Interactive Installation Proposal

This brief is about raising awareness and providing information on animal conservation in a new and interesting way. I will attempt to engage my target audience by involving them and encouraging them to take part in an activity that blends non-digital art and design with digital media. I intend to produce an installation piece that is fun and entertaining but at the same time edifying.

The intended audiences for this brief are men and women between the ages of 18 and 25, who are perhaps likely to go traveling and witness the exploitation and abuse of wild animals in countries like Thailand first hand. In terms of protecting primates and discouraging their use within the tourist trade, I could hope to dissuade my audience to partake in activities that parade primates as a form of amusement.

I will need to research the different issues surrounding animal conservation and decide upon the area that I wish to campaign. Other research will include a look at existing installation artists and practitioners concerned with interface design. Campaigners have long been working to put an end to the suffering and slaughter of wild animals, I therefore consider it appropriate that my work have elements of old fashioned, retro aesthetics, signifying that the detrimental attitudes towards wild animals are and should now be a thing of the past. I will explore old printing methods and other long established techniques. As well as portraying the historical context of my subject matter I also hope to exhibit a contemporary look at the state of animal conservation and the steps that we can take to aid the preservation of our wildlife.

I will also consider how kinetic art could be a feature of my installation and facilitate the connection between the digital and the non-digital elements.

Interface Design

Interface design is focused on the user's experience and interaction. Unlike traditional design where the goal is to make the object or application physically attractive, the goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction experience as simple and intuitive as possible.

Mundus vult decipi, goes an old moralistic saying: the world wants to be deceived. This is especially valid today with the 'user illusion of the world'.

According to Norbert Bolz (2006), user-friendliness means 'functional simplicity in the face of structural complexity, i.e. easy to operate, but hard to understand. A product's intelligence consists precisely of its ability to conceal this chasm of inscrutability. Use thereby emancipates itself from comprehension. Anyone who still talks about intelligent design now means that a device's use is self-explanatory. Yet this explanation does not lead to understanding, but rather to smooth functioning. So to put it stereotypically, user-friendliness is the rhetoric of the technology which consecrates our ignorance. And this design-specific rhetoric now provides us with the user illusion of the world.' (www.mediamatic.net)

The human being is no longer a user of tools, but rather a relay switch in the media syndicate, engaged in a circuit.

Bolz (2006) explains that when you buy a computer, you're not only buying a piece of hardware but also, and above all, a bundle of software - with the promise of user-friendliness. By no means does this imply that the user is supposed to understand what it does, but rather that it will spare him any irritation. A user-friendly computer allows you to forget that you are working on a computer: its interface design protects you from the post-human technology of the digital.

Shocking

Animals often learn by association. I could educate and raise awareness about animal conservation by creating a human intelligence test that gives the user a shock when they answer a question wrong and a reward when they answer a question correctly. This scenario places the human in a situation similar to that of a animal in a laboratory. The incorrectly answered question could not only result in a physical shock but a series of mentally shocking images could be flashed on screen e.g primates killed for bush meat.


The Pain Machine Game

Initial Ideas - Notes

From a posotive or negative viewpoint, set up a minature representation of an animal behavioural test like the 'Skinner Box' (connected to the computer, recording/displaying data in an interesting way).

Or set up a human version of an animal intelligence test. Like the Skinner box, use tiny electric shocks to coax a certain behavior/action.

Or invent a new type of interactive animal toy to provide animals with entertainment/food rewards/training.

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More animal Interfaces

Below is an image of the classic 'Skinner Box', an operant conditioning chamber used in experimental psychology to study animal behavior.




















The second image shows a dog partaking in a game of 'flyball'. The flyball machine was invented by Herbert Wagner. He realised that his dogs needed physical exercise, but didn't want it to cost him any effort. Even throwing a ball was too much trouble and so he invented a machine that would launch a ball for him. The machine is operated by a dog pushing on the small wooden board.

An interface for Animals

Momentarily moving away from animal conservation, I am going to explore the possibilities of interactive interfaces that are made for animals.

Many experiments have been carried out to test the behaviour and intelligence of animals. This image shows psychologist Elizabeth Brannon using touch-screens, Plexiglas boxes holding raisins and buckets hiding grapes to establish that ringtails and his mongoose lemur cousins possess a surprising ability to learn sequences of pictures and to discriminate quantities. While Brannon’s work is still only at a preliminary stage, its initial results lead her to believe that such studies could mark the dawning of a new appreciation of lemur intelligence.

'The ringtails live in social groups, which could be distracting, and they’re completely free to just ignore us and the apparatus. But despite these possible complications, we found they would completely voluntarily come over to the screen and participate.' (Brannon, 2004)

Brannon (2004) explained that sometimes, the lemurs even competed with one another. "Occasionally, one animal would come over and finish the sequence started by another to get the reward," (www.innovations-report.de)

Initial ideas

On one side of the thaumatrope, images of wild animals in their natural surrondings, and on the other, images of hats, rollerskates and rings of fire. When the disk spins the images on both sides of the toy combine. I like the retro feel of the thaumatrope and I think it would be appropriate that the images be printed on the disc in an old fashioned way (resembling the increasingly old fashioned view of animals as entertainment).














Using a similar form of electronics and programming to that of the 'RFID DIY kit' shown below, I could insert a tag into each of the thaumatropes so that when the toys are placed on the reader, a corresponding video would be played on a monitor.


Interaction Design Lab
Buy

Old Toys

These early toys that show monkeys dressed up in human clothes and smoking cigarettes may have warped our perception of animals and encouraged people to view primates as a source of entertainment.

PG Tips Adverts

Once very popular, the PG Tips adverts are now considered bad taste by many.

Other Forms of Animal Entertainment

There are many wild caught, endangered primates smuggled for illegal trading in Thailand. The Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre underwent an undercover investigation at Safari World in Thailand in 2002. More than a dozen orangutans and several chimpanzees were found dressed up and made to perform a Thai boxing match. All these orangutans were juveniles and there were no adult orangutans found in the park.

There are many primates in Thailand and other parts of the world that are forced to wear clothes and pose with tourists for photographs. After the photo sessions they are often chained up inside very small cages. Some primates have their incisors and canine teeth removed to prevent them from attacking.