Investigating metaphor-based user interfaces in the design of responsive environments. The first iteration of this series is augment_me to be followed-up by complete_me and data_shadow. A large part of the image collection is already available flickr augment_me was exhibited at Artspace, Sydney and review in the V94 RealTime Arts Magazine plus a paper delivered at ISEA 2011

augment_me
Is a responsive visual database; a memory machine of sorts but a live and developing one. The images constituting the database are photographs collected over the past 8 years of my life and track my relationships with people, things, places and scenarios. Some of the ideas used in augment_me began to take form when I interviewed a young person as part my research in 2004. During the interview, I asked questions specifically about identity and materialism. Some of the answers bewildered me - primarily because the attractiveness and appeal of self was all about how one “looked” and this appeared to be determined, almost solely, by branding, consumption and market driven perceptions. The self could be more the self by buying or having a certain thing to define “you”.  To define “me”.

In augment_me, the individual images are everyday - banal in some instances, beautiful in others.  A building, a lover, graffiti, a dirty street, flowers, drunk friends, a fountain, my unmade bed, a painting, a wake – they are fragments, moments, within an identity, a life which is not fixed nor defined by a singular, fixed thing but is shifting and ever changing.

Creative Collaborators
Programmer: Adam Hinshaw
Sound art: Ian Andrews
Producer: Kate Richards

augment_me was made possible by the generous support of the Visual Arts & Crafts Board and the Music Board of the Australia Council.