portrait 2013 - Douglas Engelbart
[ portrait 2013 - Douglas Engelbart ] 肖像2013_
Brief:
[ portrait 2013 - Douglas Engelbart ] is an installation in honour of Douglas Engelbart. It’s an operating system into which you can plug 88 computer mice, which means every mouse has its own cursor on the screen and everyone can control them at the same time.
“One computer, one web browser, many cursors, many computer mice; people surf the net and interact with HID devices together at the same time.”
The first commercial personal computers appeared in the ’60s; at that time, computers had only a keyboard as their interface for executing commands. Since graphical operating systems began, the computer mouse has served as a pointing device, surfing a two-dimensional world until now. It was invented by Douglas Engelbart, who was an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, and also contributed to the development of hypertext, networked computers and precursors to graphical user interfaces.
When Douglas Engelbart died in 2013 at the age of 88, I decided to make a work in his memory. I make a portrait work every year as part of my own artistic practice. In the beginning, I started to think about cloud computing and today's social networks. Current social media platforms are built on time-based status feeds; it’s a comfortable user experience which lets people feel and understand the latest activities of their friends or companies. But I asked myself whether there was some other way to make people feel something much more directly; that would be interesting. And if cloud computing could be more than just sharing data and co-working, that would be wonderful for me. At that point, I made a non-personal web browser to express my thoughts: “How chaotic would it be if people could surf the internet at the same time?” “The fastest commander will be the person who clicks the mouse first.” “The web media can be true or false.” This project is a computer with 88 computer mice, and every mouse is fully functional. The audience can choose and surf online content on certain pages automatically generated by custom software. If the mice have been idle for 10 minutes, the mouse cursors on the screen arrange themselves into the figure of Douglas Engelbart. These web pages are related to online computer mouse tutorials and to Douglas Engelbart. I try to create an environment which is different from the regular way of using a personal computer, using this humorous setup to let people feel and think about what the next level of the human computing environment will be and how media or social media affect our society.
This project has now been extended: I am developing a web browser plugin as a new social platform which allows people to see their friends’ mouse cursors in their browser and interact with them. I think this is a kind of physical activity that lets people in front of a screen catch the feeling of the “being” of their friends.