An extract from the 2002 NYSCA grant proposal for a large scale touch screen plasma panel TextArc. Exhibition Summary: Aug. ‘01: Banff Centre for the Arts; Nov. ‘01: UIST (User Interface Software and Technology conf.); Mar. ’02: Living with the Genie conf. Columbia Univ.; Apr. ‘02 TextArc.org site; Jul. ’02 SIGGRAPH art show Sample a, the CD-ROM shows TextArc running. Sample b is a Web version of TextArc. They both demonstrate an earlier project tuned for single-person interactive use on a small computer screen. “TextArc Plasma Panel Edition 1” will have roughly the same formal structure but will be tuned for public or private viewing on a 41? diagonal screen. For example, colors may change to better suit installation in a library, and a more powerful computer may make the motion made more fluid. In addition, the way people can interact with it will be changed based on careful study of viewers. I willwatch what people do, ask what they intended to happen, and alter the programming to make it happen—giving the viewers a sense of immediate control. Interaction techniques will be retargeted to support conversation rather than isolated exploration. Name: W. Bradford Paley Project Description: TextArc is a visual representation of a text; it draws the entire text on a singlepage—twice. For the current project that page will be a 32” x 20” plasma panel. The text is drawn in an elliptical arc to respect its linear structure, to provide visual context for where ideas occur, and to provide an easy way for people to share observations (e.g. “Look, the Caterpillar appears here, a third of the way into the story”). Individual words in TextArc get brighter as they appear more often. Words are positioned inside the ellipse depending on where they appear in the text. A simple averaging rule assures that the automatic positioning of words for any text will still have meaning: words are pulled closest to where they appear most often. So, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice appears in the middle, since she’s central to the story, while characters only mentioned in specific chapters, like the Mock Turtle, Gryphon, and Caterpillar appear close to their own chapters. Presentations of TextArc have intrigued and excited people, even in its early stages. An April 15 New York Times art section article described TextArc as “a full-fledged work of digital art. ... This is the reading process made visible” and helped the launch of the Web site at http://www.textarc.org generate (conservatively) 60,000 visitors. Hundreds of them, including many Literature professors and researchers, have written to agree. Importantly, a large percentage come back time and again to explore different texts. Visitor flow has settled to a consistent 500-1000 people a day, demonstrating that people see value beyond their initial “it’s lovely” reaction. It suggests that TextArc helps people find real meaning through this admittedly unusual view. The requested grant will help bring TextArc into the social domain—off the small computer screen and onto a wall in a shared space, so it becomes a focus for conversation and learning beyond isolated explorations on the Web. It will be both passive and interactive. People will be able to just watch and comment to one another as TextArc “reads” a novel or piece of non-fiction. TextArc “reads” by stepping through the text a word at a time, showing progress in a highlighted subtitle. At the same time, an amber line loops smoothly through the highlighted words inside the ellipse. When the line approaches repeated themes (identified by counting repetitions of word pairs) the themes bloom into flower-like networks of purple tendrils. They show where the author has taken the idea in the past, and whether this mention of a word reinforces a theme (following a tendril), or ignores it. People will also be able to touch the screen to begin reading from any specific word, or find every place a word appears in the story. The requested grant will help cover the months of careful on-site testing and reprogramming needed to make TextArc work in this extremely different multi-person interaction style and large format. The texts displayed will be chosen to enhance the likelihood of conversation. For example, I have contacted the New York Public Library and have had initial interest in an installation that may display texts related to another exhibit, or related to physical books laid out in front of the display. An installation in a public high school might show books that the students read for their literature classes; an installation in a Wall street firm could show recent news items relating to stocks a volatile industry. TextArc fits into both a new and an old genre of art. Interpretation of the hidden structure in databases and texts is something the contemporary art world is just beginning to address. But visually exploring what it means to see and understand—to be human—is the essence of work by Cézanne and movements like Cubism, Purism, Futurism, and Synchromism. They paved the way for the more structured scientific studies of the same phenomena decades later in fields like psychophysics and the cognitive neurosciences. I apply findings from the art movements and the mind sciences to expose the meaning in texts and databases. The current project is meant to bring my exploration one step forward into social discourse—not just about the means I use to show text, but the rich content of the texts themselves, which will be chosen from among the world’s most respected literature and the most relevant text available for the viewers at a given installation.