topical media & game development
representation & interaction
<recordList>
<record creation="1070031329" modification="1107262576">
<priref>1001000025</priref>
<input.time>10:22:05</input.time>
<edit.time>13:55:55</edit.time>
<related>1001000019</related>
<edit.name>Tatja.Scholte</edit.name>
<input.name>bb-05</input.name>
<edit.date>2005-02-01</edit.date>
<input.date>2002-10-09</input.date>
<contributor.domain>organisation</contributor.domain>
<publisher.domain>organisation</publisher.domain>
<creator.domain>organisation</creator.domain>
<title>Conservation record for Antony Gormley's 'Untitled (For Francis)', 1985</title>
<subject>Gormley, Antony</subject>
<subject>mixed media</subject>
<subject_type>artist</subject_type>
<subject_type>artist_material</subject_type>
<publisher.role>museum</publisher.role>
<rights>TATE, Conservation Department. Please contact Publisher</rights>
<relation>www.tate.org.uk/search/default.jsp</relation>
<contributor.role>museum</contributor.role>
<creator.role>conservation department</creator.role>
<publisher>TATE, Conservation Department</publisher>
<language>English</language>
<identifier>Tate</identifier>
<identifier>T05004</identifier>
<form.type>Report</form.type>
<format>Word</format>
<format>Print</format>
<format>Photograph (black-and-white)</format>
<description>The Tate's conservation record for Antony Gormley's 'Untitled (For Francis)', 1985,
includes a record of examination, a structure and condition report,
handling and installation notes, a record of treatment,
information concerning display and installation, as well as photographs of the work.
</description>
<date>2002-10-08</date>
<coverage>UK</coverage>
<content.type>Artist's technique</content.type>
<content.type>Conservation</content.type>
<content.type>Display/Installation</content.type>
<content.type>Artist's material</content.type>
<contributor>TATE, Conservation Department</contributor>
<creator>TATE, Conservation Department</creator>
</record>
</recordList>
further research
Contemporary art is an intrinsic part of our cultural heritage.
Installations, performances, video and other forms of media art,
as for example
web art, have the interest of a small
group of adherents, but are in comparison with more traditional
art forms, far more difficult to present to a general audience.
Another problem presents itself, due to the type of materials
used and the context-specific aspects of these art forms,
in the conservation of the works.
In our research we address the issue of providing access
to these contemporary art forms from a wide variety
of perspectives, ranging from the interested layman
to the expert that has to deal with archiving,
conserving and the possible re-installation of the art works.
Our research is centered around the notion of digital dossier,
that is the collection of information needed to (properly)
understand one or more works of art in the context of the oeuvre
of the artist.
The information consists of descriptive text, images depicting
the work(s), and possibly video registrations as well as
interviews with the artist.
From the perspective of the expert, in charge of conserving
the work(s), the dossier must contain all the information needed
for (proper) re-installation.
For the presentation of the digital dossier
we deploy a rich media presentation environment
with which we gained ample experience in our
research in intelligent multimedia [IMVU],
among others in previous pilots with ICN,
in which we realized such environments for
the Dutch artist Marinus Boezem and the Serbian-Dutch
artist Marina Abramovic.
In our present research we will focus in particular
on intelligent navigation and interaction
with the (presentation environment of the) digital dossier.
Due to the wish and need to
support the use of the dossier from a variety of perspectives,
the presentation environment must offer a multitude of
potential interaction scenarios, and accomodate the needs
of the variety of users in an intelligent fashion.
An essential part of intelligent interaction is provided
by the possibility to give assignments in loosely
structured natural language, to query for particular aspects
of the work, as for example properties of the materials
that are used, or to specify desires
with respect to the presentation of the information offered.
In summary, from a research perspective we address the following
issues:
research issues
- representation of information of one or multiple works
of art in a digital dossier,
- presentation of that information in a
rich media presentation environment,
- intelligent navigation and interaction, and
- support for interaction with loosely-structured
natural language.

The results of our research will on the one hand contribute to making
contemporary art forms accessible to a larger audience
and on the other hand are explicitly meant
to support the complex task of the conservation
and re-installation of works of art in an effective manner.
scientific aspects
The presentation of information in a 3D environment
will not be the central focus of our research.
Instead we will concentrate on navigation and interaction,
and support for interaction with natural language.
In addition, we will tackle issues of representation of information
and investigate a generic approach to the construction of
digital dossiers.
