Camille Utterback gave a talk at UC Berkeley on Monday. A dig­i­tal artist, pio­neer of inter­ac­tive video art, and one of last month’s awardees of a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. “genius grant”), Camille got her start in dig­i­tal art at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. There, with Romy Achituv, she cre­ated her first inter­ac­tive video instal­la­tion, “Text Rain,” in 1999.

Utterback’s talk was titled “Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey.” I want to share some of her thoughts here, because many of them are right in line with my own recent think­ing. The fol­low­ing items are highly para­phrased from my notes dur­ing the talk.

• Utterback writes all of her own code, mostly in C++, but also uses Processing to sketch ideas.

• In com­pu­ta­tional media, the rules are implicit and hid­den. When the user has to deduce the rules, the inter­ac­tion may be frus­trat­ing. When not frus­trat­ing, though, this qual­ity can make for a beau­ti­ful process of discovery.

• Always avoid “one lin­ers.” Make sure your work has enough con­cep­tual com­plex­ity to stand the test of time.

• Consider how an instal­la­tion affects your phys­i­cal body — are you look­ing up? down? arch­ing your back? bend­ing toward the floor? Notice what emo­tions and behav­iors we asso­ciate with those posi­tions. (Eyes cast down­ward, for exam­ple, indi­cates shame. Looking straight ahead indi­cates engage­ment.) Don’t make the user uncom­fort­able, unless you are try­ing to make the user uncomfortable.

• It is very impor­tant to do user test­ing. When cod­ing, you are writ­ing rules that define the accepted para­me­ters of user behav­ior. Not every­one will behave as you do, so test to make sure your rules are flex­i­ble enough to work for others.

• Using cam­era input auto­mat­i­cally makes a piece social. People will move in front of the cam­era with oth­ers, inter­act with each other and the piece, and cre­ate their own mean­ings from the interaction.

• People intu­itively under­stand how to move and inter­act with mir­rored video, by virtue of expe­ri­ence in the phys­i­cal world (i.e. using mir­rors). Think about how to trans­late other shared phys­i­cal expe­ri­ences into intu­itive, dig­i­tal inter­face mechanisms.

• Utterback tries to bridge the gap between the “fleshy world” of the body and the rules-based world of the computer.

• Her work in draw­ing sys­tems (such as the piece Untitled #5) con­tains many hand-drawn ele­ments, over­laid with dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tions. (Not all the forms are code-generated.)

• This kind of work is fun, because peo­ple move in goofy ways, like kids.