Golan Levin
Looking at Looking at Looking
Date 3/10/08
Affiliation Artist, Associate Professor of Electronic Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
Abstract
Much consideration has been given to the idea (in, for example, Reader-response criticism) that the gaze of the viewer is the force by which artworks become constituted. Yet most interactive artworks to date have lacked fundamental information about where their participants' visual attention is actually directed. Likewise, many of our richest models for interactivity are grounded in notions of mammalian facial behavior -- to understand an animal, we look into its eyes -- yet the powerful expressive affordances of eyes, as a form of dynamic display, are almost never granted to interactive artworks. What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond if they could look back at us?
This talk will present a survey of Golan Levin's personal research into the "medium of response", with consideration given to the conditions that enable people to experience sustained creative feedback with reactive systems; to the potential for audiovisual abstraction to connect viewers to realities beyond language; and more generally, to information visualization as a mode of art practice. The talk concludes with a presentation of Levin's most recent attempts to create engrossing and uncanny interactions structured by gaze: by endowing responsive artworks with new perceptive capacities -- the ability to know where we are looking -- and new expressive means, through simulated eyes that can return and meet our own.
Bio
Golan Levin is an artist/engineer interested in the exploration of new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into formal languages of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity. He is Associate Professor of Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
-- As of 3/10/08