Doree Duncan Seligmann

Dorée Duncan Seligmann

Director Collaborative Applications Research
Avaya Labs
Avaya Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10103
(tel) +1 212 841-6036
(fax) +1 908 696-5402
email: doree@avaya.com

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Panelist at Supernova 2005

"Your Attention Please"

June 20-22, San Francisco, CA

Editor:"Arful Media" in IEEE Multimedia

Artful Media--Celebrating Art and Technology

The explosion of affordable technologies--both hardware and software--has contributed to the spread of multimedia in the arts and a pervasive breakdown of the boundaries between art and technology. Whereas even ten years ago collaborations between artists and technologists were championed as groundbreaking, today we view such alliances as customary, perhaps even required. Artistic and technological partnerships have moved from defining a particular "state-of-the-art" to becoming the state of all arts and, some might argue, the state of all imaginations, and technologies, and productions.

Despite this, the roles of the artist and that of the technologist in these collaborations often remain distinct, and more broadly, the spheres of influence of these separate worlds remain unbalanced. The influence of technology on art is apparent and well documented whereas the influence of art on technological innovation is not. It seems that as soon as a new technology is available, artists are compelled to use it to create new art forms, but when art preceded technology, the associated technology was often developed at its own pace, independently, and much later. This inequity may have something to do with the lack of symmetry of the perceived roles of the technologist vs. the artist: technologists develop new technologies to solve specific problems while artists create new solutions with the technologies at hand. Collaboration between artists and technologists as equal partners has the potential to bridge this gap, and multimedia, by its nature, can be the catalyst to send these two worlds colliding, to merge and mutate, accelerating innovation and broadening its scope. This column will be devoted to celebrating the mix of art and technology.

Short Biography

Dr. Dorée Duncan Seligmann is currently the director of Collaborative Applications Research at Avaya Labs where she works in the areas of communication-enabling business processes, context-aware applications, presence-based technologies, mobile communication solutions, communications middleware, and user-interface techniques. Since joining Avaya she has filed over 50 patents.

Her interest is to develop new systems that enable people to communicate more effectively and efficiently. Under the broad rubric of providing a rich user interface, this work involves issues ranging from aesthetic considerations to mechanisms to increase ease-of-use and a user's control over devices and systems to ways of humanizing network management systems.

Seligmann studied anthropology at Harvard U., writing a thesis that compared Irish and Irish-American pubs. Afterward, she moved to Paris, where she spent several years directing and designing theatrical productions and started a English-language theatre. Unpon returning to the United States, she earned a PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University. Her dissertation, Interactive Intent-Based Illustrations: Visual Language for 3D Worlds, describes a system to automatically generate 3D graphics based on communicative intent.

At Bell Laboratories, she was a designer of Rapport, and early multimedia conferencing system from which several products at AT&T and Lucent Technologies were born. She also developed N-ICE (Networked-Interactive Collaborative Environment) that enables users to share arbitrary application programs in persistent environments. She then developed Archways, which merges her dissertation work with her work in multimedia systems. Archways automatically generates a 3D virtual environment (3D graphics and 3D sound) for multimedia communication using knowledge-based graphics and intelligent objects. She was head of the Metaphorium, experiments in visual metaphors and narratives, including the Message is The Medium, SubwaySurface, MessageInABottle, SandTypewriter/SkyWriter, LiveWebStationary, and the IsleOfWrite.

Seligmann has written a book about her great-aunt, Isadora Duncan, entitled "Life Into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World" published by W.W.Norton, NY. She edits the art and technology column in IEEE Multimedia.

Pictoral History

IBIS Interactive Illustration
As the user navigates, IBIS chooses different techniques to maintain the MODE dial's visibility. In this case a cutaway-mask is automatically generated.

IBIS Composite Illustration in COMET.
IBIS determines two illustrations are needed to show the steps in the procedure, highlights the screws in the first and the cover plate in the second. IBIS generates different types of arrows to show the operations and selects the viewing paramaters to show enough of the radio that it is recognizable. In the automatically generated textual explanation, COMET augmented the text with the two generated cross-references (refering to the design and stylistic choices made by IBIS).

IBIS Interactive Illustration for KARMA (for a head-mounted display).
It is designed to show how to remove the printer's paper tray.
(Available slide from SIGGRAPH Techinal Slide Set '93 #25 .)

Rapport Multimedia Conferencing System.
Rapport was the first multimedia conferencing system at Bell Labs which used the model of persistent virtual meeting rooms. The Rapport interface integrated the content and interfaces to separate media services into one cohesive display. This screen shot shows Bob Ensor's view of a virtual meeting room that he is sharing with Sid Ahuja.

ARCHWAYS: automatically generated virtual environment for multimedia communication
John, Cati, and Dorée sharing application programs and video and voice in a virtual meeting room.