We’re extending the deadline for our workshop at the Creativity & Cognition conference to 4/20. If you’re a creator who enjoys analyzing your own creative practice, a designer seeking to parameterize the design space for creative tools, or a researcher interested in the interplay of artistic process and scientific methodology, please submit! We have some funds available for struggling students, too.

Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination

UPDATE: Funding support (for conference fees & travel) is available for all accepted position statements.

Extended Deadline: CFP due April 20th, 2007.

Artists, philosophers, and scientists have been developing conceptual models of creativity for centuries. Yet developers of media art and technology are often accused of interfering with ‘the creative process’ when they rely on such formalisms to guide their designs. This workshop will look at creativity as a collection of conceptual models for the construction and dissemination of media arts, music, performance, and tools. We are interested in conceptualizations that explicitly or implicitly inform the system design and may be realized in part or whole in a system. These conceptualizations may have originated with philosophers (e.g. Hegel and Dewey), artists (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp), or scientists looking at cognitive, social, and computational aspects of creativity.

Furthermore, with new media, the distinctions between creator-centric and experiencer-centric creativity are blurring. Practically, this blurring results in an endlessly evolving stream of artifacts that are “finished” when their participatory roles are fulfilled. This raises questions about where the creative act begins and ends, and has implications for the design of tools to support creative work, as well as for the creative work itself, from art installations where the participants can shape the work’s meaning and purpose to new educational tools and environments that seek to introduce learners to creative collaboration. This conflation of the role of creator and experiencer forces us to reconsider models that cleanly separate the two and to seek out new models in which the “user” takes on a creative role, not just an interpretive or interactive one.

This workshop presents the design of several contemporary creative models for new media in theory and in practice. The primary goal is to foster multidisciplinary communication and collaboration by discussing implementable models of creative acts. The workshop will provide an opportunity to present and discuss:

• New models and novel combinations of existing models
• Critiques of existing models
• Examples (successful or unsuccessful) of applications of creative models
• Applications and/or installations which embed or embody specific models for creativity
• Qualitative studies of creative processes

The focus will be on bridging creative theory and creative practice with practical applications for creative arts and technology, from installations to the tools that support them. Along the way, we hope to develop new models for understanding creative processes in which participants and creators are one and the same.

Radical techno-fundamentalist Kevin Kelly has posted another manifesto that is quite remarkable (even in the context of Kelly’s mindbogglingly uncritical body of work) for its steadfast refusal to acknowledge that a research program might somehow be misguided. Kelly never ceases flogging the idea that if a computer scientist is working on something, then it is our future: not a possible future, but the future. The research program in this case is the continuous archiving and retrieval of personal experience, which Kelly refers to as “lifelogging.” (This terminology is presumably in accordance with the Wired magazine style manual, which requires that any technology or practice deemed to be “inevitable” be given a catchy name of the form [noun + verb + ing], see e.g. crowdsourcing.)

Kelly begins by extolling the glorious benefits lifelogging will bring. Then he gives example after example of lifelogging failing to be useful or usable. But no matter! For true believers like Kelly, failures are just speedbumps on the road to guaranteed success. One is reminded of our president’s similar blindness to failure or mistakes of any kind as he stares into the bright shining light of his desired future. The strong evidence that lifelogging isn’t needed, isn’t wanted, and doesn’t solve the problems it claims to solve is irrelevant, because lifelogging is “inevitable” and will soon be “pervasive.” “Skeptics” might complain, and might even try to prohibit lifelogging, but these naysayers should be ignored. Kelly’s message is that resistance is futile, so we might as well begin adapting our laws, culture and norms now.

But resistance is not futile, and CARPE technologies are not inevitable. People can and, I expect, will reject lifelogging, for the very reasons that Kelly cites in his article. The central flaw in Kelly’s reasoning (other than his rampant technical determinism) is a belief in “information” as some phlogiston-like magical substance that will, if gathered in sufficient quantities, empower us to live better lives. But as Daniel Yankelovich argues in Coming to Public Judgment, what people lack is not information, but the realization that they can exert influence over the world in which they live. Kelly is ready to cede this influence entirely to the computer scientists and product developers at Microsoft. I am not.

I like working with cool people. So if you’re cool, and you’re a person (who is still a student and will be in the Bay Area next week), you should some to the Yahoo! Research Berkeley Open House next Friday and bring your resume. I’ll be standing by the punch bowl.

The final day of the main program of ACM Multimedia was satisfying enough to convince me to try to come back next year. Highlight of the morning was a presentation by researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, who demoed a system which analyzed chat logs to create highlight summaries of live broadcast events. Basically, they looked at chatroom activity during live broadcasts of American football games, and looked for spikes in the rate at which messages were posted. They also recognized emoticons to determine positive or negative affect. They used the resulting data to pick out segments of the broadcast program which corresponded to these positive or negative spikes. By doing so they could create overall highlight summaries or ones geared to particular social groups (my team’s highlight may be your team’s lowlight). A simple idea, but not one I’ve seen actually implemented before.

