This happened #6

I'm hoping to grab a ticket to This happened #6 at the Southbank Centre in London on the 15th November. This happened is series of talks and seminars in which interction designers/interactive artists present concepts and project productions.

At this event:

United Visual Artists
Markus Kison
Troika
rAndom International

are all making presentations...

The project was started by Chris O'Shea of Pixelsumo, Joel Gethin Lewis and Andreas Muller of Nanika.

Japanese Graffiti

Cool Hunting have posted news on Remo Camerota's new book 'Graffiti Japan'.
Remo's website is here and this is Cool Hunting...

Interactive Art at the Science Gallery

After an enjoyable day in Limerick at the Tweak Festival (article below), I was treated to some more interactive art/installations in Dublin. On Friday, 19th September (19 - 21st September), The Science Gallery opened ArtBots, an event exhibiting robotic art and art making robots. The exhibition boasted 15 unique and varying exhibits, ranging from a rubix-cube solving robot, who successfully solved the puzzle in under 40 seconds, to a 20-foot long, sound generating, spring steel band that emulates the onset of a storm.

"Once purely cerebral experiences are transformed into tangible experiences" - 'What It Is Without The Hand That Wields It'.

A personal favourite was Riley Harmon's 'What It Is Without The Hand That Wields It'. This installation consisted of a Counter-Strike server linked via a micro controller to blood-transfusion bags containing fake blood. When a player is killed in the game, a signal is transferred to electronic solenoid valves in a particular bag, and blood is spilled onto the floor. What I like about Riley's work is that he makes the gaming experience more tangible to a player or viewer. If a player kills, or is killed, they are often so far removed from reality that the player doesn't think twice the actual act of killing an, albeit computer generated, character. Riley's work makes for literal bloodshed. I spoke to him briefly at the event and was stunned to hear that he received negative feedback from the computer game industry who claimed that his work was 'pretentious'. I can't say I agree. I can understand why computer game manufacturers might be concerned with people suggesting the ethics of their publications are in doubt, but I don't believe that this project is intended to highlight moral issues. I think it's more based on heightening the experience of the viewer or player, engaging other senses, making it more physical.


'Telematic Drum Circle'

Another interactive art work I'd like to mention was by electronic artist Byeong Sam Jeon. His work, 'Telematic Drum Cirlce', consisted of a number of drum and percussion instruments, manned by pneumatic air control valve robots, which would react in real time to a user's control via the web. Telematic Drum Cirlce allowed internet users to collaborate via this website to create and partake in an improvised, online music collaboration.



From Wednesday 24th - Sunday 28th September, Trinity's MSc Multimedia Systems hosted their graduate exhibition for 2008. The event

My choice of the lot was an interactive, touch screen installation named 'Drawings of a Floating World', pictured above, by Tara Carrigy, Néill O'Dwyer, Colin O'Sullivan and Scott Wade. Made of 3 infra-red touch screen interfaces, the installation surrounded the viewer creating a truly immersive environment. The graphic work was created using Java-based Processing and the viewer interacted by brushing an optical-fiber paintbrush over the screen, triggering reactive animations. One of my favourite parts of these installations is watching the public take part in the installation and this work succeeded in engaging an enthusiastic crowd. Information on the event can be seen here.

It was a nice finish to a rather Interactive Art packed week.

Tweak: Interactive Art & Music Festival

I managed to get the chance to make it to the Tweak Festival held in Limerick City last Friday. Tweak is a festival dedicated to promoting the use of technology as an artistic tool in society, aiming to explore its "social, economic, psychological, aesthetic and functional" potentials. The event ran from Monday, 22nd September through to the 25th. The festival held workshops, talks and live events across the University of Limerick, Limerick School of Art and Design and Limerick City club, Trinity Rooms.

The event was organised by Limerick based, MSc Interactive Media and Music Technology graduate, Nora O’ Murchú, who is now researching her Phd in the same field. An interview with her can be read here.

The event boasted a line up consisting of France Cadet, Digital Slaves, Area10Media La, John Bowers and Limerick based Soundings amongst others.

On the Friday I attended morning (ColourSound & Desaximundi) and afternoon (Digital Slaves) workshops on how to use VVVV, an interactive art and video synthesis tool, commonly used for live musical visuals and interactive art installations. VVVV provides a higher level of abstraction from coding. The user manipulates nodes, which become interconnected, working as input parameters and return values - eliminating the need to explicitly write code. It would be similar to what we would expect to see in a 3D packages node hierarchy and I'm guessing that this is how Softimage XSI 7's ICE programming technology works.

