UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Emerging Methodologies for Interdisciplinary Research Practice A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media Arts & Technology by Angus Graeme Forbes Committee in Charge: Professor George Legrady, Chair Professor Tobias Höllerer Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin March 2014 The Dissertation of Angus Graeme Forbes is approved: Professor Tobias Höllerer Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Professor George Legrady, Committee Chairperson January 2014 Emerging Methodologies for Interdisciplinary Research Practice Copyright © 2014 by Angus Graeme Forbes iii For my mother, Margaret Joy McKenzie Forbes (1947-2009) iv Acknowledgements The Media Arts & Technology program is a special community of thinkers and creators. I would like to acknowledge all my colleagues and collaborators who supported and inspired me throughout my time here. I feel fortunate to have had many teachers and advisors at UCSB who introduced me to interdisciplinary approaches to research and who continually motivated me to explore new ideas, including Matthew Turk, Marcos Novak, Curtis Roads, and Alan Liu, among others. I would especially like to thank Tobias Höllerer and JoAnn Kuchera- Morin for their unflagging support and thorough feedback on article submissions, qualifying exams, research statements, job applications, my masters project, and on this dissertation. Most of all, this dissertation would not have been possi- ble without the mentorship of George Legrady, who provided me with count- less opportunities by inviting me to take part in his collaborative installation projects, by encouraging me to begin teaching, by offering valuable criticism of my work, and by sharing his deep knowledge of new media arts. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the many wonderful musicians, artists, writers, sci- entists, composers, philosophers, and students I had the opportunity to befriend while living in Santa Barbara, including Basak Alper, Amelia Nuding, F. Myles Sciotto, Colter Frazier, Kiyomitsu Odai, Andres Burbano, Pablo Colapinto, Sum- mer Star, Irene Checa-Garcia, Daniel Mintz, Ty Hegner, Bo Bell McKeon, Erin McKeon Bell, Olivia Harris, David Mendoza, Lisa Jevbratt, Marko Peljhan, An- nika Speer, Phil Taylor, Kristen Spalding, Xárene Eskander, Christopher Jette, Wesley Smith, Alex Norman, Stephen Pope, Amy Lerner, Saiph Savage, Mar- ion Wittmann, Turi Honegger, Seeta Sistla, Javier Villegas, Katie Longo, Greg Shear, Shivakumar Viswanathan, Julie DeAngelis, Graham Wakefield, Haru Ji, Lance Putnam, Michele Bowers, Bob Sturm, Nitsa Pomerleau, Nalini Kokatay, Anil Çamci, Stacey Isaac, Mike Godwin, Anna Knos, Mariano Mora McGinity, Melissa De Bartolomeo, John Delaney, Tony Fast, Josh Gold, Ilana Dann Luna, Tam Hunt, Eric Newman, David Romblom, Luke Taylor, Brie Finegold, George Blake, Ethan Turpin, Molly Hahn, Byungkyu Kang, Erin Bray, Joshua Dickinson, Reza Ali, Danny Bazo, Anaya Cullen, Karl Yerkes, Brian Hansen, Marco Pinter, Qian Liu, Amichi Amar, Dennis Adderton, Yuan-Yi Fan, James Darling, Larry Zins, Matt Wright, Solen Kiratli DiCicco, Michael Hetrick, Sarah Stuckey, Joann Cho, Charlie Roberts, and many others too numerous to mention. v Curriculum Vitæ Angus Graeme Forbes Education 2006 - 2009 Master of Arts in Media Arts & Technology, University of Califor- nia, Santa Barbara. Master’s Thesis: A Framework for Dynamic Information Visualization 1990 - 1992 Bachelor of Arts in British and American Literature, New Col- lege of Florida. Bachelor’s Thesis: Babbling on the Threshold: Duality, Myth, and Resistance in James Merrill’s “The Chang- ing Light at Sandover” 1988 - 1990 Associate of Arts, Bard College at Simon’s Rock Experience 2013 - present Assistant Professor, School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts, University of Arizona, Tucson 2013 - present Director, Creative Coding Lab, University of Arizona, Tucson 2012 Assistant Research Professor, School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts, University of Arizona, Tucson 2012 Researcher, Allosphere Research Facility, California NanoSys- tems Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara 2011 Researcher, Four-Eyes Lab, Computer Science Department, Uni- versity of California, Santa Barbara 2009 - 2011 Lecturer, Media Arts and Technology Program, University of California, Santa Barbara 2009 Researcher, Experimental Visualization Lab, Media Arts and Technology Program, University of California, Santa Barbara 2006–2008 Researcher, NSF IGERT Trainee in Interactive Digital Media, University of California, Santa Barbara Selected Recent Publications 2014 A. G. Forbes. Interactive cellular automata systems for creative projects. In P. Rosin, A. Adamatzky, and X. Sun, editors, Cellu- lar Automata for Image Processing, Computer Graphics & Com- putational Geometry. Springer, 2014. To appear. vi 2014 S. Savage, A. G. Forbes, C. Toxtli, and S. M. Desai. Visual analysis of online audiences. