May 6, 2004

Imagination Environment connects words, images

The Imagination Environment, a new high-tech visual display developed by the Northwestern Program in Network Arts, is on exhibit at The Second City theatre, 1608 N. Wells St., Chicago.

Kristian Hammond (right), director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory, and David Shamma, designer of The Imagination Environment, discuss the Second City installation.

photo by Stephen Anzaldi

The installation, which has an open-ended run, was timed to open with The Second City e.t.c.’s new revue, “Show Title Deemed Indecent by FCC.”

The Program in Network Arts is an initiative of the department of computer science of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Its aim is to enable the creation of a set of software agents that use the machine and the network as a medium for artistic and cultural communication rather than a simple computational device.

The Imagination Environment plays a piece of video media on a central screen — a political speech, a news broadcast or a theatrical scene — and, using the technology of closed captioning, the spoken words are used to search for related images. The most popular images associated with the words in the piece are then illustrated on the eight screens surrounding the original piece of media.

Designed and implemented by David A. Shamma, a graduate student of Northwestern’s Intelligent Information Laboratory, The Imagination Environment exposes the connections between ideas and the online images that it finds. Exploiting the connectivity of the Web and the technologies of information retrieval, it opens a window to our world that is a machine’s “imagination” of who and what we are.

“Using images found on the Web, The Imagination Environment can amplify emotions, expand on ideas and surprise us with connections between thought and image that we might not be aware of,” said Shamma. “Because it is controlling and directing the performance itself, The Imagination Environment is not so much a piece of art as it is an artist in its own right.”

“The Imagination Environment is one of the first systems to use the Web as a cultural object,” said Kristian J. Hammond, director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory. “It shows us the links between a flow of ideas and the images that they connect to online. It exposes us to the connections that are there, connections that we ourselves created but may not ever think of as we watch movies, the news and television.”