Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This interdisciplinary art/science research collaboration explores how motion can express meaningful and semantically rich information. Motion has a rich capacity to evoke sophisticated affect and express certain qualities that evoke the impression of emotion, personality and attitude. We propose to explore the development of semantics of motion that can be used to convey meaning in the abstract representations expressed through interaction and information visualization in the context of science as well as art. Our collaboration involves developing innovative interdisciplinary methodologies informing the creation of new technologies and new artistic practice and the application ofthese new approaches to enhancing user experience in the digital environments used in performance, visualization and games. The artistic research will inform the scientific model-building process by providing knowledge in movement experience, expression and analysis used in the domains of dance, choreography and theatre. Tools, techniques and models evolved in the collaborative research workshops will be used to prototype and test art-installations that explore motion as content and as interaction. From the scientific perspective we seek to develop an experimentally validated, computationally realizable semantics ofmotion that models both meaning and expressive interaction. The scientific goals are twofold 1) to mine creative disciplines ofmovement and expression for a deeper understanding ofthe communicative properties of motion, and 2) to investigate how these properties can be computationally realized throngh a set ofinteraction tools that enable abstract expression to convey complex meanings. We will explore the utility of this extended expressive scope of motion in both standard information visualization applications and in enhancing affect, user experience and atmosphere in digital environments for games and 3D worlds.