The event seemed to have gone down well. The workshop scheduled for the Wednesday; Michael Gurevich and Peter Bennett's Designing Stylistic Interactions was booked up and both morning and afternoon events I attended boasted promising numbers. O'Murchú didn't commit to future events, but Tweak succeeded in more than just getting the ball rolling. The Interactive Art scene in Ireland seems to be taking off and it would be a shame for this to be left as a one off event. I think it would be hugely beneficial to get more people participating and get a core interactive art community established across Ireland which could help promote and support similar events taking place in cities around the country.

Above photograph of interactive installation by Peggy Sylopp - http://www.generative.org/
VVVV on Vimeo

My Flickr Updated

I've finally managed to update my Flickr page here...

I came across some street art by an artist by the name of 'Eelus', who's work can be found on South William St and just off George's Quay... His two-tone stencil work is very reminiscent of another prominent street artist...
Also up is more lovely Maser work on Andrew's Lane Theatre...he also did work on the interior which is worth a gawk. And the "You Are Beautiful" stencils which can be seen all over the place...

Nintendo outprofit Goldman

"According to calculations by the Financial Times, the average employee at Japanese video games maker Nintendo is on track to earn more for their company this year than than the average Goldman Sachs employee did in 2007, the investment bank's best ever year." - Financial Times

I came across this in Tuesday's (16th Sept '08) Financial Times. To my amusement, they report that Nintendo's employees will potentially create $1.6million per employee head, compared to Goldman Sachs, where each employee are looking to accumulate $1.24million per head.

Nintendo are enjoying the results that investing in widening their consumer scope with the Wii and DS and these profits show that. However, while the the Goldman Sachs average employee took home $626,000, the average Nintendo programmer took home $90,900, with the rest going to shareholders.

METAMORPHOSE 08

I came across this article in trusty PINGMAG.JP.
Metamorphose is a Techno and Art Fesitival in Shizuoka, Japan, just south west of Tokyo. This years festival included a wide range of reactive and interactive light installations to complement the rave environment. The concert visuals look amazing and the lighting displays at the event seem incredible too. I'd love to have seen it first hand. I looked into the use of visuals as a part of my thesis and Final Year Project. That demo can be seen further below. Above is the link to the pingmag article and this is a link to the festival's myspace page.

The above photograph is taken from the festival photos on the myspace page...

Design VS Programming

I'm currently working on an essay which will look at the role of artists and programmers. Maeda, whose TED talk is above, was a professor at MIT's Medialab before joining the Rhode Island School of Design earlier this year. Maeda strongly believes that there is a shift in human's preference for HUMAN generated art, as opposed to technologically created material...this is the guy who supervised the creation of PROCESSING, the JAVA based interactive art software.

I'm sceptical that there will be a complete shun of technologically created work, but agree that the development of work will become more balanced between art and technology.

It will be posted next week, hopefully.

Ubisoft takeover of Hybride

"We've set ourselves a goal of creating angrossing, extended game experiences for our audiences. That means taking our game properties and extending them to other media, including television, film books and more"

- Rob Cooper, Managing Director,Ubisoft UK

October 08's 3D World Magazine reported on Ubisoft's acquisition of Canadian based effects company, Hybride. Hybride are best known for their effects on both 2006's 300, and 2005's Sin City, comic book adaptions. Such an acquisition would make sense as VFX of film and gaming begin to naturally merge. There's a quote from Jenkins' 'Convergence Culture' about how in the shooting of The Matrix sequels,

"Perry's team logged four months of motion capture work with Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress who plays Niobe, and other member of The Matrix cast. All the movements and gestures were created by actual performers working on the set and were seen as extensions of their characterisations."

- David Perry, Electronic Arts.

This studio synergy "allowed them to import thousands of 'assets' from the film production into the game". 

I've taken particular interest in this as it could set up an ideal business structure for developing tight-knit transmedia storytelling opportunities. This seamless connection between computer game and film media can help create a ubiquitous franchise, reaching out to a particular fan-base or general public alike. 

10 Futuristic User Interfaces

Jack Schofield posted this link to Smashing Magazine where they displayed their ideas of 10 futuristic interfaces. Some really nice concepts. I especially like Ringo: Holographic user interface as I've become fascinated with the idea of taking computer generated effects off the screen and into the real world (Its referred to as Augmented Reality as opposed to Virtual Reality).

I found it surprising that Jeff Han's multi touch screen, as presented on TED below, didn't make it into the list. I'd have it at the top of the list...



I was lucky enough to get a demonstration of the Musion Eyeliner technology in London. Its actually the material technology and set up logistics that Musion actually offer, its not an interface in itself. Many of you would have seen this used for The Gorillaz' live show (Musion & Passion Pictures) with Madonna at the 2005 MTV European Music Awards in Lisbon.



...and this is one of my favourite projection displays from Alexander McQueen's 2006 fashion show created by Musion and Glassworks Ltd.



