Anna Lundh – Visions of the Now
In September 1966, the festival and congress Visioner av Nuet (“Visions of the Present”) took place in Stockholm. The event aimed to investigate the impact of technology on humanity, society and art. Computing was only in its infancy, yet discussing its consequences and exploring what it would mean to make use of it artistically was considered paramount at that time. Almost half a century later, artist Anna Lundh began a research effort into the 1966 festival and produced an updated version, to reconsider its original concerns in a world fully immersed in the technology that in 1966 was called “the new”. Lundh’s festival, Visions of the Now, took place in May 2013 and gathered over thirty international artists, musicians, theorists and scientists, in a series of lectures, panels, open discussions, art and music performances. This artistic experiment has also been documented in a multi-volume archive box, recently published by Sternberg Press.
Anna Lundh is an artist and PhD candidate in the KTD program (Konstfack/Royal Institute of Technology). Lundh’s work investigates cultural phenomena, societal agreements, and how ideological shifts take place, often taking technology and our experience of time as points of departure. This transdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, web-based work, interactive experiments, text and performance. Her work has been exhibited in Sweden at Moderna Museet, Bonniers Konsthall, Tensta Konsthall, and GIBCA; and internationally in Norway, Holland, Denmark, Latvia and the US – primarily in New York City art organizations including The New Museum, The Kitchen, ExitArt, Apexart, and Performa.
Mikael Wiberg – The Materiality of Interaction
A new approach to interaction design that moves beyond representation and metaphor to focus on the material manifestations of interaction. Smart watches, smart cars, the Internet of things, 3D printing: all signal a trend toward combining digital and analog materials in design. Interaction with these new hybrid forms is increasingly mediated through physical materials, and therefore interaction design is increasingly a material concern. In this book, Mikael Wiberg describes the shift in interaction design toward material interactions. He argues that the “material turn” in human-computer interaction has moved beyond a representation-driven paradigm, and he proposes “material-centered interaction design” as a new approach to interaction design and its materials. He calls for interaction design to abandon its narrow focus on what the computer can do and embrace a broader view of interaction design as a practice of imagining and designing interaction through material manifestations. A material-centered approach to interaction design enables a fundamental design method for working across digital, physical, and even immaterial materials in interaction design projects. Wiberg looks at the history of material configurations in computing and traces the shift from metaphors in the design of graphical user interfaces to materiality in tangible user interfaces. He examines interaction through a material lens; suggests a new method and foundation for interaction design that accepts the digital as a design material and focuses on interaction itself as the form being designed; considers design across substrates; introduces the idea of “interactive compositions”; and argues that the focus on materiality transcends any distinction between the physical and digital.