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ERINN SAVAGE – Performance
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Interaction Design

“We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.”– Culkin, 1967

In our age of accelerating technological ubiquity these words are deeply prescient. The disturbing paradoxes of our modern world are hidden in plain sight. It keeps us safe but to do so it has to invade our privacy. It liberates while simultaneously confining us. It is both friend and foe. Significantly, technology does not choose its own path.

How can artists and designers actively inhabit this endlessly liminal space? Rather than retreating to a separate more comfortable reality, we see in these graduates a desire to engage directly with and reflect on the experience of modern networked life. Much of this work is socially engaged, questioning fundamental ownership and truth in data; exploring rules and pattern in closed systems; exposing the implicit biases in AI; investigating the encodings of language; revealing the cracks in Machine Learning systems; interrogating the nature of subjective experience; often with humour and absurdist tragedy at heart. Questions are raised as much as answers suggested.

To realise this ambitious work, these graduates successfully evolved an agile and hybridised workflow, developing emergent and responsive media art practices. By generating a range of investigative outcomes they effectively bridge media and materials found in both traditional and digital methods.

gsa.ac.uk/interactiondesign
gsainteractiondesign.com

Patterns of Play-

Print of a match between Rafael Nadal and Rodger Federer in the 2008 Monte Carlos final.

Patterns of Play Documentation video

Video documentation of how the artist created his work, exploring the technology and thinking that went in to finalising the piece

Patterns of Play

Still image of the prints on display

Patterns of Play

Image of how the prints compare to live tennis matches

Motion Capture Tennis

A motion capture experiment of a point between Rafael Nadal and Juan Martín del Potro in the Wimbledon 2018 Quater-Final

Objects in Liminal Space

Documentation of design research in liminal space.

Sculpture of the Machine

Digital computer aided design model of 3D printed sculpture.

Portrait of the Machine 1

Machine learning algorithm image output from self-portrait sequence.

Portrait of the Machine 2

Machine learning algorithm image output from self-portrait sequence.

Uncanny Artifact

Digital computer aided design model of 3D printed sculpture.

Teapot Head

Digital computer aided design model of 3D printed sculpture.

Beyond Flatpack Culture: Towards a New Ecology of Modularity

Machine learning/trained print

Beyond Flatpack Culture: Towards a New Ecology of Modularity

Print

Beyond Flatpack Culture: Towards a New Ecology of Modularity

Print

Beyond Flatpack Culture: Towards a New Ecology of Modularity

Print

Beyond Flatpack Culture: Towards a New Ecology of Modularity

Print

Beyond Flatpack Culture: Towards a New Ecology of Modularity

3D printed models

Rust

When we take images using our phones we typically take them in bursts and select the best ones for social media. This is explored in Rust where taking a memorable day from her own phone she has used machine learning to generate artificial beach imagery to imitate existing memories which she has planted within the grid of a camera roll. As we scroll through our camera roll would we notice that false images had been placed amongst the burst? What else could be suggested to us?

Jamais Vu

In Jamais Vu images are generated based on social media status updates which others have publicly reposted and shared through memory apps. These images were then framed and staged within her own home as sentimental photographs would be. The frames are placed above artificial flowers next to a family clock which has stopped working. While the scene may seem ordinary in passing, on closer inspection may appear odd.

Michael (desktop computer) displaying the Chrome extension that replaces technology related words such as computer, machine, CPU etc. with their humanised counterparts.

Screenshot of the same extension replacing words on a webpage.

Sample of the extension's code done in Atom.

Screenshot of extension working on webpage.

Processing sketch that causes a popup to appear on screen whenever there is an attempt to close the window.

Experimentation Documentation

Development Sketch

(t)ether work in progress

Mockups

Mockups of Final Outcome

Age of Experience

EEG-VR wearing concept / Illustrator

Age of Experience

Virtual garden illustration / Illustrator

Age of Experience

Virtual garden illustration / pencil, colour pencil

Age of Experience

Virtual garden / Unity

Age of Experience

Brainwaves / Muse lab

Wire Experiment

Wire Experiment

Proposed Sculpture (untitled)

Genesis, Neuromancer, Gamer Theory - framed prints

Genesis - detail

Sixty Minutes in Minecraft - detail

Sixty Minutes in Minecraft - framed drawings

Hand Sketches

Valentine

From 'Conversation' series

Ankita

From 'Conversation' series

'Conversation' series

This series is a study of gestures taken from a set of interviews.

Hand Held

Looking through history, people have labelled different hand positions and movements, through symbolism within cultures and specific moments in time. Furthermore, how people have progressively shifted their hand behaviours through the age of personal devices. Our hands have adapted physically to its new demands. Taking selfies and holding a portable device in your hand has become the new norm and what body language culture has spawned from this era.

LeftLeft

A cast of a left hand which has been 3D modelled and then laser cut

“What do you think about ghosts?”- 1

series is the study of people's hand movements when responding to the question “What do you think about ghosts?”.

“What do you think about ghosts?”- 2

This series is the study of people's hand movements when responding to the question “What do you think about ghosts?”.-

Hosting Focus Groups

Through hosting creative activity-based workshops, I have been collecting honest, first-hand experiences from young people in relation to their mental health. Using the information gathered from these activities and discussions I determined 3 key themes; medication, barriers to accessing support and stigma. Using these themes, I have been developing a series of works.

Medication

From discussions that took place during the focus groups, it became evident that young people consider mental health support and care to feel very clinical. In particular, participants commented on feeling ill-informed, anxious and confused about the use and role of medication on their treatment. This work is a visual interpretation of these discussions. Using machine learning to generate fictional medication names, I have been designing and assembling my own medication packaging. My intention is for this packaging to be convincing and mistaken for real prescription medications, thus highlighting how trivial and alien medication names, and the role of such medications, can feel to a young person.

Barriers to Accessing Support

For this study I have been working with one young person to develop an augmented reality application that communicates some of the barriers they have encountered when accessing support for their mental health. The main challenge this young person faced was consistently relying on telephone communication to access such services – something they found impossible due to the nature of their anxiety. Using the AR application, audio and animations are activated when visual triggers are detected. These visual triggers are fictional correspondence inspired by the real correspondence the young person received - one of the most significant being a self-referral card. While a self-referral system might seem practical for service delivery, and can even seem insignificant to others, it can be a huge barrier to some users who need to access the service. In this work I hope to communicate the emotional implications of such systems and how they can be counter-productive for young people in the treatment of mental ill-health.

Stigma

Stigma is still a significant barrier when it comes to young people talking openly about their mental health. When a young person experiences stigma they can begin to feel their mental health condition defines who they are. Using the Tobii eye-tracker and Processing I have been developing an interactive installation that features video interviews of three young people talking about their experiences of mental ill-health and associated stigma. These video interviews are initially distorted with stigmatising phrases the young person has experienced. When the eye-tracker detects that someone is gazing at the display the video becomes less distorted – and the user begins to ‘see’ the person beneath the stigma and hear their story.