We will now discuss possible solutions and the scientific
aspects related to the topics of, respectively,
navigation, natural language and intelligent guidance
seperately.
navigation:
Given the complexity of the information space related to a work
of art, interactive facilities must be provided
for the user to gain a quick overview of the information
available as well as the means to deepen the inspection rapidly,
avoiding needless and cumbersome detours.
At the same time, the user must be allowed to inspect
the (multimedia) material related to the work of art,
such as a collection of images or video recordings.
To accommodate the complex structure of the information space
we have developed a 3D representation of a concept graph,
a semantic device well-known from artificial intelligence,
which allows the user to expand a node representing
a particular concept or aspect into a collection of related
nodes.
Moreover, for the presentation of (multimedia) information
we have developed a (generic) presentation gadget,
that displays images or video and textual information simultaneously.
The actual content of the presentation gadget depends
on the node of the concept graph from which it is
expanded.
The presentation gadget allows for limited browsing
following (textual) links, within the material presented.
At each moment, the presentation gadget can be collapsed
to continue navigation in the concept graph.
Using the concept graph in conjunction with the
presentation gadget resolves the duality of information
and presentation that is inherent for (multimedia) digital dossiers,
and thus promotes what may be called the immersive
experience of digital artist's dossiers.
natural language:
Having a concept graph as a generic navigation device, it
still remains a problem how to fill the concept graph
with meaningful content, and how to indicate
meaningful relations between the concepts and aspects
covered by the nodes of the concept graph.
In the prototype digital dossier for Marina Abramovic
this was done by hand, based on information derived
from a transcripion of an interview with the artist
(provided to us by ICN).
Interviews with artists is one of the means ICN deploys
to gain knowledge needed for the conservation of
contemporary artworks.
Such interviews provide a rich source of textual information,
that includes both general viewpoints on the artist's oeuvre
as well as specific constraints that adhere to
the (re) installation of the work(s) of art.
In our research we will investigate the use of techniques
from formal linguistics, [Grammar], as a means to derive
both structure and content of the concept graph
for a particular dossier (semi) automatically.
Using a basic lexicon of terms and phrases
related to contemporary art we should be able to
generate a representation of the textual information
that may serve as a basis for construction of the concept graph.
This representation must contain an enumeration
of the concepts, the relation between occurrences of concepts,
as well as a reference to the work(s) of art to which the
concepts apply.
Natural language processing technology may not only serve
for the static analysis of the material, when the digital dossier
is created, but also dynamically when the dossier is being used,
to aid the user in finding relevant information.
Research issues here are, on the one hand,
the interpretation of user input (that is, loosely
structured natural language),
and on the other hand, filtering the concept graph
representing the information space in such a way
that it adequately reflects the user's interest or perspective.
intelligent guidance:
Our aim is to arrive at a general framework for artist's digital
dossiers, that provide intelligent guidance
to both the expert user, responsible for the
future re-installation of the work(s),
and the interested layman, that wishes to get acquainted
with a particular work or collection of works.
In general, there are two techniques that we can apply to provide such
guidance:
- filtering the information space according to the user's
perspective, and
- intelligent agents, that (pro) actively aid the user in searching
the information space.
Filtering the information space may be done, as indicated
above, using techniques from formal linguistics
to restrict the concept graph that defines the navigation
structure,
by stating assumptions with respect to the relevance
of particular linguistic categories from
a user's perspective.
Intelligent agents is an approach stemming from artificial intelligence
which allows for providing guidance in a variety of ways,
possibly even in an embodied form using
a face or humanoid figure to give suggestions
to the user on what interactions to perform.
In [AWC] we have investigated the use of embodied
agents in a digital dossier for the artist Marinus Boezem.
In our current research, however, we will very likely
not use embodied agents.
Nevertheless, we will investigate to what extent we can use an agent model,
possibly with learning capabilities as explored in [Interactive],
to provide guidance and support interaction.
the background of our research
is provided
by our previous research on intelligent multimedia,
as described in [IMVU].
Our intelligent multimedia platform supports interactive
3D graphics, multi-user virtual environments, as well
as embodied agents.
See [Platform], [Community] and [STEP].
It uses distributed logic programming, [DLP],
and is built on object-oriented programming technologies, [OO].
It has been applied
in student projects,
done in cooperation with ICN, for developing digital
dossiers for respectively Marinus Boezem
and Marina Abramovic.
A natural language interface for an agent capable of learning
has been explored, in cooperation with the formal linguistics
group of the University of Utrecht, by our candidate
researcher in his master thesis project, which has resulted
in a publication on the Interactive Virtual Agents conference,
[Interactive].
