User:Squang

W. Bradford Paley is a New Media artist located in New York City. He is better known as an interaction designer that has contributed to the organization of data and interface formatting.1 His organizational skills and interest in understanding the way people use and interact with information through functional aesthetics has led him to the field of interaction design.2 His focus for creating his art pieces seems to be targeting people's awareness about how information is organized, presented, and used. He is currently an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University in the department of computer science3, and he has gone on to do series of lectures about his work, and written many important articles concerning the study of data formatting. Paley was born in Detroit, Michigan, and has moved around to many places throughout childhood. His first encounter with computer graphics was in 1973, at Andover High school, Michigan. He created a 2D game design called, Stochastically shaded spheres & circles. His second game design was a 2-D computer game called find the boy or spaceship, which he later remade as a spaceship lost in a cube game.4 Andover High school was one of the first few schools that offered experimental computer classes, and this gave him a chance to work with arrangement of fonts into visual pieces. From then on he graduated form UC Berkeley in 1981 with a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Economics and an unofficial minor in computer science.5 Although his degree seems somewhat trivial, his unofficial computer science major allowed him to pursue his interests with computers, and to experiment with a new field of study solely devoted to what we now know as interaction design. While he was at UC Berkeley he continued to work and experiment with visuals. He created an experimental piece called Worms which was a type of Behavioral Image. It requires one to move the cursor on the screen to drag a worm around. The worm was programmed to chase it's own tail, which was more interactive than his previous works. His experimentation with moving images will become a very important part of his art career because his current works contain a lot of moving images (data) on the screen that interacts with the audience. After he graduates UC Berkeley, he went into computer animation for advertisements, in 1982. In the same year he started to build computer interfaces, and he found Digital Image Design Incorporated (didi.com/brad).6 The website is still running today, and has become a big success in terms of interface design and in helping create visual displays for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), since 1985. He is still highly involved in NYSE by creating hand held devices (this product's patent is currently pending) for the stock brokers to use.7 It is supposed to increase the efficiency of the brokers by placing data into a certain format so that it would be easier and quicker for them to read.

Paley's main focus as an artist has a lot to do with Database Aesthetics. According to Christiane Paul, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art “[Database Aesthetics are] the aesthetic principles applied in imposing the logic of database to any type of information, filtering data collections, and visualizing data...[it is] a conceptual potential and cultural form-- a way of revealing (visual) patterns of knowledge, beliefs, and social behavior.”8 The philosophy behind his company Didi is “Interface design can be more than fashion or branding; it can be an optimization process that connects data with business tasks in a deep and effortless way.”9 In this case, the visuals of his work are supposed to be simple, and be easily maneuvered. He advocates non linear visual data, organized to allow people the ability to react to it before they have to think about the task. A good example would be the hand held device he created for the brokers at the NYSE. According to him, this device has “sped brokers up by an average of 15 times—not 15%—1500%; down to less than a second!”10

The art pieces done by Paley are very process oriented. To him, the input seems to be just as important as the output of his work. The beauty of his pieces rely on the nature of the format rather than pure aesthetics. Paley's piece at the Whitney, CodeProfiles (2002), commissioned by Christiane Paul, clearly shows his awareness of the how the input should visually effect the output. The code for his piece is shown to the audience, and then as the audience enters the link, the web page where his art piece is located shows the code itself. Relationships are created in the piece through the different colors of lines that move around. The different colored lines are used to differentiate how the code is written by the programmer, how the computer processes the code, and how the viewer probably reads the code.11 The actual objective of this piece of work is to incorporate three points in space, and he does so by pointing out the three relationships of the use, and creation of the code.

Paley's newer body of work, Textarc (2002), draws a lot from his previous work, CodeProfiles. Of course the objective is completely different, the use of color as a tool to differentiate the importance of information is the same. Both of these pieces have a very utilitarian approach to them, a total echo of his companies (Didi) philosophy. According to his interview done by Pau Alsina, Professor of Humanities Studies (UOC), he draws his inspiration from nature, by mimicking natures uses of colors and layers in put them into his databases.12 He is still focusing on the idea of organizing data, but the programmer does not play a direct role. According to Christiane Paul “[he] treat's the book-- itself a data container-- as a database and arranges it into its smallest units, words and lines that can be filtered according to various principles.”13 It is also “a visual model that represents an entire text on a single page.”14 The use of previous ideas are apparent because Textarc is reformatting the way someone is supposed to read a book. Rather than reading an entire book, the point of this particular program is to help the user get the main ideas from the organization of the text in the book. The rule as to how one is supposed to use the program is detailed in an interview down by Pau Alsina.