Performance

Experiments in Art & Technology

cevans — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:22:00 +0000

Experiments in Art & Technology

To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits!

First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy KlÃ¼ver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg.

KlÃ¼ver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence of people who might be competent enough to bridge the chasm between these disciplines. In part inspired by the Aristotelian idea of Techne -- systematic use of knowledge for intelligent human action -- KlÃ¼ver dreamt of equal participation between artist and engineer in creating pieces of art. He saw artists as visionaries, and technology as an inseparable part of contemporary life; he famously sought out "new means of expressions for artists...and to find out where they stood in relation to the society that was sending men to the moon."

Anyway, KlÃ¼ver and Rauschenberg, who'd already collaborated on several sculptures, organized 9 Evenings, an epic art salon, attended by over 10,000 people, at the 69th Regiment Armory building in New York. The event paired ten artists including Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, and Yvonne Rainier with over 30 engineers from Bell Laboratories. The engineers, headed by KlÃ¼ver, helped the artists with complex technical components to their pieces ("miles of cable"), creating performances, installations, and dances that blended technology with fine art to somewhat legendary effect.

For example, Rauschenberg produced a piece for 9 Evenings called "Open Score," in which the artist Frank Stella and his tennis partner played a game of "wired" tennis on a giant court in the Armory Building. As they played, tiny crystal-controlled FM transmitters embedded in their tennis rackets transmitted the vibrations of the racket strings to an FM radio receiver, which amplified the sound and also, one after the other, turned off the 39 lights in the Armory ceiling. By the end of the match, the giant room (and the audience) was in utter darkness.

As the darkness fell on the room, some 500 people shuffled in and were suddenly lit by infra-red sensitive cameras. This massive group was invisible to the audience save via projections of infrared television on large screens; Rauschenberg, in his notes for the piece, wrote "the conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action." One could argue that the "conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one" is essentially the basis of what drives us to do science. The world is full of invisible actions that niggle us to the point of distraction and building mile-long particle accelerators underground.

Also for 9 Evenings, John Cage performed Variations VII, in which he used communications media (radio and telephone) to amplify phenomena already present in the Armory, as well as modulating the amplitude of his on-stage collaborators' brain waves. Stage lights placed next to photoelectric cells both lit the performance area and triggered sounds as passers-by and performers walked past them. As a visual component, the shadows produced were cast onto two large canvases.

On top of it all, Cage set up 10 telephone lines in various New York locations -- from the Bronx Zoo aviary, to the 14th Street Con-Edison electric power station and Merce Cunningham's dance studio -- which picked up ambient sound and were re-broadcast during the performance.

The end result was particularly unlistenable.

This kind of tech-driven performance is fairly common in the age of populist technologies like Arduino, Max/MSP, and Twitter (not to mention the Maker movement) but the large-scale, technically complex performances of 9 Evenings would have been impossible in 1966 without the involvement of engineers who knew their stuff. And the collaboration was fruitful in both directions, too: the transmitter in the "Open Score" rackets was designed by Bill Kaminski, who was working in wireless radio transmission at Bell Labs. Later, that technology was developed into the wireless microphone.

9 Evenings birthed a great many things, not least the wireless microphone; it launched the career of John Cage, and led KlÃ¼ver to found "Experiments in Art & Technology," a kind of matchmaking service designed to connect artists with willing engineers, facilitating the creation of art unconstrained by technological limitations.

Additional Resources:

DVDs of 9 Evenings performances are available through Microcinema

Or through Amazon

Tons of 9 Evenings resources at the Fondation Henri Langlois

9 Evenings Reconsidered by Catherine Morris, Jane Farver, Clarisse Bardiot, and Michelle Kuo

cevans Tue, 02/08/2011 - 04:22

Quicker feedback for better performance

edyong — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:00:31 +0000

Quicker feedback for better performance

We've all experienced the agonising wait for feedback, whether it's for exam grades, news from a job interview, or results from a grant application. These verdicts can have a massive influence in our lives but they can often take weeks or even months to arrive. And that's a big problem, according to Keri Kettle and Gerald HÃ¤ubl from the University of Alberta.

They have found evidence that we do better at tasks the sooner we expect news about our performance. If we think we'll be evaluated quickly, the threat of a negative appraisal looms ever larger. And this greater sense of danger motivates us to work harder.

Kettle and Haubl asked 271 students to give a four-minute presentation as part of a university course. Their performance would be judged by their peers and it would count towards their final grade. The students were told about the date of their presentation and when they would hear about the results, with waiting times ranging from a few hours to 17 days later.

The duo found that students who anticipated the quickest feedback achieved the higher grades. On average, those who knew they would hear back later on in the day scored within the top 40% of the group. Those who thought they would hear back 17 days later received scores that skirted the bottom 40%. It seems that even the anticipation of quicker feedback can boost performance.

To make sure that other events going on at the time weren't affecting the scores, Kettle and Haubl also asked some students to give presentations on the same day as their previous group, but without any advance warning about their results date (they're the "nonparticipants" in the graph). Without this knowledge, all the students scored equally well regardless of when they received their feedback.

