apexart :: Public Program :: Coding the Body

PUBLIC PROGRAM
In conjunction with the exhibition Coding the Body organized by Leah Buechley.

Touchy Feely Tech: Coding for the Social & Emotional Body

Tuesday, March 25: 7 pm
apexart, 291 Church St, NYC

Presented by Katherine Isbister




A sidelong glance or a loving touch can express more than a thousand words. Dancing around the living room can make you just as happy as reading good news in an email or text. Yet we still leave the expressive social and emotional body out all too often when designing software and technology to support everyday living. In this talk Katherine Isbister will present a series of evocative tech prototypes built at the NYU Game Innovation Lab aimed at better supporting the social and emotional aspects of being in the world and being with each other. These range from a public game that uses a surveillance camera to encourage collaboration and connection, to a door entry security system that lets you make rude gestures to open the door if that's what suits your fancy, to a dance battle game that uses mobile devices to get people looking at and moving with each other instead of being together alone. This work challenges some key assumptions hidden deep in the code and hardware that surround all of us—in the talk Isibister will surface those assumptions toward replacing or augmenting them with new ones that may reshape the future tech landscape in body-positive ways.



Katherine Isbister is a Human Computer Interaction researcher and designer, focused on creating more compelling emotional and social qualities in games and other computer-supported experiences. She directs the Game Innovation Lab at NYU, and holds a joint appointment between NYU's computer science and game design departments. Isbister's team creates research prototypes with support from NSF, Microsoft, Bell Labs, and other funders. Projects have been featured by Wired, Scientific American, and NPR. Isbister is a recipient of the MIT Technology Review Young Innovators award.


Please join us.
All events are free and open to the public.

apexart's exhibitions and and public programs are supported in part by the Affirmation Arts Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Edith C. Blum Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.

apexart
291 Church Street, NYC, 10013
t. 212 431 5270
www.apexart.org

Directions: A, C, E, N, R, Q, J, Z, 6 to Canal or 1 to Franklin.