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Friday, December 23, 2011

Visual Art We Live in the Future

Posted by Jen Graves on Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 11:23 AM

In 2012, the Henry Art Gallery will install an artwork on its facade that will demographically profile you.

When you walk by, cameras stationed at various places around the facade will capture your image and attempt to place you using Facebook and Twitter data. The system will find people similar to you. It will determine your age and gender, and a cacophony of voices on speakers will reduce to just one voice—a voice "like" yours, now speaking to you.

On the screens, images will pop up of people that are "like" you, along with text from status updates and Tweets. The system may even find the actual you. "You" will keep playing after you leave, too, until the system becomes interested in someone else. Whoa.

This is an artwork called Sanctum, by James Coupe and Juan Pampin, both professors in the University of Washington's DXArts program. It's a commission by the Henry (yay! Go Henry!), and details about the selection process and jury are here. The work is scheduled to launch at the start of fall quarter 2012.

Sanctum from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Comments (11) RSS

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Minority Report. Today it's an art installation. Eventually it will be advertising.

Posted by monkey on December 23, 2011 at 11:29 AM

@1 Not "eventually." There are already advertising installations in place that do similar things.

Posted by dicon on December 23, 2011 at 12:05 PM

this should be interesting (looking forward to it)

Posted by Ranchhand on December 23, 2011 at 12:23 PM

Awesome... and really, really spooky.

Posted by Allyn on December 23, 2011 at 12:29 PM

This is why I limit my internet activity to saying dumb things on Slog anonymously.

Posted by Rotten666 on December 23, 2011 at 12:53 PM

Jen: can you make "we live in the future" a subject header... Like those green Topic items such as "visual art"?

We've been living in the future for quite some time, of course, but it is definitely coming harder and faster nowadays, so that's prolly why the bulk of people are noticing.

Posted by treacle on December 23, 2011 at 2:03 PM

Wow. That is massively creepy.

Posted by Reverse Polarity on December 23, 2011 at 2:10 PM

What's the point of doing this in Seattle? Isn't everybody up there white? You could just put up pictures of the last 10 people to walk by, and it would be the same.

Posted by eclexia on December 23, 2011 at 3:05 PM

While I could see it determining your gender there is no way it could determine your age (unless your birthday is posted) or voice, other than just choosing either a male or female voice. As for the facial recognition stuff, yeah.. that's been around and used in security the world over.

Just saying.

Posted by noitall on December 23, 2011 at 3:10 PM

that is creepy as hell.

Posted by Philly on December 23, 2011 at 3:30 PM

DXARTS MAKES MANY ENEMIES
In the last year, I’ve been quite surprised at the number of complaints I experienced from people on and off the UW campus about DXArts. People report the department and staff as difficult to get along with and as showing a disturbing sense of superiority. Many Art School students and Instructors report they don’t like DXArts. They feel they are looked down on by DXArts. A foreign DXArts instructor was extremely inflexible regarding the opinions and work of her students and constantly used her cell phone during class. DXArts seems to be recruiting a lot of foreigners. DXArts is reported to have closed its doors to new students. It was reported by an important off campus art institution that DXArts is impossible to work with and may be in trouble continuing as a program. There must be a lot of friction between the UW School of Art and DXArts. The campus is never free of politics and territorial issues.

Posted by Unglate tongue on December 26, 2011 at 2:51 PM