Zimmer’s Research
Human and Machine Haptics
We are
researching touch in general and we are developing technologies to simulate and
stimulate the human touch system, providing new ways to interact with computers
in virtual worlds or to use computers to interact with other people and things
at a distance. This is work that I am doing jointly with Mandayam A.
Srinivasan, director of the Touch Lab at MIT and grew out of work an EPSRC-funded project
(done jointly with Janis Jefferies) to work towards computer simulated access
to the feel of textiles. The research also includes applications in the other
direction in which we are are studying textilesto help us create devices that
will allow simulation of feel more generally.
Papers:
Book in
progress: Human and Machine Haptics which I am writing jointly with Mandeyam
Srinivasan
Reconfigurable Media for interactive television and
contemporary art research:
New Millennium New
Media (EU Funded)
We are developing tools, techniques, and strategies for creating and for
engaging with non-linear narratives. Partners on the project include: BT, BBC,
Sony, Finnish television. Goldsmiths is principally responsible for the
reasoning software, software the reasons about how to configure fragments of a
story into a coherent narrative, and the high-level production tools.
Culture Mining (AHRC-funded)
A project with the Tate, in which we are turning the Tate's streaming media
collection into a research archive by creating an ontology for contemporary art
and producing algorithms for semi-automatically fragmenting parts of the
collection and tagging the fragments with meta-data associated with the
ontology
Abstraction
This
work has two strands: an old strtand of abstraction as a mathematical technique
for speeding up search and a more recent strand that concerns studies of
Abstraction in Art as a way of understanding both the computing abstraction
work and abstraction as a Psychological Process.
AI
Papers:
Art,
Psychology, Computing
Abstraction in
Art (Proceedings of the Royal Society)
Work with Artists
Public
Art
This
work is various projects done in conjunction with Greyworld, including Bins and Benches at
the Junction at Cambridge (funded by the Arts Council).
Society
of Neurons
This is
a web-based project, funded by the AHRC and realised jointly with Warren
Neidich and Thibbauld de Sousa, that treats user’s interactions as
environmental input to the creation of an artwork that evolves in a way that
mirrors the growth of the human brain. You can download the software at: Society of Neurons and read about
it at: SON paper.
Mutators (funded by the AHRC, The Arts Council,
and the Emerald Fund)
This project follows on seminal computer
art work that William Latham did in the 1970's and 19080's. William is working
with us, updating those ideas with emerging three-dimensional modelling ideas
to produce algorithms for geometric design and computer visualisation.
Applications of the Designer work include Computer Art the automatic generation
of 3D content for the Games, Special Effects (Film+TV), and CAD-CAM industries;
applications for the visualisation include visualisation of complex numerical
sequences including genomics, proteomics, financial data streams
New partner funding
scheme with industrial and cultural partners (funded by Arts and
Business).
This umbrella funding brings together performing artists, visual artists and
companies to generate research ideas. We are the convenors and the other
participants include, or have included, BT, The London Philharmonia, Dance
East, Cambridge University, and FACT.
Hexagram
A multi-disciplinary research institute based in Montreal supports two
projects, through Canadian government funding on artistic and social uses of
clothes with embedded computational devices. The two projects are called
Intelligent textiles and Wearable Absence.