 Hi everyone. Yeah, my name is Tim Murray Brown and I'm an artist creating interactive artworks, which I've been doing for about 10 years now and Yeah, my talk today is called Rewilding Human-Computer Interaction and I Yeah, it's a I'll say at the start. It's a prototype talk. It's based on some ideas I've been thinking about for a few years now But I think this is probably the first time I've kind of tried to put it into an accessible form And I think this is probably the ideal space and audience for the idea So as I'm talking if you do have any feedback or ideas or something about Like the concept or how it's presented that you'd like to share then make a note of it And I'd love to hear about it afterwards So for me interactive art is really About using the notion of interaction as a basis for our form So it's like the interactivity is the canvas and I'm really interested in what kinds of Ideas and values we can express through an interactive system and through the interactions that happen through it. I Want to share just a short little showreel to begin with to give you an idea of the kind of works that I create Okay, so rewilding human computer interaction. Here we go. So we are Surrounded by interaction design everywhere we go. So any to me any system that's designed for you to interact with it To was some kind of intended outcome or with some intention has got interaction design infused into it. I Really like the light switch. I think it's just kind of a very simple example of Interaction design and it goes from here all the way up to say Twitter Where there's a huge amount of actions you can take and responses that may happen But I also want to I would include like the benefit system as a form of interaction design as well and A trip to IKEA where you're going through the maze and somebody's really plotted it out for you and The key points I want to make about all of these examples is that the interaction has been designed So the kind of unfolding relationship between the human and the system Has been thought about and how that's going to happen. There has some kind of intention within it now when you are designing interactivity one of the things you quickly discover is that people are really unpredictable and they rarely respond in the way that you expect them to and What may seem obvious to you as a designer is actually never ever ever obvious and however many times I Think I've learned this lesson. I find I have to learn it again and There is a huge amount of Knowledge that we have that we don't realize about how systems work that we just tap into instantly And if you're designing a completely novel form of interaction and people come to it fresh Then it is a lot The way they will behave is a lot less clear than you might imagine and so you don't realize quite how much you assume About people having an intuition about things Now when it comes to interactive art, this is an ambiguity that you can actually play with sometimes and creating a little bit of confusion or uncertainty can be part of the experience or the interaction that you're trying to work with But a lot of the time when you're building an interaction What you're really trying to get someone to or the kind of interaction you're trying to devise or to have unfold is actually a few layers deep and You need to give someone a bit of a cue or a bit of context to get started This is a an instrument from a piece I did or it's a big collaborative piece called the cave of sounds from a few years ago with music hackspace The instrument requires you to shine lights on it to make different sounds. It's by Casper Zeeman and We've got this instruction shine on top of the instrument Not because we want to really tell people what to do But because all of the openness in the actual Instrument and the work itself happens after you've got over that initial hump So you need to have a little bit of influence or a little bit of instruction and This can go further and further and in fact the More like Invested you are in a specific outcome than the more influence you might like to exert over the person You can do this through Invitation or constraints or you can do it through manipulation And when it comes to an artwork or even like a simple tool then a little bit of influence or manipulation is kind of fine You know, it's part of what we sign up for but when it comes to an operating system which in today's world is kind of our main interface to the entire digital world then things get a little bit weirder and It's probably not news to see this kind of interface where You're being asked to make a decision and the options that you're given have been gamed to push you towards a particular decision and The decision that someone's trying to make you make Is not really necessarily someone who's aligned with your interests so this is a World garden and maybe you can see where the analogy is going to go So I don't know how participatory you will be as an audience But who here can remember when the iPhone first came out So quite a few people So if you're younger than that this may I don't know how How surprising this is but when the iPhone came out It was one of the first kind of big locked down interfaces that we Received as consumers and it was a bit of a shock people weren't quite expecting to have something as powerful something which is basically a computer that fits in your pocket and So once you've received it to have it Designed in a way where you can't decide which programs can run on this But you have to only run programs that have been approved by the designer And I don't think Apple were the first people necessarily to do this or to come up with this idea But I do hold them responsible mainly because I think they are the people who really mainstreamed This idea and kind of made it a normal thing And what they really showed with the iPhone is that if we put up a walled garden And you have a really really good product then people will just use it anyway and whatever objection they have they will probably start to forget about and It also showed that if you put up a walled garden for your ecosystem Then you can make a huge amount of money through doing