1Demonstrations of Expressive Softwear and Ambient MediaTopological Media LabSha Xin Wei1, Yoichiro Serita2, Jill Fantauzza1, Steven Dow2, Giovanni Iachello2, Vincent Fiano2, Joey Berzowska3,Yvonne Caravia1, Wolfgang Reitberger1, Julien Fistre4 1School of Literature, Communica-tion, and Culture / GVU CenterGeorgia Institute of [email protected], {gtg760j,gtg937i, gtg711j}@mail.gatech.edu2College of Computing/GVU CenterGeorgia Institute of Technology2 {seri, steven, giac, ynniv}@cc.gatech.edu,[email protected] Faculty of Fine ArtsConcordia UniversityMontréal, [email protected] set the context for three demonstrations by describingthe Topological Media Lab’s research agenda We nextdescribe three concrete applications that bundle togethersome of our responsive ambient media and augmentedclothing instruments in illustrative scenarios.The first set of scenarios involves performers wearing ex-pressive clothing instruments walking through a confer-ence or exhibition hall. They act according to heuristicsdrawn from a phenomenological study of greeting dy-namics, the social dynamics of engagement and disen-gagement in public spaces. We use our study of these dy-namics to guide our design of expressive clothing usingwireless sensors, conductive fabrics and on-the-body cir-cuit logic.By walking into different spaces prepared with ambientresponsive media, we see how some gestures and instru-ments take on new expressive and social value. Thesescenarios are studies toward next generation TGarden re-sponsive play spaces [Sponge] based on gesturally pa-rameterized media and body-based or fabric-based ex-pressive technologies.Keywords: softwear, augmented clothing, media choreog-raphy, real-time media, responsive environments, TGar-den, phenomenology of performance.1. ContextThe Topological Media Lab is established to study ges-ture, agency and materiality from both phenomenologicaland computational perspectives. This motivates an inves-tigation of human embodied experience in solo and socialsituations, and technologies that can be developed for en-livening or playful applications.The TML is the laboratory arm of a phenomenological re-search project concerning the substrate to heightened andeveryday performative experience. The TML is also af-filiated with a series of experimental performance instal-lations including TGarden and txOom, which have beenmanifested in six generations of productions of responsiveenvironments in 10 cities over the past four years[Sponge, FoAM].Figure 0. Dancing in TG2001, a prototype TGarden, Rot-terdam, The Netherlands.Our approach is informed by the observation that con-tinuous physicalistic systems allow improvisatory gestureand deliver robust response to user input. Rather thandisallow or halt on unanticipated user input, our dynami-cal models always provide expressive control and leavethe construction of meaning and aesthetics in the human’shands.The focus on clothing is part of a general approach towearable computing that pays attention to the naturalizedaffordances and the social conditioning that fabrics, fur-niture and physical architecture already provide to oureveryday interaction. We exploit the fusion of physicalmaterial and computational media and rely on expert craftfrom music, fashion, and industrial design in order to2make a new class of personal and collective expressivemedia.2. TML’s Research HeuristicsPerhaps the most salient notion and leitmotiv for our re-search is continuity. Continuous physics in time and me-dia space provides natural affordances which sustain in-tuitive learning and development of virtuosity in the formof tacit “muscle memory.” Continuous models allow nu-ance which provides different expressive opportunitiesthan those selected from a relatively small, discrete set ofoptions. Continuous models also sustain improvisation.Rather than disallow or halt on unanticipated user input,our dynamical sound models will always work. How-ever, we leave the quality and the musical meaning of thesound to the user. We use semantically shallow machinemodels.We do "materials science" as opposed to object-centeredindustrial design. Our work is oriented to the design andprototyping not of new devices but of new species ofaugmented physical media and gestural topologies. Wedistribute computational processes into the environmentas an augmented physics rather than information tasks lo-cated in files, applications and “personal devices.”One way to structure and design augmented physics is toadapt continuous mathematical models. The simplest inthe set theoretic sense are topological structures. Topo-logical media can richly sustain shared experience. Mediadesigned using heuristics drawn from topological struc-tures (continuous or dense structures rather than the spe-cial case of graph structures) and dynamical systems pro-vide alternatives to the scaffolding of shared experience.Our hypothesis is that simulated physics and qualitativeprocesses rigorously designed by topological dynamicalnotions offer a strong alternative to communication theo-ries based on the conduit metaphor [Reddy].3. Applications and DemonstrationsWe are pursuing these ideas in several lines of work: (1)softwear: clothing augmented with conductive fabrics,wireless sensing and image-bearing materials or lights forexpressive purposes; (2) gesture-tracking and mathemati-cal mapping of gesture data to time-based media; (3)physics-based real-time synthesis of video; (4) analogoussound synthesis; (5) media choreography based on statis-tical physics.We demonstrate new applications that showcase elementsof recent work. Although we describe them as separateelements, the point is that by walking from an unpreparedplace to a space prepared with our responsive media sys-tems, the same performers in the same instrumentedclothing acquire new social valence. Their interactionswith co-located less-instrumented or non-instrumentedpeople also take on different effects as we vary the locus(the locus of…) of their interaction.3.1. Softwear: Augmented ClothingMost of the applications for embedding digital devices inclothing have utilitarian design goals such as managinginformation, or locating or orienting