What if a 10eyed Alien

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What if a 10-eyed Alien Lived in Your House?
This is not a horror movie.
Zachary Pousman Mario Romero Michael Mateas
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Alien Presence

• An alien presence is
• an intelligent interactive art installation
• a first-class social entity in its environment
• Open to co-interpretation
• Users interpret the system
• The system interprets the peoples activity

Artifacts of the Presence Era Viegas, Perry, Howe
Office Plant 1 Bolen and Mateas
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Not (HCI) Business as Usual

• From HCI
• Useful but not a productivity enhancer
• From UbiComp
• Everywhere but not big brother
• From Artificial Intelligence
• Complex Interesting Emergent but not AI
  Complete

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Tableau Machine Details Sensing
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Tableau Machine Details Interpretations
Qualitative observationsversus Quantitative
Measures

• Social Energy
• Social Density
• Social Flow

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Tableau Machine Details Productions
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Elements of Composition Mapping

• Direction
• Horizontal, Vertical, Oblique
• Color (palettes)
• Calm, Quiet, energetic
• Dominance
• Hi, Med, Low
• Number of Shapes
• 4 to 20 or more
• Shape Selection
• Circles versus rectangles

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Generativity with a Rule System

• Forward Chaining Rule System
• LHS (conditions) and RHS (actions)
• Example Rule
• (defrule propose_rect_right
• (shape ?x(lt ?x 700) ?y ?sizer ?r ?g ?b
  ?theta)
• gt
• (assert (proposed_rectangle ?x ( ?y ( 60
  ?sizer)) (randomRange 1 3) ?r ?g ?b 0)))

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Current Work / Future Work

• Evaluation
• Short-term - Just completed
• Longer term experiences - but what to measure?
• Changes to the Tableau Machine
• Generativity
• Constraints to make good art?
• New kinds of displays, other social environments

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Thanks!

• Questions?
• Some further reading
• Dourish, Paul - Where the Action is
• Agre, Phillip - Computation and Human Experience
• Nelson Goodman - Languages of Art
• Höök, K., Sengers, P. and Andersson, G., Sense
  and sensibility evaluation and interactive art
  (CHI 2003)