This application used the Grail parser, which is based
on the notion of parsing as deduction, [Grammar].
In the proposed research we wish to continue this cooperation
to further incorporate language processing capabilities
in our framework.
As a complement to the theoretical and technical research we also
plan to continue our empirical
human-computer interaction studies, as reported in [AWC],
to assess the viability of our approach.
The contribution of the cultural heritage institutes,
in particular ICN, will be to provide the material,
assist in finding relevant categorizations and, inevitably,
function as the touchstone against which our efforts
will be evaluated.
innovation
Although digital archives or digital libraries
are by no means a new phenomenon,
our concept of digital dossiers contains a number
of innovative elements.
A digital dossier provides a unified information and
presentation space.
In this sense it differs significantly from
a digital archive with a traditional web interface,
where navigation and presentation are distinct.
Digital dossiers allow to a much greater extent for an immersive
experience of the information related to works of art.
As such it is reminiscient to explorations in
virtual archeology.
As concerns intelligent guidance,
again, although agent technology itself is by no means new,
we firmly believe that our use of techniques from
formal linguistics in combination with agent technology offers
exciting new ways in which intelligent guidance may be realized.
The type-logical perspective of our linguistic framework
will enable us to exploit commonalities between the reasoning facilites
underlying visual information processing, and language processing,
[Categorial].
Hence, fundamentally, we address issues of the relation between
visual and verbal/linguistic structures.
Pragmatically, this will be reflected in our explorations of how textual
relations can best be presented in a tangible way
to the user of the digital dossier.
On a longer term, our research opens the prospect
of having an information representation scheme
that may, with minimal additional annotation, be used
to generate a fully functional digital dossier.
relevance for cultural heritage
In contrast with the majority of research (proposals)
in the CATCH-framework,
which are concerned with making a great mass of artworks
accesible to a wide audience using (fairly)
traditional techniques of presentation,
our research addresses the more narrow area of contemporary artworks,
which require the use of more advanced presentation technologies.
Our work has started as an extension to the
INCCA project,
which provides a digital archive of meta-information indicating
sources of information on (the conservation of) contemporary art.
However, as also indicated in the
Culture 2000 project proposal, more advanced
practices and techniques are needed to adequately
capture the requirements for the re-installation
of contemporary art works.
Our research aims at developing the (information) technologies
needed to implement such practices and techniques,
and more in particular to develop a framework for realizing
digital dossiers with intelligent guidance,
adapted to the particular perspective of its users,
which may be conservation experts or intelligent laymen.
The framework will be built on open standards and may eventually be donated
to the cultural heritage community.
research directions -- media art
In a recent symposium on the preservation of contemporary media art,
a number of institutions presented their projects,
ranging from more technical topics,
such as the
conservation of videotapes
and the
mass storage of digital material
to the conceptual issues in
capturing new media,
the variety of
media formats
and the need to record and maintain
meta data about the artworks and related information.
To get an idea what the phrase media art encompasses,
have a look at the circumscription given in
the WikiPedia:
new media art is a generic term used to describe art related to, or created with,
technology invented or made widely available since the mid-20th Century,
including technology stemming from
telecommunications,
mass media and digital modes of delivery the artworks
Below, the disciplines that belong to this form of art are listed,
together with their entries in the WikiPedia, in an abbreviated form:
(new) media art
- audio art -- no definition available
- computer art -- any art in which computers played a role in production or display of the artwork.
- digital art -- art created on a computer in digital (that is, binary) form.
- electronic art -- entry to game producer,
should be Leonardo.
- generative art -- art or design generated, composed, or constructed through computer software algorithms,
or similar mathematical or mechanical autonomous processes
- hacktivism -- the writing of code, or otherwise manipulating bits, to promote political ideology
- interactive art -- a piece of art that involves the spectator in some way.
- internet art -- art or, more precisely, cultural production which uses the Internet
as its primary medium and, more importantly, its subject.
- performance art -- art where the actions of an individual or a group at
a particular place and in a particular time, constitute the work.
- robotic art -- page does not exist
- software art -- is an intersection of two almost non-overlapping realms: software and art.
- video art -- is a subset of artistic works which relies on "moving pictures" and is
comprised of video and/or audio data.
- video game art -- involves the use of a computer game for the creation of a digital artwork.

By the nature of the WikiPedia, to which every user can contribute entries,
this list nor the defining entries are by any means authorative.
Nevertheless, it does provide an overview and may serve as a starting point for further research.
(C) Æliens
23/08/2009
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