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP), Nice, France, May 2014. In submission. 2014 A. G. Forbes and J. Villegas. Creative applications of microvideos. In Proceedings of the the Sixth International Conferences on Ad- vances in Multimedia (MMEDIA), Nice, France, February 2014, To appear. 2014 A. G. Forbes, J. Villegas, K. Almryde, and E. Plante. A stereo- scopic system for viewing the temporal evolution of brain activ- ity clusters in response to linguistic stimuli. In Proceedings of IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, Stereoscopic Displays and Ap- plications XXV, February 2014. To appear. 2014 J. Villegas and A. G. Forbes. Interactive non-photorealistic video synthesis for artistic user experience on mobile devices. In Pro- ceedings of the International Workshop on Video Processing and Quality Metrics for Consumer Electronics (VPQM), Scottsdale, Arizona, January 2014. To appear. 2014 A. G. Forbes, C. Jette, and A. Predoehl. Analyzing intrinsic motion textures created from naturalistic video captures. In Pro- ceedings of the International Conference on Information Visu- alization Theory and Applications (IVAPP), Lisbon, Portugal, January 2014. To appear. 2013 A. G. Forbes and L. Thorson. Art+experiment. In Proceedings of the IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP), Atlanta, Georgia, October 2013. 2013 A. G. Forbes, M. Surdeanu, P. Jansen, and J. Carrington. Trans- mitting narrative: An interactive shift-summarization tool for improving nurse communication. In Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Interactive Visual Text Analytics, Atlanta, Geor- gia, October 2013. 2013 A. G. Forbes, T. Fast, and T. Höllerer. The natural materials browser: Using a tablet interface for exploring volumetric materi- als science datasets. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization (VIS), Atlanta, Georgia, October 2013. 2013 A. G. Forbes and L. Thorson, editors. The IEEE VIS 2013 Art Show Catalog. IEEE, 2013. vii 2013 A. G. Forbes. Media arts roles in art-science collaborations. In Proceedings of the Re-new Digital Arts Festival, pages 276–282, Copenhagen, Denmark, October-November 2013. 2013 J. Villegas and A. G. Forbes. Double-meaning: Interactive ani- mations with simultaneous global and local narrative. In Proceed- ings of the Re-new Digital Arts Festival, pages 300–304, Copen- hagen, Denmark, October-November 2013. 2013 A. G. Forbes, T. Höllerer, and G. Legrady. Generative fluid pro- files for interactive media arts projects. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graph- ics, Visualization, and Imaging (CAe), pages 123–129, Anaheim, California, July 2013. 2013 J. Villegas and A. G. Forbes. Real-time ambiguous animations. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (CAe), Ana- heim, California, July 2013. 2013 C. Roberts, A. G. Forbes, and T. Höllerer. Enabling multimodal mobile interfaces for musical performance. In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expres- sion (NIME), Daejeon, Korea, May 2013. 2013 S. Savage, A. G. Forbes, and T. Höllerer. Utilizing crowdsourced databases for social media question asking. In ACM CSCW Workshop on Social Media Question Asking, San Antonio, Texas, Februrary 2013. 2012 A. G. Forbes, S. Savage, and T. Höllerer. Visualizing and veri- fying directed social queries. In IEEE Workshop on Interactive Visual Text Analytics, Seattle, Washington, October 2012. 2012 A. Burbano, D. Bazo, S. DiCicco, and A. G. Forbes. The new dunites. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), pages 1501–1502, Nara, Japan, 2012. 2012 S. Savage, A. G. Forbes, R. Savage, T. Höllerer, and N. E. Chavez. Directed social queries with transparent user models. In Adjunct Proceedings of the ACM symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), pages 59–60, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 2012. 2012 A. G. Forbes, T. Höllerer, and G. Legrady. Expressive energy: The fluid automata project. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), pages 65–70, Albuquerque, New Mexico, September 2012. viii 2012 A. G. Forbes and K. Odai. Iterative synaesthetic composing with multimedia signals. In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), pages 573–578, Ljubjiana, Slovenia, September 2012. 2011 A. G. Forbes, B. Alper, T. Höllerer, and G. Legrady. Inter- active folksonomic analytics with the tag river visualization. In IEEE Workshop on Interactive Visual Text Analytics, Providence, Rhode Island,