Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2. The Imagination Environment at Second City Chicago
the Web and the core technologies of information
retrieval, it opens a window to our world that is a
machine's “imagination” of who and what we are.
Search engines, Web logs (blogs), Web portals,
and individual Web sites are reflections of our
cultural reality. They represent a set of created
systems that expose and heighten the connections
we use, but rarely see, both in our minds and in
the online world. The images and media online
are linked and indexed by how we refer to them
in a variety of contexts: blogs, news feeds, and
Web pages. By exposing both their results and
processes, these systems reflect and reuse the
mundane, the available, and the purely popular
as art. In doing so, the system itself is an artistic
agent, gathering, sifting, and presenting our own
reality back to us as it moves through the Web,
seeking information.
The Imagination Environment uses advanced
information retrieval techniques on media streams
that are invisible to us. When we “watch” TV,
the TV receiver is reading (actually decoding)
the closed captioning (CC) stream and using it to
identify what is being said. Then, by exploiting
indexing mechanisms within search engines, it
finds distinct images and displays them as jux-
taposition, to externalize either the canonical or
the popular culture.
The TV, here the 2003 State of the Union ad-
dress, plays on the center tile as related media is
presented in the surrounding tiles. The installation
uses the words and phrases in the dialog to build
the context of the scenes portrayed through the
surrounding screens of images.
President George W. Bush mentions that Sad-
dam Hussein is in violation of several United
Nations agreements during the 2003 State of the
Union address. He says the word 'agreement,' and
the image of a proposed Palestine-Israel partition
from the second Oslo Interim Agreement of 1995
is displayed on the neighboring screen. See Figure
3. The audience is reminded of other senses of the
word agreement in the world, juxtaposed with the
source's (President Bush's) words.
The Imagination Environment externalizes
the zeitgeist of the online community. It is an
autonomous emotional amplifier that is built to
externalize media broadcasts in real time as il-
lustrated in Figure 3. It watches movies as either
a DVD or TV feed. While it watches, it searches
Search WWH ::




Custom Search