Metaphone

Abstract

The Metaphone is an interactive art piece that transforms biosensor data extracted from participants into colorful, evocative perceivable visual patterns on a big canvas. The biosensors register movement, pulse and skin conductance, the latter two relating to emotional arousal. The machine creates a traditional art formcolorful paintings -which can be contrasted with the pulsating, living body of the participants and the machine-like movements of the Metaphone. Participants interacting with the machine get their own painting drawn for them -a highly involving activity spurring a whole range of questions around bio-sensing technologies. The participants engaging with Metaphone have to agree to share their personal data, thereby expanding the interactive discourse while questioning the extension of the body with the machine and involving participants with public exposition of their inner worlds.

Ambiguity as a Resource to Inform Proto-Practices

“…The responses in skin conductance have been studied quite extensively in psychophysiological laboratory studies [48], and it is found that the best placements to observe skin conductance responses (phasic component) are the forehead, palms of hands and soles of feet [83]. In HCI, skin conductance has been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from games [62], self-reflection [42,50], arousal detection for interactive systems [55,85], emotion detection for user studies [45], or arts [74]. In order to isolate the phasic component of skin conductance, it is necessary to eliminate all environmental factors, movement noise, as well as the tonic component of skin conductance.…”