A Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Ishii focuses on the distinction between art and science the need for the community's appreciation of both.

Good morning. It's a very great pleasure to talk about art and science at this conference [The 26th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer Human Interaction] because I think that art is missing in most of the discussions and the designs coming from this community.

I'd like to briefly talk about what I've been doing and why my work is so relevant to art. My team has been exploring the vision of tangible bits [See CHI 97 Paper - Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms] - basically how to bridge the world of the physical and the digital. More specifically we have been working on balancing the form of interaction design with a single idea - the physical embodiment of digital information, communication or ideas traditionally represented using digital form.

In the morning session there was an important focus on embodiment which is really exciting to hear. So why art and science? Because art is so critical to develop a new concept or vision. First I would like to explain why - but before I start I'd like to show an example of one of the most popular pieces that my team has designed in the past [Prof. Ishii begins showing the Music Bottles project]. We present work not only to scientific communities like CHI but we also exhibit at many art exhibitions, museums and scientific museums to reach a much wider audience. This is part of our effort think together and discuss the future of digital communication - and how this can be woven into the fabric of everyday physical environment. This [Music Bottles] is a very simple minimal design extending the notion of the container or conduit to the digital domain.

Technology is a very important driving force of today's HCI, and the CHI community has a very strong focus on human centered design. This starts with an understanding of the user need in order to make up a meaningful application and solve the problems that the users are conscious of. My team, however, has been intentionally focusing on the layer of 'the vision', the concept or principle behind this. And it is always the art that is is the source of the inspiration to generate this new concept or idea. Why not focus on user needs or application, why vision? The answer is very simple. Technology gets obsolete in one year. The application disappears in ten years - but the vision, we hope, never disappears. The vision lives much longer than our lifespans. You see in Florence such great evidence of this - the art everywhere has inspired everyone. Even today all the people come this city to appreciate what our ancestors have done.

I'd like to explain how with some of our projects we've really engaged with the art - not only as a source of inspiration - but also we try return, we try to change the art itself. First I will show our classic example of Illuminating Clay [Prof. Ishii begins showing the Illuminating Clay project]. We are very eager to design a new medium for the representation of ideas. For landscape design it's not so much rigorous simple scientific work - it needs aesthetics, an 'artistic' point of view. This clay is both computational clay and physical clay. You can give it form and manipulate it while simultaneously the computer provides an analysis - a rigorous scientific mathematical analysis. It is painting on top of the clay. This becomes a medium for not only artistic representation but also scientific reality.

Another example is Sandscape, which is a successor of the Illuminating Clay constructed using a more malleable medium - sand. This is an installation in Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and visitors can sculpt the sand themselves to design landscapes. Here you see the water drainage illustrated with a collection of vectors. Why do we give beautiful form to the landscape? People can always be informed by the analysis of scientific technical work. Here there is no boundary between form-giving using clay. But for now scanning into computers, then doing the analysis using computers - that is the current paradigm.

Representation of ideas is a very important issue for art and science. Representation really matters because if you choose wrong representation you can starve because the way you can manipulate the operation is strictly limited by the representation. So digital or physical? Physical of course has user manipulation better communication, and spatial understanding. Digital? No question - precision, ease of dissemination and quantitative analysis. The problem is people who are forced to choose one. Illuminating clay or sandscape is an important step, trying to embed new design mediums or representations of ideas which inherits from both physical affordance and computational digital affordance. This is trying to change the way we come up with the creative design.

And I believe downstream, people who give form based on aesthetics - that's art. The upstream, where the river starts - that's science. But both art and science can be integrated into one tangible medium. That is something very important for us so we are bootstrapping, we are changing the design process by making a new medium, a new material, to think with.

Another example is a work done by Professor Kimiko Ryokai she's now teaching at Berkeley. Is she here? Anyway, I'd like to show another example that contributes to the field. Many years ago in the era of the renaissance, painters were also color makers. They went to the field looking for the stone, the rock, of the color with which they could paint in order to materialize their concept as paintings. They created the medium with in which they worked. But now its completely divided - and we're interested about how to let kids explore the the materials themselves. Using the everyday physical world as a palette, a source of the colors, textures, movement and also the source of the inspiration [this concept refers heavily to Prof. Ryokai's IO Brush, completed when Prof. Ishii was her PhD. Thesis Advisor].

You could just paint with all the inks which you were given, but colors you find in the world have a very special emotional meaning - it's not the same as the color you pick up from the color picker on the windows or macintosh. All the emotional value and all the stories are woven into the final painting and every stroke has more meaning. What is the relevance to the art? I'd like to explain. Painting is a two dimensional dead ink covering the surface - but if you see this image created with IO Brush you see the teddy bear behind the ghost cloth. This is a third axis - the z axis which has never existed in the history of the art. We are inventing new forms of the artistic expression.

This is something very exciting and all the people in the museum and the artists are excited about it. Even kids were exciting but that wasn't Kimiko's goal - she didn't care about the concept of history which we discussed so she came up with her own interpretations of ideas or usage of this third dimension. You might have seen this piece in the context of HCI but if you see this from the perspective of art history there is some significant quantum leap which I find really exciting. In the digital era we are not just using technology to restore or preserve or emulate but you can make a bold jump to go to the next stage. This is exemplified in the thesis title of "the world is your palette."

It is how you change the perception of the world through the eyes of the creator that is one of our important goals.

HCI really developed a new way to let people interact with information - digital and physical. And art inspires us. It is through this interaction of how to inspire people that this becomes something exciting and important for me. Inspiring people's imagination and creativity through the interaction is one of the goals. People ask what are we designing? The basic answer is eyeglasses. Through the interaction people are now wearing special eyeglasses subconsciously. Through these eyeglasses people can see the world differently - once you open the bottle you can't stop imaginin and dreaming of what contents you may want to put into the bottles surrounding your world. Once you paint with the IO brush you can't stop dreaming about new meaningful and beautiful paintings you can make out of the real physical world. That is the inspiration which art can give.