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PARTICIPANT'S PROPOSALS
Thomas Soetens & Kora Van den Bulcke - [Hybridity] [Overclocking the City] [Self & Society]
Workspace Unlimited - artists - ßInitiator Breaking the Game
We propose to talk about Hybridity, Overclocking the City and Self & Society while giving a virtual tour of our networked projects of Virtual World of Art. The discussions related to the three themes will happen within this virtual world in a multiplayer form. We will first visit EXTENSION, a virtual world connected to the Society for Art & Technology in Montreal, then DEVMAP, a virtual world conceived for the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 04 commisioned by the V2_Institute, and finally, IMPLANT, a virtual world connected to the Vooruit Arts Center in Belgium.
Matt Adams
Blast Theory
Now that my identity is splintering at an increasing rate and I am establishing avatars, alter egos and personas wherever I go (How can I even count the number of passwords and 'names' I have now?) can artists respond creatively and fragment their own set of relationships between themselves and their public?
Peggy Ahwesh - [Self & Society]
Independent Filmmaker
I've worked in film and video for years, with tendencies towards the experimental and theoretical. My work investigates the imaginary of women, trangressions of genre, psychological manifestations of mind and body, the virtual landscape, dreamspace, the hyper-real of horror, sleep and feminine sexuality via essaylike films, faux-documentaries and diary films. I grew up with feminism and punk and Super 8mm film. The opposite of a techno determinist, I tend to mutate with whatever technology comes along that I can figure out and find useful to express my ideas.
Karin Becker - [Hybrdity]
Tema Q, Linkšping University
A r t o c c u p i e s a c e n t r a l p l a c e i n t h e l i f e o f t h e c i t y . T o d a y m a n y a r t i s t s u s e t h e p u b l i c a r e n a o f c i t y s p a c e t o i n v e s t i g a t e q u e s t i o n s o f c e n t r a l s i g n i f i c a n c e f o r o u r t i m e . I n t h i s p r o j e c t a r t i s t s d e v e l o p w o r k s t h a t i n t e r r o g a t e a n d e n g a g e t h e s p a c e o f t h e c i t y a n d i t s p e o p l e , w o r k i n g i n c o l l a b o r a t i o n w i t h r e s e a r c h e r s i n C u l t u r e S t u d i e s ( T e m a Q ) , Linkšping U n i v e r s i t y . I n " 8 h / e i g h t h o u r s " J o h a n B e r g l u n d u s e s t h e f a c a d e s o f p u b l i c b u i l d i n g s t o e x h i b i t l a r g e p h o t o g r a p h s o f d a i l y l i f e f r o m c o n f l i c t - r i d d e n a r e a s o f t h e w o r l d , c h a l l e n g i n g n e w s r e p o r t s a n d a l t e r i n g t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n t h e p u b l i c a n d t h e p e o p l e p o r t r a y e d . I n t h e w e b - b a s e d " S e c r e t C i t i e s " , J o n a s D a h l b e r g a n d Garan D a h l b e r g i n v e s t i g a t e c i t i e s t h a t n o o n e e v e r t a l k s a b o u t a n d w h i c h a r e m i s s i n g f r o m m a p s , a d d r e s s i n g i s s u e s o f c e n t r e a n d p e r i p h e r y a n d m a k i n g v i s i b l e p l a c e s t h a t f a l l i n t h e s h a d o w o f g l o b a l i n f l u e n c e . I n " R e m e m b e r i n g I m a g i n a t i o n " E s t h e r S h a l e v - G e r z c r e a t e s a n a l t e r n a t i v e m o d e l o f a s p e c i f i c c i t y c e n t r e b a s e d o n h i s t o r i e s e x t r a c t e d f r o m c i t y a r c h i v e s a n d f r o m i n t e r v i e w s , e x a m i n i n g t h e t e n s i o n s b e t w e e n c o l l e c t i v e a n d i n d i v i d u a l m e m o r y i n t i m e s o f c o n s t a n t c h a n g e . T h e g o a l o f t h e t h r e e - y e a r p r o j e c t i s t o , t h r o u g h a n e t w o r k o f s c h o l a r s a n d a r t i s t s w i t h a c o m m o n i n t e r e s t i n u r b a n c e n t r a l i t y a n d a f o c u s o n m e d i a , d e v e l o p n e w w a y s t o r e f l e c t o n t h e c r e a t i v e p r o c e s s e s o f a r t s - b a s e d r e s e a r c h a n d t h e f o r m s o f k n o w l e d g e t h a t a r i s e t h r o u g h i t s w o r k .
Chris Burke - [Self & Society]
This Spartan Life
Using X-Box Live and the game Halo 2, we have created a talk show called This Spartan Life in which we invite guests to enter the X-Box live gamespace, walk around, explore, jump, shoot, and fight as they wish, all while carrying on conversations about their work and the nature and societal relevance of virtual online worlds. X Box Live is equipped with headsets so that players can talk to each other in the game. In this way, we conduct our interviews.
Our host, Damian Lacedaemion, encourages discussion and behavior that emphasizes the 'virtual town square' aspect of live gamespaces. The actual game can become irrelevant as we simply walk and talk. Some subjects might prefer to shoot the place up and throw grenades, which is fine also. The extension of the human into virtual space through gaming, the evolving concept of play and "emergent gameplay" will make equally interesting topics of conversation for some guests.
