Rachel Jacobs

A conversation between trees: what data feels like in the forest

A study of an interactive artwork shows how artists engaged the public with scientific climate change data. The artwork visualised live environmental data collected from remote trees, alongside both historical and forecast global CO2 data. Visitors also took part in a mobile sensing experience in a nearby forest. Our study draws on the perspectives of the artists, visitors and a climate scientist to reveal how the work was designed and experienced. We show that the artists adopted a distinct approach that fostered an emotional engagement with data rather than an informative or persuasive one. We chart the performative strategies they used to achieve this including sensory engagement with data, a temporal structure that balanced liveness with slowness, and the juxtaposition of different treatments of the data to enable interpretation and dialogue.

‘Ere Be Dragons: heartfelt gaming

Abstract A new pervasive digital game is discussed, relating technical and conceptual innovation. A combination of sensor technologies enables a responsive visual and auditory environment to be overlaid on the real world. This allows processes within the players body to be mapped to the environment through which the player passes, externalising the internal. Rather than using technology to replicate the rigid goals and structures of many conventional games, this game explores the concept of ‘open play’, a form of personal exploration. The work is an interdisciplinary collaboration between digital artists and health scientists with an agenda to alter players’attitudes to the body and health as well as to break new ground artistically.

The Ethical Implications of HCI's Turn to the Cultural

We explore the ethical implications of HCIs turn to the ‘cultural’. This is motivated by an awareness of how cultural applications, in our case interactive performances, raise ethical issues that may challenge established research ethics processes. We review research ethics, HCIs engagement with ethics and the ethics of theatrical performance. Following an approach grounded in Responsible Research Innovation, we present the findings from a workshop in which artists, curators, commissioners, and researchers explored ethical challenges revealed by four case studies. We identify six ethical challenges for HCIs engagement with cultural applications: transgression, boundaries, consent, withdrawal, data, and integrity. We discuss two broader implications of these: managing tensions between multiple overlapping ethical frames; and the importance of managing ethical challenges during and after an experience as well as beforehand. Finally, we discuss how our findings extend previous discussions of Value Sensitive Design in HCI.

'Ere be dragons: an interactive artwork

The paper introduces a pervasive digital artwork which harnesses live heart-rate and GPS data to create a novel experience on a Pocket PC. The aims of the project, the technologies employed and the results of a preliminary trial are briefly described.

The timestreams platform: artist mediated participatory sensing for environmental discourse

Ubiquitous and pervasive computing techniques have been used to inform discourses around climate change and energy insecurity, traditionally through data capture and representation for scientists, policy makers and the public. Research into re-engaging the public with sustainability and climate change issues reveals the significance of emotional and personal engagement alongside locally meaningful, globally-relevant and data-informed climate messaging for the public. New ubiquitous and pervasive computing techniques are emerging to support the next generation of climate change stakeholders, including artists, community practitioners, educators and data hackers, to create scientific data responsive artworks and performances. Grounded in our experiences of community based artistic interventions, we explore the design and deployments of the Timestreams platform, demonstrating usages of ubiquitous and pervasive computing within these new forms of discourse around climate change and energy insecurity.

Behind The Scenes at HCI's Turn to the Arts

Since 2000, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has seen a turn to the artistic, looking at more provocative, cultural and social experiences. In doing so HCI is increasingly collaborating with artists who engage with real world data. Much of this work focuses on engaging the public in the spectacle of interactive experiences. In contrast, this paper takes a look behind the scenes by studying a collaboration between artists, climate scientists and researchers as they designed a participatory sensing system to interpret scientific data for public presentation. This paper presents this cross-disciplinary approach from the perspective of an artist/researcher on the project.

Them and Us: An indoor pervasive gaming experience

Abstract The emergence of pervasive technologies has led to an increased interest in both the design and the development of pervasive games. This paper presents “Them and Us”, an indoor pervasive game which uses theatrical processes to encourage social interaction within the confines of the game. The “Them and Us” game play places a group of people together in a single space to interact with one another, whilst location-based technology informs us about the locative-nature (who, where and when) of the social interactions formed while in that space, in order to score points based on this interaction. “Them and Us” adopts a narrative-based approach in which a script informs the way that participants play the game and the way their social behaviour, in regard to this becomes part of the game mechanism. This new genre of interactive game-based artwork intertwines the physical and virtual contexts of the players in order to create new and exciting player experiences. The design of “Them and Us” emphasizes the use of tracking the audience and performers as a way to encourage interaction within the game-space.

Digital Participation Through Artistic Interventions

Abstract This chapter highlights how a human focused approach to fostering digital participation engaged local communities and schools with issues of sustainability and climate change. We describe a series of four socially engaged, interactive artistic interventions that took place across forests, urban and rural environments in the United Kingdom and Brazil between 2009 and 2015. These projects used sensing and online technologies to exchange information between communities in the United Kingdom and Brazil to engage with their local environments, presenting a framework that focused on the human element of human–computer interaction specifically supporting sensory and embodied experiences of scientific data. These approaches encourage digital inclusion and interdisciplinary thinking about local and global issues of deforestation and climate change. The authors argue that an abundance of opportunities, networks and local knowledge can be mediated through both digital and analogue technologies, in order to provide truly ‘lived’ experiences of environmental and digital participation.