However, neither set of recruits had any idea about the advantage of faster feedback. In fact, those who were prepared to find out their scores within the day grossly underestimated their scores, while those who settled in for a longer wait thought they would do much better than in reality. As Kettle and Haubl say, "People do best precisely when their predictions about their own performance are least optimistic!" The duo think that these poor predictions are a way of bracing ourselves for disappointment.

Kettle and Haubl's work certainly supports their hypothesis, but there's probably a bit more work to do here. For a start, the duo only did a single experiment; it would be good to see if the promise of swifter feedback improved performance under a variety of settings. Likewise, we often expect feedback to come at a certain point because of our experience, even if we aren't given any specific dates. Do these predictions affect our performance too?

There are a lot of questions to answer, but for the moment, it seems that seemingly trivial details as the date of a person's feedback could make a big difference to how well they perform at a task. Kettle and Haubl also point out that their results are directly relevant to people "who are responsible for mentoring and for evaluating the performance of others." If such performance is associated with snappy feedback, then managers and mentors might think harder about providing comments and criticisms to their staff more promptly.

Reference:Kettle, K., & Haubl, G. (2010). Motivation by Anticipation: Expecting Rapid Feedback Enhances Performance Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797610363541 If this link isn't working, read why here

More psychological goodies:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp

edyong Sun, 02/28/2010 - 06:00

Kicking performance affects perception of goal size

neurophilosophy — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:50:09 +0000

Kicking performance affects perception of goal size

ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for example, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.

Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A new study by psychologists at Purdue University now lends more weight to this, by providing evidence that success rate in American football field goals affects how the size of the goal posts is perceived.

Jessica Witt and her colleagues have been investigating perception in athletes fro a number of years. Earlier work by this group of researchers has shown that apparent ball size is correlated with batting average in softball players, so that players who are performing better perceive the ball to be bigger, and that golfers who play better judge the hole to be bigger than those who do not play as well.

For this new study, Witt collaborated with former National Football League player Travis Dorsch. 23 participants were taken to an indoor football practice field, where they warmed up with three practice kicks. They were then asked to estimate how many kicks out of 10 they would score, and also to estimate the dimensions of the field goal posts, using a scaled-down adjustable model made out of PVC pipes (below left). Each participant then kicked 10 field goals, after which they were asked to make another estimate of the height and width of the posts, using the same apparatus.

It was found that participants who made 3 or more successful kicks perceived the goal to be bigger than it actually was, whereas those who scored 2 or less goals perceived it to be smaller. There was also a relationship between the subsequent perception of the goal posts and how the kicks were missed: participants who more frequently kicked the ball to the left or right of the target perceived the upright posts to be narrower, whereas those whose kicks tended to fall short of the goal, or to be too low, perceived the crossbar to be higher.

There are number of possible explanations for these findings. One is that there is a relationship between the participants' prediction of their success rate and their perception of goal size, so that those who predcited more successful kicks perceived the goal to bigger, but this was found not to be the case. Alternatively, there may have been pre-existing differences in the participants' perceptions of the goal posts, and the earlier studies of golfers and softball players had not ruled this out, because the participants had only been asked to estimate target size after performing the task. This time though, the participants were asked to make their estimates twice - once just before their 10 field goal kicks, and again immediately afterwards. The pre-kicking estimates of those who scored 2 kicks or less were no different from those who scored 3 or more, strongly suggesting that the differences in the second estimate of goal size were due to performance on the task.

This is the latest in a series of studies showing that our perceptions are grounded firmly in our actions. Witt's group has previously demonstrated that perceptions of goal size in golfers and softball players are apparently affected by performance. Other researchers have shown that perception is also influenced by the amount of effort required to perform an action. A location seems further away when one has to walk uphill to reach it, or if one is tired or in pain during the walk, and hills look steeper when one is carrying a heavy backpack. Similarly, objects that are just out of reach are perceived to be closer when one is holding atool that extends reach, while those that are positioned so that they are difficult to grasp are perceived as beign further away.

All of these studies show that perception does not merely involve reconstructing the geometry of one's environment from visual information. Rather, our perceptions seem to be firmly grounded in, and strongly influenced by, the abilities, intentions and efforts of the perceiver. This may be because we view the environment in terms of energy costs, and plan our actions accordingly. Thus, a tired walker who perceives a hill to be steeper than it actually is will walk more slowly, and an athelete who perceives a target to be bigger will need to expend less energy and attention. Conserving energy is vital for survival, so such an adaptation would confer an important evolutionary advantage.

Related:

Witt, J. K, & Dorsch, T. (2009). Kicking to bigger uprights: Field goal kicking performance influences perceived size. Perception 38: 1328-1340 DOI: 10.1068/p6325.

Witt, J. K. et al. (2008). Putting to a bigger hole: Golf performance relates to perceived size. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 15: 581-585. [PDF]

Witt, J. K. & Proffitt, D. R. (2005). See the ball, hit the ball: Apparent ball size is correlated with batting average. Psychological Sci. 16: 937-938. [PDF]

neurophilosophy Mon, 10/12/2009 - 07:50