Report: The "No One Opens Attachments Anymore" Paradigm

The workshop "No One Opens Attachments Anymore" would seem to have bitten off a great deal in its aim of bringing together scientists and artists for two days of ‘explorative activity and scientific inquiry’. Organisers InfoLab21 and folly rose to the challenge and provided us with an eclectic, entertaining, and inspirational workshop hosted at Lancaster University.

The two days were split into talks and a practical "build_IT" challenge, both of which reflected a carefully crafted mix of participants, based on background and experience. David Bruemmer scared us all with talks of robots developed at the US defence agency, DARPA, which could autonomously carry out their patriotic duty, and even 'take out' a falling coke can before it hit the ground. To a collective sigh of relief, it was revealed that many such robots can be immobilised by the careful placement of a jacket on their external sensors. For David, key issues in the design of new robots centre around human-robot interaction, and the development of trust between operator and autonomous agent.

Sean Collins explored the nature of trust further with his call for robot husbandry as a means for evolving new forms of robots – clearly a great amount of trust is needed between robot and human in such interactions.

Explorations of the nature of interaction moved on to human-human interaction with the work of Michael Hohl and Stuart Reeves on performer-interface-audience triads and the role of technology in developing experiential interaction, where evaluation moves away from task-focussed qualities. Here, it is the quality of the experience and interaction that drives design, and the motivation behind theoretical frameworks is an attempt model the qualities of interaction between participants so that we can understand what does, or does not, make for a good experience.

Kirsty Stansfield's artistic work "ariel - (brass) on interactive spaces" provided a link between scientific inquiry into human interaction and a practice-based understanding of space and our place in it. She presented a piece in which sound is produced by the position of people's bodies in the installation space, as well as their explicit interaction. Such works raise questions about people's role in performance and the conventionalised notion of audience versus performer - in this piece people start off as audience members, but become performers by virtue of their physical location and motion.

Similarly, Toby Hey's work on the "Infrasense" exhibition explored our views on virus culture and interaction in a physical space. The exhibit opened on the Friday night and consisted of 3ft tall "Trojan horses" made of bits of old computers moving hypnotically slowly across a room. Visitors could remotely control small bugs (also out of made of bits of old computers) which roamed around the space and caused the horses to stop and playback a recording of people talking about various kinds of virus.

The theme of viruses was carried forward in Roberta Buiani's discussion of viruses as discursive practice in which she explored the negative perception of viruses and argued for a more balanced and lucidly conceptual reformulation of what a virus is and does. Such a conception might give us new ways of formulating our interaction with others, and, as discussed in other parts of the workshop, could see the convergence of concepts of meme and virus.

Mark Smalley presented artistic work on technologically-mediated interaction through his piece "Double Talk" which explored telepresence by allowing participants to interact with others through the living image of their own bodies in a remote virtual world. This form of distant co-action was contrasted with Nick Bryan-Kinns' work on remote music collaboration where only participants' contributions (not the people themselves) are represented in the remote space. More subversively, Jenn Sheridan and .:thePooch:. presented work on HCI and live performance, discussing, for example the "Schizophrenic Cyborg" in which a performer has messages sent to a device located on his stomach as he interacts with an audience. These parasitically-constructed messages create a sometimes disturbing interaction in which participants question their own roles and preconceptions.

Steve Benford expanded this mixed reality theme with his overview of his experiences with projects such as "Desert Rain", and "Uncle Roy All Around You". Such pieces involve mixed reality gaming where players move around a large open space and are somehow chased by stationary game players. From a conceptual standpoint, he focussed on how in mixed reality environments technical failures such as WIFI cold spots could be used as design features, in this case enabling gamers to hide from each other. Again, we could use ideas about the relationships between performer, audience, and interfaces to help us understand what goes on in such interactions, and to help us imagine and develop new and engaging forms of interaction.

The talks covered a wide range of topics, but underlying them all was a common need for a means of understanding interaction between entities, and how our interactions create and mutate the way we are. The frequency of recurrence between the different disciplines of this point of enquiry was striking and raises the hope for more focussed collaborations between artists and scientists in exploring our experience of the world.

By now you may be wondering how these talks could possibly relate to a practical activity. The organisation of the "ScrapComp Challenge" this year was a masterstroke, with teams carefully made up from a range of backgrounds, and the requirement that all the ideas developed related were to the themes of the presented papers. The challenge itself was to design a "Beautiful Viral Campus" – something that would turn Lancaster's frankly hideous brutalist 1960s campus into a place of beauty, whilst focussing on the themes of human-human interaction and viruses.

The "Department of the Underpass" team proposed to take bits of lecture notes and photos of the environment around Lancaster to create a learning zone in the subway under the campus, mixing text and visuals to create a knowledge soup. This would infect buses with knowledge as they entered the subway, which would then be disseminated through the town itself using loud speakers. "Warren Peace" proposed webcams in rabbit warrens to convey the breeding aspect of University life, whilst the "Viral Graffiti" group proposed a system which would convert graffiti tags at bus stops into heat and vibration viruses. These viruses would then move around the interior of buses through the seats, with interesting effects.

The winner, the "TickleBot", proposed a robot which tickled students and then took a picture of them laughing. These images would virally reproduce in the aforementioned underpass to create a fun and amusing environment from what was previously a rather drab bus stop.

The challenge provided a fun and enlightening means of interacting with people of different disciplines, and to explore divergent perspectives in a carefully framed manner. Moreover, it allowed us time and space to reflect on, and explore, the themes of the workshop, so adding another layer of understanding.

All in all, "No One Opens Attachments Anymore" provided a two-day space for a mix of participants from different disciplines to come together, learn about each others' perspectives, and learn about their own discipline from a myriad of angles. Moving on, a new challenge would be to explore ways in which the divergent views on our interaction with each other could be used to inform new and conceptually powerful paradigms. This is a grand challenge indeed, and will surely only come about with further positive inter-disciplinary interaction.

Nick Bryan Kinns
Queen Mary, University of London

Photo courtesy of Michael Hohl

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