2008-11-14 Wight

seminar

courses people research connect directions

CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public

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Gail Wight

Stanford Art Dept.

Unreasonable Interactions

November 14, 2008

Human Computer Interaction is increasingly engaged with the social-cultural context that people live in everyday. The city, in all its grit and glory, provides a complex and rich context in which to understand the challenges technologies face when they are adopted by people in the real world. In this presentation, I discuss three on-going research initiatives from my group at Cornell Tech in New York City which grapple with interaction in the urban context: Trashbots in the City, Urban Fingerprinting, and Communal eXtended Reality. These projects highlight different aspects of urban interaction--culture, scale, engagement--which demand new approaches from researchers and practitioners in HCI. In this talk, I will also champion the perspectives that HCI brings to the already crowded urban landscape.

Artist <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~gailw">Gail Wight</a> investigates issues of biology and the history of science and technology. Her work engages the cultural impact of scientific practice, and plays with our constant redefinition of self through our epistemologies. Gail Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Wight has exhibited her work internationally, in both science and art museums. She has worked for a research project on cognition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Exploratorium's Performance Program, and has held residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, at Capp Street Project, the Exploratorium, the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is on the faculty of Stanford University’s Department of Art & Art History, where she teaches Experimental Media Arts.