I’m working this semester with Michael Mateas and Mario Romero on a generative art installation for the home, the Tableau Machine. The machine works by analyzing the video frames from 6 cameras mounted in the Aware Home (a “living laboratory” of a home — it’s got all the things a usual house has, a kitchen, bedrooms, living room, dining room, but also an infrastructure for location-sensing, camera arrays, and microphone arrays). The output of the cameras is turned into a minute by minute model of “social mood.” My job is to find a way to represent these moods on the display of the system.

Our artistic vision right now: A quote by Le Corbusier “A house is a machine for living in.” If a home is a machine, what does it look like? How does it work? What does it make/produce? We have an idea for a collage machine that has visual primitives that resemble machines or factory components. We have gears, belts, smokestacks, and the like. The system will use the data from the cameras to change the way the collages look.