv, she created her first interactive video installation, “Text Rain,” in 1999.
Utterback’s talk was titled “Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey.” I want to share some of her thoughts here, because many of them are right in line with my own recent thinking. The following items are highly paraphrased from my notes during the talk.
Utterback writes all of her own code, mostly in C++, but also uses Processing to sketch ideas.
In computational media, the rules are implicit and hidden. When the user has to deduce the rules, the interaction may be frustrating. When not frustrating, though, this quality can make for a beautiful process of discovery.
Always avoid “one liners.” Make sure your work has enough conceptual complexity to stand the test of time.
Consider how an installation affects your physical body — are you looking up? down? arching your back? bending toward the floor? Notice what emotions and behaviors we associate with those positions. (Eyes cast downward, for example, indicates shame. Looking straight ahead indicates engagement.) Don’t make the user uncomfortable, unless you are trying to make the user uncomfortable.
It is very important to do user testing. When coding, you are writing rules that define the accepted parameters of user behavior. Not everyone will behave as you do, so test to make sure your rules are flexible enough to work for others.
Using camera input automatically makes a piece social. People will move in front of the camera with others, interact with each other and the piece, and create their own meanings from the interaction.
People intuitively understand how to move and interact with mirrored video, by virtue of experience in the physical world (i.e. using mirrors). Think about how to translate other shared physical experiences into intuitive, digital interface mechanisms.
Utterback tries to bridge the gap between the “fleshy world” of the body and the rules-based world of the computer.
Her work in drawing systems (such as the piece Untitled #5) contains many hand-drawn elements, overlaid with digital manipulations. (Not all the forms are code-generated.)
This kind of work is fun, because people move in goofy ways, like kids.