...and if I am going to mention Musion and McQueen's fashion show work, then Diesel's 2007 'Liquid Space' (Vizoo & DVein) from Florence is certainly worth a mention.

The Watchmen Downloadable Game, Warner Brothers' Transmedia Storytelling

"...consumers become hunters and gatherers moving back across the various narratives trying to stitch together a coherent picture from the dispersed information" - Henry Jenkins

Jack Schofeld's 'Newsbytes' headline in The Guardian's Technology section on the 31st July told of Warner Brothers' partnership with Deadline Games to develop an episodic downloadable game for 'The Watchmen', a graphic novel written by written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons and due for cinema release in 2009.

Warner Brothers have developed an intense interest of using transmedia story telling in an attempt to promote as much interest in their cinema releases as possible. The case-study example would be The Matrix Trilogy, which boasted computer games, the 'Animatrix' (a collection of anime and CG animations uncovering other, parallel stories in the Matrix world), and a huge online multiplayer game. More recently, for the release of Chris Nolan's Batman Begins, Warner Bros' own DC Comics released special editions comic books for the movie, to provide extra background information on Batman and Bruce Wayne to enhance the viewers' entertainment experience.

Transmedia story telling, while allowing for additional depth to a story, also creates additional revenue. Licensing of the story ensures game developers or other merchandising bodies adhere to the text of the story. This means that any sales on other media will mean cash for Warner Bros'. But comic books and video games are quite subliminal forms of marketing 'thus blurring the line between marketing and entertainment'.

What I really like about the concept is that is provides numerous access points for a consumer. A consumer may just get enough out of watching a movie; while a more avid, enthusiastic fanbase may have a thirst for more information, searching for behind the scene stories or development of peripheral characters, living parallel lives to the films' leads.

I first read about transmedia story telling in Henry Jenkin's Convergence Culture and extensive notes on the topic can be found here, on his own blog.

We're Beautiful, apparently...

"And its exponents range from Banksy (the internationally acclaimed scourge of capitalism, whose works have sold for large sums) to Maire(a disaffected teen who lives on my street and, apparently, has a crush on someone named Ger)."

- Eoin Butler, Irish Times Magazine, Saturday, June 7, 2008

In recent months I've been noticing a rise in quality graffiti work around the Dublin city centre.

The recent publicity of Maser on a local level and international iconisation of Banksy do well to romanticise graffiti. Anonymous guerilla artists rebelling against current capitalist regimes under cover of night to press their own left wing propaganda.

However, I have become bored with these anti-capitalist rants. It's old. Too often I see anti-Bush or 'Shell to Sea' sentiment amongst other political criticisms pasted onto walls. Such activity can have a negative impact on a public viewer. Not only does the audience have to put up with the illegality of the graffiti, they don't enjoy any positive result. The stark contrast between this and the work I have posted above may lend itself to a different outcome.

The work was a bit of a riddle to me. There was no signature, no noticeable or recognisable style which made me, first, to think that it was a viral advertising campaign by some creative cosmetic company (I thought Dove). Research proved fruitless. Initial google results pointing me to a flickr page posted by a Dublin based photographer who believed the work was possibly by Maser. I later came across www.you-are-beautiful.com (How could I expect to find that?) and learned that it was indeed a viral campaign, but it was headed simply by a well to do consortium based in Chicago, Illinois. This 'You Are Beautiful' slogan can be seen in a number of different locations around Dublin. The two shots above were taken on Wicklow St (since removed) and Harcourt St respectively - I have also seen it printed on Palace St and by West Coast Coffee on Westland Row (yet to be photographed).

It's the positive words that make me warm to it. The same can be said for Maser's 'Maser Loves You' campaign. The all too infrequent positive sentiment makes a fresh change from the, while often intelligent, social criticisms. Such optimistic art work may help graffiti be seen in a more positive light...though for every good piece of work, there always seems to be an angsty 'Maire' publishing her woes...or that guy, 'Grift', for that matter...

Accompanying photographs are my own and are copyright 2008.

More Radiohead Freebies

After the release of Radiohead's 7th studio album, In_Rainbows, Yorke an co. have collaborated with director James Frost to shoot (or not shoot) their video for their latest single from In Rainbows, 'House of Cards'. The video is not shot with a single camera or light. Instead a system, comprised of 64 lasers rotating in 360 degrees at 900 times per minute, captured spacial data which could then be analysed and sorted to create 3 dimensional images of the objects it was shooting. 2 systems were used. Initially, for close up, detailed scanning (Thom Yorke's face), a system by the name of Geometric Informatics was used. For more distant objects (Los Angeles suburb), an advanced version of the system, Velodyne Lidar System, was put to use.

Radiohead then released the code that was created to create the effects for Processing and C++ files. This will allow Radiohead fans to augment the video and their own touches to it. There is a House of Cards youtube channel where the collaborators can post their new versions of the video.