that and I gotta say so this is the EMF crowd and I'm pretty sure of all of the people who I might try and give this talk to this is going to be more of the Crowd that's going to be against having a third party decide what you can and can't do with your own pieces of technology But there are like good reasons for imposing these kind of constraints on the way we interact with technology such as safety and security saving us from Software that's here to exploit us or saving us from having devices that are open to being hacked into and One of the big things is just simplicity like keeping the Technology we use simple enough so that we don't have to spend ages like fiddling with it trying to learn how to use and We don't need to be worrying that we set it up wrong and it's going to shoot us in the foot But there are also some kind of quite sort of simple to explain not so noble reasons for doing this as well Like I mentioned it's incredibly profitable Because you have a when Apple gains that control over the App Store They had they gave themselves a huge amount of leverage They're deciding what tools you can use and they can use that to control other markets But they can also just use it to lock you in to certain applications as they please and There is questions around value extraction about collecting data and about that general loss of control but I'm quite interested in the in The reasons that we kind of feel but maybe are not always quite so easy to articulate because I think that's where I think that's particularly where the role of artists and other researchers needed to come in and There is this kind of loss of freedom that you get with more constrained Technology there is a sense that there is a huge amount of leverage that a corporation is holding over you and everybody and Even if that corporation is great and they're making all the right decisions and we're really happy with everything They do there is that feeling of a loss of power and that that equation could change in the future And if that does happen, we don't have the capacity to change it ourselves There's a sense that you want to like do what you like with your own stuff And there's also this issue of homogeneity, which is that the experience or the interfaces that we use have been incredibly standardized and Sometimes that is for usability, but the other example. I like to think about is the ringtone on an iPhone Like before the iPhone it was pretty normal to be able to use any sound you want as a ringtone And you'd be on the bus and someone would start blaring out this horrendous pop song You know for a really tinny speaker and it would play for seven seconds And then you'd hear a conversation happen and that was kind of normal for a couple of years The apple kind of standardized the ringtone, which in a way is just purely a branding decision that they just felt They had the power to do So I'm not going to rant about Apple and all guns for the whole time but I wanted to start with that just to kind of give the context and The main thing that I find most frustrating is that nobody seems to care about it other than like quite techy people So when I talk to people about constraints that about freedom with technology people actually seem to prefer having the simplicity and the safety over the freedom and the opportunity that you might have with more open interfaces and I have a hunch like I feel like okay. This I think this is a really worrying trend, but I can't exactly explain why necessarily And so I'm going to go right for the juggernaut Which is that I think There's some things gotten a little out of hand in online culture so this is the very famous storming of the US Capitol in 2020 and If that wasn't a kind of weird and scary enough event it was followed shortly afterwards by Donald Trump being banned from Twitter and I'm definitely no fan of Donald Trump But I do think it's a bit strange to have the former president of America censored from the main platform for political discourse and It may be that you feel like okay. This picture on the left is definitely the scarier option So it's like a provocateur of a delusional and that somehow heavily armed mob Ready to start a civil war and that's actually an incredibly dangerous situation that requires exceptional measures or You maybe you think that there is a kind of Woke snowflake mob running the internet who have inherited all of these freedoms without ever having to fight for them and are a bit complacent about preserving them I'm not going to actually take a position on that. What I want to say is that maybe there is a third position Which is that the fact that we found ourselves having this debate about whether Trump should be allowed or not allowed on Twitter Suggests that something's gone seriously wrong with the way we've enmeshed technology into our lives So returning to the garden metaphor On the left here we have our garden our walled garden and what is the garden? The garden is a kind of planned bit of nature it's where we've taken all of this kind of natural plants and exerted top-down design to organize them in a very specific way and In a garden when you find beauty and order in a garden It's there by design and that kind of reassurance and That you might feel in a garden does come from nature, but it also comes from this sense of nature being controlled of human Culture having found a way to tame the wildness of nature And when a garden starts overgrowing and going out of control it can be actually a little bit scary It's like a sign of decay and on the right we have the wilderness and the wilderness is nature without humans and the plants are always out of control and you don't get the neat lines You don't get the excessive amount of flowers that you might see But out of this chaos and complexity you actually find a different kind of beauty and you get a different kind of reassurance That independent of humans there is this massive beast Running going around there's this kind of consciousness of nature and this process which we are a part of But even in nature it is sensitive to disruption The natural system has evolved over a long period of time. It's very slow to adapt