CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Late-Breaking/Short Talks
CollageMachine: Temporality and Indeterminacy in Media Browsing via Interface Ecology
Andruid Kerne
NYU Media Research Lab
719 Broadway, 12th Floor
New York, NY, 10003 USA
andruid@cat.nyu.edu
http://cat.nyu.edu/andruid/
Creating Media
519 W. 26th Street, Suite 5000
New York, NY 10001
andruid@dti.net
http://www.creatingmedia.com
ABSTRACT
CollageMachine synthesizes artistic and computational
practices in order to represent media from the World Wide Web
(WWW). It functions as a process-based art work, and as a special
browser which can be useful for searching. Media elements are
pulled from Web pages and composed into a collage which evolves
over time. The evolving art work / browsing session can be shaped
by the user. The temporal composition of the collage develops
with relation to its visual composition and semantic content.
The CollageMachine engine combines structured randomness and the
user's expression of preferences and interests with design rules
and semantic rules to make decisions about the collage's layout,
and about which media to retrieve. My approach in blending music
composition strategies, visual art aesthetics, and computer science
techniques into this interactive environment arises through application
of the theory of
Interface Ecology.
Keywords
World Wide Web, temporality, indeterminacy, visual design,
entertainment, interface ecology, interaction design,
interaction paradigms, design techniques, Web browsers
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
INTERFACE ECOLOGY
Interface ecology intermeshes thinking from different
disciplines. To act ecologically is to develop one's work as
part of an open environment, rather than stuck in the box of this
or that discipline. I am drawn to the WWW as a venue, because
a large audience may be reached, and as a medium, because so many
objets trouves (found objects) are available for reassembly.
I began to create a conceptual interface between the practices
and ways of thinking of computer science, visual art, and music
composition by asking myself the question, "How will I compose
in the medium of the World Wide Web?" In conceptualizing
CollageMachine, I have employed stock postmodern art methods,
such as indeterminacy and the use of found objects. These methods
were first suggested by the Dada artists, Trstin Tzara and Marcel
Duchamp, and developed by Max Ernst, John Cage, and others [5,
1].
Temporal Composition
Cage introduced indeterminacy to the musical processes
of composition, and performance [1]. His "Imaginary Landscapes"
features an ensemble of performers, each of whom turns the dial
on a radio for some period of time, waits for a period of time,
then continues. The times for each performer were predetermined
by a chance procedure. CollageMachine is a sort of "Imaginary
Landscapes" translated, in which instead of using radios,
I use the WWW, or some relational database, as the source for
media. The user-responsive performance is carried out by software.
No two CollageMachine performances are alike.
Traditionally, the work of a composer is to create
temporal structures with sound. In CollageMachine, it is a visual
presentation which develops over time. While the user may influence
this process, it can proceed with or without user interaction.
Media elements which may be images or chunks of text are added
to screen in a definite rhythm. Digital media naturally afford
this new ability to compose visual work which is temporal.
Visual Design
Visual arts principles are active in CollageMachine
algorithms. The algorithm which makes choices about color uses
indeterminacy and interprets Johannes Itten's theory of color
design [3] to implement harmony and contrast. Objects are sized
and placed with a fuzzy sense of proportion in order to develop
coherence in their layout. By necessity, the visual media elements
may overlap, and build up layers, as the screen can be easily
filled in the course of a collage episode.
COMPUTATIONAL METHODS
Structured randomness in CollageMachine is implemented
via methods from computer graphics. The Perlin Noise function
is used as a source of smoothly varying pseudo random numbers
[4]. I also use Perlin's intuitive functions for tweaking values,
bias and gain, in order to create procedural expressions which
cluster randomness around or at extremes from a mean.
Each collage episode is seeded with the URL of an
HTML file. CollageMachine begins by parsing this file into a
set of text chunks, and image URLs. The images are downloaded.
Files pointed to by links are also downloaded and the process
continues recursively, as in Web crawlers like the Xerox Web Forager
[2]. The multithreaded Java implementation of CollageMachine
permits the visual evolution of the collage, the parsing of HTML,
and the downloading of media to proceed concurrently as soon as
the first HTML file has arrived and been partially parsed.
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
I have extended my composition for the medium of
the WWW with user-centered interactive features. The work of
art becomes a tool.
 |
The most basic interactive mechanism provided
by CollageMachine is goto mode. In goto mode, when a user clicks
on an element of the collage, a new Netscape browser window opens,
displaying the media element in its original context or following
a link. |
 |
At this time, in its early development, the GUI also
provides the user with simple mechanisms for expressing interest
or disinterest in collage elements which are on the screen. An
element may be brought to the top or removed from the collage.
|
These actions influence the CollageMachine engine's choices in
prioritizing media elements for continued downloading and presentation.
Development of sophistication in CollageMachine's choices of
priority for downloading, through user interest advisor agents,
is a future direction for this work.
APPLICATION DOMAINS
The collage which evolves over time is a new paradigm
for multimedia content browsing. The goal of CollageMachine is
to create a user experience of the WWW which is both entertaining
and useful. I want, on the one hand, to appeal to the video game
crowd of young channel-surfers. I offer an environment in which
no two visits to a Web page are ever the same. I would like to
create a sense for the user of the Web as a collage geography
which one can steer through by indicating affinity or disinterest
in various content.
CollageMachine also wants to appeal to people who
are using the Web as a research tool. By initiating a CollageMachine
session with a page which is the result of a search engine query,
CollageMachine can deliver the results as a visual assemblage.
Indeterminate strategies for sifting through search data offer
the possibility of unexpected experiences which can stimulate
creative thoughts, like those which arise by chance occurrences
while browsing library stacks. A browsable collage is also an
ideal way to use computing resources after initiating a search,
and while pausing to perform some other task or get a cup of coffee.
CollageMachine principals are appropriate for application
to a wide range of data banks, including CD-ROMs. A multimedia
kiosk could display its wares in an ambient collage presentation
in the absence of user-input.
CollageMachine practices interface ecology by combining
a creative, artistic process, and an analytic, scientific process
to create an entertaining and useful media environment. Interface
ecology treats the many factors which are active when human beings
meet computers as phenomena of culture. As the Greek root of
ecology, oikos, means house, so the framework of interface
ecology builds a perspective which brings the study of the ensemble
of mutually interactive interdependent layers of culture which
live in any human computer interface, and the manifold disciplines
essential to understanding them together into one house. In CollageMachine,
the principles of interface ecology find form and come alive.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My interface ecology research is supported by the
NYU Media Research Lab, the Courant Institute for Mathematics
and Sciences, National Science Foundation Grant GER-9454173, and
Creating Media. This development of this article has benefited
from on-going dialogue with Ken Perlin, Richard Schechner, Barbara
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, and Melissa Lang. CollageMachine graphic
design is by Cathy Lynn Gasser, who also contributes to the visual
design of the collages.
REFERENCES
- Cage, John. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press. 1961.
- Card, Stuart, Robertson, George, and York, William.
"The WebBook and the Web Forager: An Information Workspace
for the World-Wide Web". In Human Factors in Computing
Systems. Common Ground: CHI 96 Conference Proceedings. Reading,
MA: Addison Wesley. 1996.
- Itten, Johannes. The Elements of Color.
New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. 1970.
- Perlin, Ken. "Noise, Hypertexture, Antialiasing
and Gesture" in Ebert, David et al. Texture and Modeling:
A Procedural Approach. New York: Academic Press. 1994.
- Spies, Werner. Max Ernst Collages: The Invention
of the Surrealist Universe. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1988.
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CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Late-Breaking/Short Talks
