A-Life sculpture: eliciting complex interactions

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Joint Project SummaryNew Media artist Nell Tenhaaf will work with computer scientist Dr. Melanie Baljko to create public interactive scenarios. In these scenarios, humans will interact with one or more artificial agents, each of whose embodiment consists of electronic components (e.g. arrays of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), 2-channel audio displays). Low-fidelity embodiments such as these have been deliberately selected for the project; they serve to depict agents using abstracted form and to engage interactants at a level that is more conceptually fundamental than that which is engaged in interactions with animated, cartoon-like characters. We plan to devise mechanisms whereby the human interactant will discover that one of the artificial agents in the population actually is representative of him- or herself. Further, this "interactant-representative" agent mediates the human user's communication with other agents in the population. All agents in the population will make use of multiple modes of articulation: the human will employ modes such as touch, voice, proximity and kinesthetics, and text; the agents will employ the mode of "gesture" (afforded by its pixellated display of multicoloured lights) and the mode of sound articulation. The interactive structure that emerges will be the product of the collective activity of the interactants, so that they each function as co-creator of a dynamic artwork. The novelty and innovation of this work will lie in the structure of the elicited communicative processes; the structure will feature adaptation of the agents and the human interactant to one another and conversational turn-taking, the elicitation of such structure is an artistic endeavour. In addition, such structure will support the hypothesis that it is the behaviour of an agent, and not its embodiment, that serves to trigger the attribution of communicative intention by human users to artificial agents, a finding that is highly relevant to human-computer interaction research. Tenhaaf and Baljko, building upon their previous work, will jointly develop the computational techniques for building the interactive scenarios, the algorithms for responding to the user's input, the agent architecture, and the visual and other sensory strategies for engaging people in communication processes.