“Sensiqwerty: Work-In-Progress” presented by Penny and Lough

Symposium:

• ISEA2020: 26th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2020:  

• Sensiqwerty: Work-In-Progress

• Simon Penny
• Alex Lough

• ‘Sensiqwerty‘ is an experiment in sensorimotorically enhanced computer interface design. The project is premised on decades of building embodied interfaces that attend to sensorimotor subtleties of normal human embodied performance, often excluded from conventional interfaces. ‘Traditional’ computer keyboard interfaces are binary––key states are ‘on’ and ‘off’. In ‘Sensiqwerty‘, we have enhanced a conventional qwerty typing keyboard so it is sensitive to key pressure and duration. As an object lesson in the nature of computer interfaces and the way they ‘dumb down’ sensorimotoric capabilities of embodied users, the project examines how many expressive qualities of hand-action have been removed from keyboard control and thus from the awareness and capability of users.

  As a creative technology, it has several applications:

  1. as a tool for generating digital concrete poetry––with outputs for both live-video and as static/printed text pages
  2. as realtime graphical score generation for music/performance, particularly improvisation
  3. as a tool for coordination of remote realtime online improvisation
  4. direct integration with digital musical instruments (via MIDI), including phoneme and pseudo-speech synthesis

Video:

• The project is realized with the Sensel Morph and custom software developed in Max and Jitter.

Category:

• Artist Talk