to sudden disruptive shocks So most of recent history Has been kind of this direction development it's been taking the wilderness and creating something quite neat and organized and The wilderness was everything and it was quite scary and we kind of celebrated this transition But more recently there's kind of been this Movement to shift back to the other way and that's partly because we've nearly destroyed all of the wilderness And we're suddenly realizing that it was actually quite special and irreplaceable But rewilding is an idea that rather than trying to control every aspect of nature to preserve it that we should try to find this kind of pre-human ecosystem or balance of ecosystem Where it was self-regulating and part of that is an acknowledgement that our capacity to really design and reason about such complex Ecosystems is ultimately limited and when you really try to fix one thing you'll create a problem somewhere else So instead it's an attempt to really unlock the self-regulatory Processors that have evolved over many many millions of years So what's the relevance for human-computer interaction? Well this is a community notice board in physical space and I just want to point out the chaos The posts are all over the place. They're not even fitting onto the frame They're like spilling out the sides. They're put on top of each other and each post has a completely different personality There's no standardization of design language or any consistency. It's quite hard to read and to find things But you do feel a community I mean, okay I know it says community on top of it But you can kind of feel the community because you feel all of these different personalities all sharing and bunching together to share a space and somehow Managing to make it work so when humans are Connecting to responding to each other like we are actually wild in a sense I know we talk about rewilding as like turning back the human intervention But the way we humans exist in our natural state and you just need to look at the way we will camp here getting on like when we are in our natural environment in physical space We get on in a remarkable way There are a lot of complex processes that make this possible just in a conversation your face is moving all over the place your voice goes up and down you have pauses you have hand gestures and these kind of Ancillary gestures this kind of noise around the signal is in a way what makes empathy possible it allows us to take positions of ambiguity and It allows these kind of very small self-regulating systems to work. I think and Likewise this this way of getting on with each other has taken a very long time to evolve. It's not been designed It's something that we've evolved over the many years to be able to exist in communities So coming back to this notice board. I just want to compare this to the London house flat spare room to rent group on Facebook and I've actually put these in this this is a single column. I've laid them out just to fit them onto a white screen picture and I think like if you're looking for a spare room There's something that's probably a bit more efficient about this than the notice board because it really goes straight to the point We just see the pictures of the rooms Sometimes we see a picture of the houses that the rooms are in So it's kind of more efficient it cuts out some of the clutter But all of the personality has been squeezed out I think in a way the only way you can really get to know who this person is who you might be living with in the future Is by how they've laid out their flat and how tidy it is and what words they might have chosen to put alongside it so when the human turns into a user and On a platform. I mean, this is Facebook, but many platforms are like this You only have a few carefully planned actions and views and all of them mess The messiness of being a human or not all of it, but a lot of that messiness gets filtered out And in my head, that's kind of like a sort of monocultural agriculture When monocultural agriculture that when you have the monocrops and you've got huge fields of a single crop all of all along And it's great at maximizing a specific crop and maximizing your yields But it doesn't help preserve the self-regulatory ecosystems that go with that with that space and Wildness does kind of emerge online. So on the left here, this is an old geosities page From someone has kindly preserved and on the right. This is a post on medium. That's currently being trending The medium post I Think kind of has like a better design like it's much more easy to read It's streamlined it goes straight to the content But what we're missing is a sense of who the author is beyond the actual specifics of what they're saying and The site on the left where someone has been allowed or left to their own devices to really Express themselves and they may have made a site. That's Quite difficult to read and it's actually quite fun and nostalgic now But you'd get a sense of who they are you get a sense of like what? Attitude they're having and like if they're kind of having a bit of fun or not So By clearing away the clutter it's kind of like you didn't kind of completely cut out the crap And you've just got the content But it's actually in that kind of crap that you get a feel for who the person was and You kind of lose the personality so what I want to Pitch with this idea of rewilding human-computer interaction is a kind of slightly more optimistic view of what we could be doing with technology and what direction we could be going and to suggest that What if the solution to our problems is actually human nature like human nature is our solution not our problem and The mess of humans is what makes it possible for us to have a society rather than just our sort of functional goals and so what we need to Improve like the kind of toxic cultures online and some of the problems we're having online is more space and more openness and more opportunities for these kind of self-regulatory processes to take place And I think if that's the case then what we actually need is we don't need better design or better interfaces, but what we really need is more