EMDialog is an interactive installation that was commissioned by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada as part of the Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon exhibition. It is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Holly Schmidt, a practicing artist, and Uta Hinrichs, an engineer for computational visualistics and PhD student at the University of Calgary. Responding to Emily Carr's life and work EMDialog invites museum visitors to explore the extensive discourse about Emily Carr in an interactive way. The installation consists of a large interactive display showing two interlinked visualizations that present commentary and imagery about Emily Carr's life and work along temporal and contextual dimensions. Visitors can explore these visualizations through direct touch interaction. The content of the display is cloned and projected on a wall making the visualizations and the interaction with the display visible to a larger audience. Speakers embedded in the display provide ambient forest sounds of birds, water, and wind to convey Emily Carr's experience of painting in-situ. The project was funded and supported by the University of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, and SMART Technologies Inc. who designed and provided the interactive tabletop display that was used for the installation. The following people made EMDialog possible: Sheelagh Carpendale (Associate Professor at the University of Calgary) Gerald Morrison (External Research Manager, SMART Technologies Inc.) Kirstin Evenden (Manager of New Media Initiatives, Glenbow Museum)
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About the creators of EMDialog

Holly Schmidt is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation, photography and video. She currently resides in Calgary and maintains a studio with the Untitled Art Society. Schmidt’s practice focuses on concepts of memory, perception and consciousness. In 2004, she continued her exploration of those concepts through an Artist Residency at the USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway. Recently, Schmidt introduced elements of performance and intervention in to her studio practice. She has shown locally and internationally, including the Herland Film Festival, Calgary, Emmedia, Calgary and the Visningrommet, Bergen, Norway. Schmidt has a BFA with distinction (1997) and a B.ED (1999). Holly Schmidt will begin graduate studies in media arts at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in the fall of 2008.

Uta Hinrichs is an engineer for Computational Visualistics and PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Canada, supervised by Sheelagh Carpendale. Her research interests are focussed on the design and development of innovative interfaces for large displays that support intuitive and lightweight interaction with information. Hinrichs has an interdisciplinary background in computer science, psychology, social science, and design. Before she came to Calgary to start her PhD, she finished her German Diplom (2006) in Computational Visualistics at the University of Magdeburg in Germany. Her previous research projects show her interests in both, visual design and computer science. Hinrichs' work has been published and presented at various international conferences.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people who collaborated with us on this project:
All members of the interactions lab at the University of Calgary, especially Petra Isenberg and Christopher Collins.
Robert Sirotich and Joe Wright from SMART Technologies Inc. who designed and built the interactive tabletop display, we used for our installation.
Nigel Laing who helped us a lot with image editing and graphic design.
The technical and security staff at the Glenbow Museum, in particular Glenn Myhr, who helped us installing and maintaining the installation at the Museum.
The Discovery Room staff at the Glenbow Museum who also helped maintaining the installation at the museum.
Cherry Sham, New Media Coordinator at the Glenbow Museum, who helped us with the field study we developed around EMDialog.

We would like to thank the following institutions for funding and supporting this project: