About

I'll Be Watching You

Every breath you take. Every move you make.

Observing self and others continues to unfold as a centrally mediated cultural activity. Sensors proliferate, in concert with devices, the cloud, and computing. Social media entwine. Private media get hacked. Machine learning recognizes. Data sources, computing, and representation enable a spectrum of understandings.

Comfortable understandings involve goal tracking, depiction, connection, and the advancement of expression. Uncomfortable understandings involve surveillance, detection, and the loss of identity and individuality. Critical observations involve self-monitoring, identity re-construction, and loss of transparency in access to personal metrics. Welcome, my friends, to the machine!

This third volume of the Art.CHI catalog documents interactive works presented in the exhibition, "I'll be watching you", which is part of ACM CHI 2017 in Denver. The curators were seeking interactive artworks that intentionally take a position with regard to human experiences of sensory computing. Your position may involve the comfortable, the uncomfortable, and/or the critical. The selection process was based on the criteria listed below.

• Challenge people's conceptions of the role of technology in society.
• Stimulate critical thinking and discussion.
• Use interactivity in novel, unexpected ways.
• Involve people as participants, not just viewers.
• Deal with uncomfortable issues, such as surveillance, as well as more comfortable areas, such as human connection.
• Engage the senses--touch, motion, auditory, visual-- in embodied interaction.
• Use rich sensory media in visual, textual, and sonified forms
• Incorporate mobile as well as co-located components, involving people outside and inside the gallery.
• Aggregate data from the world and exhibit in the cloud, and re-present using visualization, sonification, and tactile actuation.
• Invoke performative strategies from dance, theater, and ritual within the context of urban activities
• Combine modalities and fields to create new synthesis.
• Connect strong technical, aesthetic, and critical aspects.
• Incorporate site-specific, urban elements.
• Utilize computational techniques such as generative art, emergent behaviours, and machine intelligence
• Involve the body as a site of experience and reflection.

Our data footprints, big and small, become a critical, ethical, and political voice with the potential to transform how we consider technological innovation. Our aim was to seek conceptual, urban, public, mobile, performative and tangible artworks that reflect upon, critique, and/or construct present and future visions of our lived world across the gallery, streets and clouds.

We thank the CHI2017 conference chairs Gloria Mark and Susan Fussell for their generous support; Ernest Edmonds, Celine Latulipe, and David England for their roles in the inception of the CHI Art Program; and Sean Clark for facilitating the website (http://www.art-chi.org). We also thank the CHI Art 2017 jury members: Sarah Fdili Aloui, Kristina Anderson, John Cayley, Angus Forbes, Philip Galanter, Kia Hook, Rachel Jacobs, Lian Loke, Ann Morrison, Andrea Polli, Hwaryoung Seo, Jack Stenner.

Thecla Schiphorst, Andruid Kerne, Jiffer Harriman, HyunJoo Oh

CHI Art 2017 Chairs