Photo courtesy of Ramesh Jain’s Flickr feed.

In the afternoon Hongjiang Zhang of Microsoft Research Asia, Ramesh Jain of UC Irvine, Alberto Del Bimbo of the University of Firenze, my advisor Marc Davis, and Rainer Leinhart of the University of Augsburg (shown from left to right, not including Dr. Zhang) debated about the foundations of multimedia computing. This was interesting to me not so much because of the what was being discussed (though that was interesting too), but because it was an opportunity to observe the dynamics of a particular research community. Like my “home” field of information science, the multimedia community struggles with the challenges and opportunities of “interdisciplinary” work, and many of the concerns raised and possible solutions offered at the panel echoed things I hear around SIMS. Ramesh also commented on the panel at his blog, suggesting that the multimedia community is in its “teenage” years.

Later I had tea at the Raffles Hotel with Frank Nack, Dick Bulterman, Wolf-Tilo Balke, and Milena Radenkovic. I was especially glad to have had the chance to talk to Milena a bit about her projects at the Mixed Reality Lab, including a new effort to involve millions of cameraphone users as frontline collectors of scientific data. And of course it was great to have a chance to catch up with Frank again.

All in all it was a good conference and worth the trip. I’ll definitely try to make it to next year’s conference in Santa Barbara, hopefully to present a long paper…

Well, Day 2 of the conference wasn’t nearly as interesting as Day 1, unfortunately, and I don’t really have any particular highlights to point to. I did however have a nice long chat with Lynda Hardman of CWI, who in addition to being involved in some fascinating “multimedia meets the Semantic Web” research also turns out to be very cool. Oh, and the Garage Cinema Research MMM2 video won the award for Best Video of the conference.

I’m currently in Singapore for the ACM Multimedia conference, presenting some of my work on anime music video editors (“Toward Emergent Representations for Video”) and Organum (“Individual Presence through Collaborative Play”). Today was the opening day of the conference, and already I’ve met enough interesting people to have made the trip worthwhile.

This morning was the Brave New Topics session on Multimedia Challenges for Planetary Scale Applications, which took a very broad view of the design space around multimedia sensor networks. Phil Gibbons of Intel Research kicked things off by discussing IrisNet, an open-source software infrastructure for turning ordinary networked webcams into global monitoring systems. Next a representative from Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab discussed the challenges raised by pervasive gaming.

What struck me about the these two presentations was how closely the IrisNet system architecture mirrored the social structure of pervasive gaming events proposed by the Mixed Reality Lab folks. IrisNet separates nodes into a large number of “sensors” and a smaller number of “organizers,” with the former gathering data at the edges of the network and passing it up to the latter for further processing. Similarly, the MRL designers see the roles of pervasive gamers as a pyramid structure, with wide but shallow public participation at the bottom, a smaller number of more engaged interest groups or enthusiasts in the middle, and a small number of experts at the top. Clearly this model applies to more than just pervasive games: similar patterns have been reported in open source software projects and Wikipedia. Even unmediated.org can be viewed in these terms: I am a del.icio.us-addicted “sensor” madly recording all that interests me, while Kenyatta is an “organizer” curating feeds for wider consumption.

The highlight of the afternoon was the presentation by Atau Tanaka of Sony CSL Paris, who talked about his work on Malleable Mobile Music and a web-based tool for collaboratively remixing Creative Commons-licensed audio. I had read about Tanaka’s work before, but he was even more interesting in person and seems to be deeply interested in the social dynamics of groups interacting with media–somewhat of a rarity at ACM Multimedia, unfortunately. Definitely one to watch.

Garage Cinema Research and Yahoo! Research Berkeley were well represented the first day as well: in addition to my posters, there were tech demos of PhotoRouter and Photo LOI and a video presentation of the MMM2 project. In the evening Yahoo! paid for beers at a poolside reception in which we madly tried to recruit the best and brightest of the ACM MM crowd, a shameless gambit which will hopefully pay off in a great crop of interns next summer.

I’ll be posting highlights from the remainder of the conference over the next few days. In the meantime you can check out the Flickr photostream for the conference, which is looking a bit anemic at the moment, but should fill out as people get some time to upload their photos.

Today brings the official announcement of Yahoo! Research Labs Berkeley, an experiment in which we’ll see what happens when we take the mobile media and social media research we’ve been doing at Garage Cinema and supercharge it with Yahoo! brains and backing.

This is really exciting: it means that great ideas from Garage Cinema, unmediated, and elsewhere will have a chance to be implemented and deployed to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Even better, Yahoo! is committed to making the Berkeley Lab a place for open, collaborative research–meaning we can publish and exchange ideas with colleagues at Berkeley and everywhere else. It’s a fantastic opportunity, and I feel lucky to be a part of it.

So next time you’re in Berkeley, stop by the Lab and say hi!