diverse and adaptable interfaces and we needs the kind of Capacities to self-regulate which means that we need to have that sense of Negotiation between the person and the system and we need to have a way of defining how we interact with the system that emerges from the bottom up and has that Plurality rather than being imposed from the top down trying to solve the problems as if everybody is a uniform atom And how are we going to do that? well This is the first option, which I had to put in because there's the MF and I'm sure everybody Well, not everybody but we're here. We have workshops on building hardware and we have an amazing amount of creativity and I think you know MF kind of just really speaks to What happens when people are empowered with technology and they come together and you see this amazing space But also a huge amount of generosity But if you're not a coder if you're not a sort of tech person How do you find that empowerment and that's kind of a question that I've been exploring in this project called sonified body recently so this this is Katrina Robertson dancing and On the surface, I'm going to say sonified body is a project transforming sound Sorry transforming dance into sound But that's just kind of the surface problem as an excuse to explore this broader topic And the reason I'm really interested in working with dancers and I've worked with dancers over the years is that I think making Interactive dance interfaces is incredibly difficult and one of the reasons is difficult is that Every time you intervene and try to sort of take some part of what a dancer is doing and turn that into a Controller or make that into something that you has an effect you change what the dancer does and the dancers already great I mean, I think Katrina's an amazing dancer, but She's in her body. She's using her whole body and if I come in and say okay when you do this action This effect is going to happen What I'm going to do is start to restrict ability to dance So what what I really wanted to do with sonified body and the aim was is to Create some interface that transforms movement into sound but without imposing any design ideas So design this kind of dance-based interface, but without saying in any sense how Katrina should dance and I'll show you the result that we came up with and I just want to I meant to say before but the dancers entirely improvised So I showed you two videos. The two videos I showed you are the same So the sound is real-time and she's responding to what she's hearing but all the movement she's doing she's never done before and That's quite important to me because it's really pulling on the knowledge that she already has in the body Without asking her to learn a new kind of movement language in order to interact with the system I'm gonna have to skip the next slide. I'm afraid because I'm running short on time so Towards the summary. This is what we're calling. I want to call this a negotiated interface And we're using machine learning to define an interface based on how the dancer already moves. So for the Technically-minded we're essentially using a variational auto encoder and training it's on a sample of Katrina dancing Say just a few hours and then using the latent space of the auto encoder as our output mapping for the system and What that means in sort of actual actually practical terms is that we're taking the dance movement and we're Transforming it into a 16-dimensional parameter space. So she has 16 dimensions of control over the sound But the control is completely entangled and non-linear It doesn't make any sense at all like there's no way she could use it and then to say to someone else You do this and that happens and in fact doing one movement in one part of the space Will have a different effect than if you're standing here and you do it So you you can't really think about it. You just have to learn about it through the body through play and through exploration similar to kind of swimming I think or riding a bike The other Interesting property for me is that it's it's high bandwidth, but it's also a completely bespoke interface So the way the system response has been trained just on Katrina. It's like an interface for one It's all local so there's no like online cloud training and it's kind of a speculative idea of a future interface where The interface wraps around the person rather than the person having to wrap their way they think and act around the interface I just want to quickly conclude and to say that you can try this out yourself This is The same kind of idea but instead of turning the movement into sound We're using the movement to explore the latent space of an image generating model again and this is installed at null sector just now and Again, you get 16 dimensions of control. You can really explore like What the sort of space what the shape is of an AI model in a way that might not be so easy to do if you're just trying to change one parameter at The time on a normal interface and I Think I'm really into the idea that there is a kind of intelligence We have in the body that we can tap into if we really allow the full Complexity and diversity of the body to get involved in how we interact with a system So you may not be able to say Why the system works as it does but I really do find that people do get a feel for how it works and they can start to move through it Okay, I Will just conclude to say that yeah, we were the human-computer interaction. So maybe the future is not about more design or more control but actually about more mess and more bandwidth and less control in a sense more openness but certainly more space for us to be humans because I think humans are great And I think humans are really great at getting on and forming communities Unless some intervention prevents that from happening If you've enjoyed the talk or the installation I have a newsletter on my website which is probably the best way to find out about how this is going to evolve and If you have any feedback or critique before I take this talk into the wider world I will be just outside now. So please do come and talk to me. I'd really love to hear your thoughts. Thanks very much