We have seen a similar concept when Nine Inch Nails made various songs/sounds available for fans to mix and to generate their own songs. NIN would then release their favourite mix(es) on their record. Bands which have a strong cult following will look to benefit from these innovative marketing ploys. Both bands recently split from their major label deals (Radiohead -EMI and NIN - Interscope/Universal) and are personally responsible for the marketing, promotion and funding their own productions. I think these these creative techniques are sure to grab the attention they need.

House of Cards is a nice tune, too...

I am in the middle of playing around with a few effects of the Radiohead song and will post up the results...

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

http://www.youtube.com/group/houseofcards

GreenPix Zero Energy Media Wall, Beijing, China

'Architainment' - Coonan

I came across the GreenPix Zero Energy Media wall in the July/August Innovation Magazine (Clifford Coonan) in the Irish Times. The wall is a 20,000 square meter facade of 2,292 computer controlled LED lights, designed by Italian born, New York based Simone Giostra and Partners, engineering consultants Arup and China's solar technologists, Suntech.

Seen from over a kilometer away, the wall will cast flowing lighting patterns and video over one of China's most congested main roads, close to the main Olympic sites.

The remarkable thing about this display is that its completely self powered; utilising solar panels located in the individual glass panes (photovoltaics). The panels absorb and store energy from the sun during the day to spend it on lighting the dazzling visuals by night.  

The building itself is China's first venue dedicated to Digital Arts. This is an exciting moment as China bounds forward as both an economic force, but also an artistic one (Computer Arts, July 2008). Expect to see this venue mentioned in the same breath as Ars Electronica and MediaLab Prado.

My Final Year Project Demo...

This is an mpeg4 clip of my final year project demo. I wrote a plug in for Maya 2008 using xcode on Mac OS X. A .wav music input is analysed and the beat is extracted and the animation is then synchronised to this. The animation isn't real time, with the keyframes animated by a simple MEL script before the shot is rendered.

Massive Attack with Goldfrapp - Amsterdam, July 2008

After canceling their American tour dates in 2006 and having missed their tour date in Cork on July 2nd this year, I was finally able to pick up Massive Attack tickets for their tour date in Amsterdam's Cultuurpark on July 3rd.

Massive Attack were supported by a somewhat underwhelming Goldfrapp, whose setlist concentrated on their 'Seventh Tree' record - more similar to 'Felt Mountain' than the funkier 'Black Cherry' or 'Supernature', records responsible for rocketing Alison Goldfrapp to diva superstardom. Though melodic, the more modest set didn't seem to sit well with the crowd who, in return, failed to engage in the performance. It seemed, and myself included, that the crowd anticipated Goldfrapp's crunchier numbers like 'Strict Machine', 'Lovely To See you' and 'Twist', but they never surfaced. Supernature's 'Oh La La' got a more enthusiastic response, saving the biggest cheer for 'Train', which finished off their short set.

As the evening grew darker, the Cultuurpark finally began to resemble a full venue and, under a pink sky, witnessed its first rapturous applause as the extensive Massive Attack crew took to the stage.

Del Naja and Marshall welcomed Stephanie Dosen to look after 'Teardrop', of which she did a super job vocally. I just found her ditsy manner a bit irritating to look at. Yolanda Quartey was a regular on the stage. Massive Attack's 'Live at Albert Hall' ends with an incredible rendition of 'Unfinished Sympathy'. In that performance Shara Nelson dominates, showing both passion and incredible lung capacity to throw out, and hold, the 1991 single's higher notes. Though soulful throughout, and fantastic in 'All I Want', Yolanda fails to exhibit the vocal power that Nelson accomplishes so effortlessly, leaving me somewhat disappointed as their act came to a close. Horace Andy was responsible for the haunting vocals to 'Angel', a personal highlight as this song was my introduction to the band. This performance, I believe, was a stronger effort than that on the Albert Hall album, with a far better, distorted guitar execution.

The United Visual Artist's LED rig loomed behind the band, adding another dimension to the act. What was also impressive was the rig itself proved an impressive set piece as the lights placed behind took on various textures as it shone through the rig's slats. The simple geometric lines and ascii text were certainly products of the London based visual team. As with previous Massive Attack live tours, large political statements were printed and intertwined with the music. The lighting and graphics succeeded in complementing the musics tone - a particular early highlight was the synchronised strobe effect that spat out white, angry geometrics during the chorus of opener 'All I Want', which contrasted beautifully with the softer lighting that was cast through the rig during the bridge of the song. Both the BBC and Guardian seem to echo my sentiments, regarding the visuals as 'stunning' and 'impressive' respectively.

More photographs can be seen on my Flickr page.

Accompanying photograph is my own and is copyright 2008.