Interangible

Cut&Paste — Acura Oracles — AndroidJones

February 23rd, 2008

At the 2008 Lucent L’amour party, I saw a performance by Andrew (Android) Jones. With a graphics tablet slung over his shoulder, he was generating live motion graphics on the giant projector display behind him. In his guitarist stance, performing right next to the DJ, he evoked a rockstar—except that he’s an illustrator!

This type of design-as-performance reminded me of two other projects I was involved in: the Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament and the Acura Interactive Oracles installations. Cut&Paste is a head-to-head design competition, turning the process of assembling a composition into a performance—on stage, in front of a live audience. Designer have 15 minutes to put on a show of their creative process and complete a finished composition. What I find so fascinating about Cut&Paste, is that the core product is the performance, and the by-product is the final compositions. In any kind of traditional context, the final composition is paramount. The process is invisible, hidden, and rarely considered.

Cut&Paste makes an invisible—but extremely interesting—process visible. This is what I’m getting at with my thesis research: what are interesting ways to manifest invisible processes. Similarly, the Acura Interactive Oracles project used multi-touch table surfaces to produce real-time graphics. The Oracles were installed in Acura auto-show exhibits, but the interesting possibilities were raised during my experiments with them in the Media Design Studio. Running an application that generated motion graphics by touching the surface of the Oracle, we recorded the session. The resulting video immediately re-contextualized the previously playful, temporary, interactive experience as one of production—a touch table could be used as a tool to create permanent motion graphics.

Similar to Cut&Paste, the Acura Oracles have the potential to manifest the process of someone’s interactions with them—which creates an entirely new creative opportunity. The way you do something can be just as much of a product as what gets done!.

Entry Filed under: Acura Oracles, M4