AVI

Sans avoir la prétention d'expliquer le but et les moyens d'un art arrivé déjà à une réalisation assez avancée, je vais tâacher de répondre, autant que cela est possible, à une des questions les plus souvent posées devant les tableaux modernes. Je transcris cette question dans toute sa simplicité : "Qu'est-ce que cela représente ?" Je me fixe donc comme but cette simple interrogation et je vais m'efforcer dans un exposé très court d'en prouver la parfaite inanité.

--Fernand Léger, Fonctions de la Peinture

The point of view of Léger is agreed on by many modern and contemporary artists and critics; art suggests emotions, interpretations, meanings, mediated by the viewer's experience, mood and mind. After the Impressionists' lesson, the question "What does it represent?" may have different answers according to who asks it. Picasso used to say in Picasso on Art: "People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."

In the world of computers and technological artifacts, emotions and interpretationsmust not supersede the meaning that the designer of an interface, of amessage, of a dialogue has conceived to make an artifact usable and effective.Hence, the Advanced User Interfaces community opposes to Léger, accepts the challenge and tries to propose visual and perceptual interfaces which abstract from housekeeping and technical details, to be concrete and expressive to their users. In front of a visual interface, humans should not only understand the virtual world behind it, but also be empowered, able to be consumers and producers of knowledge through computing, participant to a human collective mind.

The invited speakers of this edition of AVI, the eighth of the series, explore these perspectives from different points of view. Riccardo Rabagliati, Dean of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, Italy, explores the realm of interactive art, confronting the complementary skills needed to conceive an artwork through new technologies. Gerhard Fischer, Director of the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D) of the University of Colorado, USA, explores visualization as a dimension of distributed intelligence, seen as an effective framework for understanding what humans can achieve and how artifacts and tools can be designed and evaluated to empower human beings and empower their tasks. Elizabeth Mynatt, Director of the GVU Center at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, illustrates the nascent relationship between people and computation, driven by the emergence of people as equally, and interchangeably, consumers and producers of the computing experience.

However, the danger to be an inane designer is always present. How to avoid this trap is collectively addressed by 32 full papers (which are one fourth of the submissions in their category), 45 short papers and 10 system papers, demonstrating prototypes and working experiences. They reflect, out of the about 200 papers submitted, variegated experiences brought to Venice by authors of nineteen countries worldwide.

Three satellite workshops have been associated to AVI 2006. BELIV06--Beyond Time and Errors: Novel Evaluation Methods for Information Visualization has been organized by Enrico Bertini and Giuseppe Santucci, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy, and by Catherine Plaisant, University of Maryland, USA. Context in Advanced Interfaces has been organized by Kris Mihalic and Manfred Tscheligi, University of Salzburg, Austria, and by Alexander Braendle and Marco Combetto, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. The third workshop, Gender and Interaction: Real and Virtual Women in a Male World, has been organized by Antonella De Angeli, University of Manchester, UK, and by Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, UCL, UK.

Finally, two tutorials, offered by Mark Maybury, The MITRE Corporation, USA, and by Monique Noirhomme-Fraiture, University of Namur, Belgium, survey the Intelligent Visual Interfaces, and the Statistics for Visual Interface Evaluation.