Session Chair:

The Gardens of Desire and Beyond: a 3D Real Time Art "Game" Project in Progress
Marianne Selsjord,
Norwegian State Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway

A Fine Arts experimental interactive project, using a 3D independent game engine as basis for developing 7 virtual interconnected "gardens", which can be explored by an audience. Partially based on Hieronymus Boschs surreal painting "The Garden of Desire". Will be mainly shown as a room installation, on a semi circular screen, projected through 3 projectors from one PC, with a graphic card with 3 video outlets.(sourround gaming principle).Originally composed electroaccoustic music is part of the project,(sourround, 3D sound). An original designed wireless physical ïnterface will be used to navigate through virtual space. The project has partially been financed by the Arts Council, Norway.

LifeClipper
Jan Torpus, Vera Bühlmann
University of Art and Design Basle, Suisse

lifeClipper is an outdoor art project, which aims at exploring new design pattern languages in the field of augmented realities through ambient computing. A new quality in perception emerges through manipulating a live streamed scene with various real-time-rendered filters, scenes, 2D and 3D pictorial information, and sound. The new quality in experience, as reported by many lifeClipper users, gives rise to some more fundamental considerations about the nature of data, mediation, objectivity, sensation, and the virtual. It is argued, along with authors like Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres, that the virtual should not simply be equated with the artificial, the digital, or the possible for the challenge virtuality poses is to view mediation not as opposed to the immediate, but in their mutual interplay and complementarity - in their convolutions.

Multisensory Interactive Installation
*Daniela Voto, **Manuel V. Limonchi, ***Umberto D’Auria.
*University of Florence, Italy,
**University of Granada, Spain,
***Mozartstudios Association Salerno, Italy.

This paper presents the 'Multisensory Interactive Installation', a musical interactive installation based on Kandinsky's paintings, through which the user can become a painter and a composer. The painting's visual elements are synesthetically linked to musical elements: each color is linked to a specific instrument and chord and the shapes are linked to a specific rhythm. The users can explore and manipulate the visual elements through the music, construct and deconstruct the art piece and/or create a new work, and musical composition. The choice and the organisation of given visual-acoustic elements will determinate a different musical atmosphere. The methodology implemented in the system, the correspondence between color and sound, visual and acustic elements, is based on the neuroscientific researches of synesthesia, the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association.

The Virtual Real-Time Dramaturge: Formalisation of Dramaturgic Principles
*Richard WAGES, **Alexander HORNUNG
*NOMADS Lab, Germany,
**Computer Graphics Group, RWTH Aachen, Germany

Compared to classic media like movies or theatre interactive digital productions in the field of entertainment computing like VR environments and computer games are typically lacking sophistication in their dramaturgic arrangement. While hardware and network technologies are rapidly gaining quality and speed we cannot observe remarkable improvements in the ability of interactive productions and formats to create empathy. Classical dramaturgic methods for the presentation of conflicts or dramatic situations frequently fail in interactive environments. Often dramaturgy and interactivity are hence labelled as contradicting concepts. In this paper we discuss important aspects of the implicit conflicts on different levels and propose new approaches to solve them. In contrast to previous work, our goal is to facilitate the understanding of dramaturgy in interactive, digital applications from a more general standpoint as a presentation strategy rather than a 'grand unifying theory'. We clarify our arguments by the description of a successful implementation.

Generative Portrait Sketching
Patrick Tresset, Frederic Fol Leymarie
Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

We consider the problem of generating art with a computer system, as it relates to the understanding of a drawing style. Our system is able to sketch faces automatically, starting from a picture, typically a photographic snapshot of a scene with humans. Once a digital image is considered, the system automatically finds where faces (or face-like patterns) are and isolate these. Each face image pattern is then used to produce a stylized portrait. The style which the system aims at using is derived from the one the first author has developed over the years in his artistic practice. The goal is for the system to mimic the process developed by the artist, rather than aiming at results exactly reproducing his way of drawing a portrait. Nevertheless, the produced sketches are in the style of the artist. Various steps in the process of producing a sketch by the artist were isolated, and each one reproduced in an algorithmic way, to allow the computer system to mimic the stylized drawing process. These steps include: salient structure detection, image segmentation, filtering, shape selection and depiction, drawing gestures along main shape features, filling and shading, final rendering. The implementation of these steps relies on an understanding of human visual perception, of the artist's work process, and of advances made in computer vision.

Some generated portraits of participants of VSMM2005.