We are exploring an area of discussion that appeals to gamers and non-gamers alike. Gamers have a sophisticated awareness of virtual space, often betraying a healthy sense of humor regarding the absurdity of virtual experiences. Damian is fond of pushing at the edges of this absurdity. Halo 2 is rife with "easter eggs" and little-known "broken zones" where the user is not meant to go and where the "edge" of the gamespace is clear. These places will sometimes be destinations in the exploration of the gamespace during the conversation and might spur interesting observations from the guests.
The action is 'filmed' by virtual cameramen (also players in the online space.) Each 'cameraman' record the video and audio output from their own X-Box, their point of view providing the 'camera' shot. Guests are not chosen not always for their knowledge of games or interactive media. A creative person with an open mind might have more interesting responses to their virtual experiences in gamespace than a seasoned theorist.
Mark Carnall - [Overclocking the City/Self & Society]
Grant Museum of Zoology and Institute of Archaeology University College London
The themes for this symposium are fascinating and this could be a great oppurtunity to publicise the serious developments in online games to a wider audience within the cultural sector and perhaps the public. So often these technologies are seen a frivolous and linear, so much so that significant positive innovations go unreported. Online gaming culture needs wider publicity so that these technologies can be developed and used by people who have no idea that these platforms or games even exist. For example many people are amazed to hear that 27 Million people a week inhabit online game worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. More people visit virtual worlds created in Korea than actually visit Korea. These online worlds have a real-money GDP greater than many real world countries.
In these virtual worlds there are so many interesting development using in world tools and technologies. One could argue that the traditional outlets of culture are way behind on realising the implications of these, something that this symposium is looking to address the balance with. However, it may be fortuoitous that cultural institutes are behind because there are a number of pitfalls and mistakes that have been highlighted by online games. Problems such as sexism, abuse, griefing, virtual sweatshops, the virtual mafia, virtual fraud and PK killings (the killing of real players as a result of an online disagreement) are testament to the potential minefield exploring this wonderful technology could be. Overclocking the City: There has already been a great deal of debate over what is public space in virtual worlds. In Second Life (a virtual world), for example there is a lucrative real estate market making $000's. Controversially many of these big buyers then seal of their new areas for private use only, which goes against the ethos of a shared community that helped these platforms to start and flourish in the first place. Virtual Self and Society: The customisation of the virtual self is one of the techniques that has really taken off in recent years. This customisation started on videogames with the limited option of naming the avatar you are given through to now where most games offer comprehensive if not complete customisation of the avatar. Also many games now include the option to perform a limited number of poses that can be fully customised. This has lead to some unsavoury expressions as well as creative and emotional ones. In Asia it has been argued that the bonding to the avatar is so strong that some online players have been known to exact revenge for online wronging, in the real world. This practice is growing and as such a special crime prevention unit has been set up to investigate these offenses. Exploration of gender is also an intersting topic especially with many virtual "couples" who choose to spend time exploring online worlds together even though in real life they may both be married to other people.
Francois Cote - [Self & Society]
University of Laval, LAMIC
LAMIC's primary interest (except choosing the color of our walls and floors, since we are actually constructing the lab...) is in the experimental study of cultural transmission in museological contexts. Our team integrates disciplines such as archaeology, architecture, ethnology, geomatics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, museology, theatre arts and film arts. We have a particular interest in the remediation of museum practices in the city, through technologies like GIS and augmented reality.
With groups at Laval University and international scientific partners, we are also working on the creation of a real and virtual laboratory in modeling and simulation of social and human factors. Our resulting decision support systems would become tools for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This lab, Pantopia, would strive to integrate simulations and models developed in different research fields, particularly in the social, human and management sciences, so as to produce "full" simulations. These metasimulations would Êincorporate information from the databases of international organizations andÊevolve through the regular addition of models, content and functionalities.
Luc Courchesne - [Self & Society]
Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) and University of Montreal
A Meta-formatted Horizon
The archetypal horizon has served as anchor and main structuring principle to most cosmogonies. Their "theater of reality" was constructed under and above the horizon, and around the appearance and disappearance of the circadian World. The day belonged to the Earth and the night, to the Heavens.
The combined effect of the night's disintegration under the assaults of artificial lighting over the last century, and of the masking of the first reality, often perceived as foreign, by our multiple physical constructions and, more recently, by the potent technologies of the virtual, artificial and augmented realities, is forcing a severe reframing of our own "theater of reality".
The first horizon expressed the physical limits of our existence and beyond, the scope of an expanding imaginary realm. The second, meta-formatted horizon, is increasingly made of the constructs from what we have imagined and in which the first physical world plays a supporting role. After Alice, we seem to have finally crossed the mirror.
Frank Dellario [hybridity]
The ILL Clan
We've been producing 3D animation in real-time virtual spaces using computer game engines, called Machinima (machine + cinema), for over eight years now. Much like the progression of the web, we've seen this technique grow from extremely simple to quite complex as the games engines (and 3D video cards) became more and more robust. But even with the game engines increased complexity, the process of machinima still opens doors for anyone with a computer and the passion to make their own films (kids to adults, armatures to professionals). If the web has democratized information and communication, people who had no voice now are not only heard but some even venerated. I believe that the process of machinima (and even online community based game play mmo's and multiplayer first person shooters) is and will continue doing so for in the animated moving image arena.
Toni Dove
artist/independent producer
Spectropia, my current project, is a time travel drama that uses the metaphor of supernatural possession to investigate identity: How do I know who I am? And who is pulling the strings? It's a "scratchable" movie performed by video DJs, improvising performers who are playing a movie instrument. I like to think of it as cinematic Bunraku. Bunraku is a Japanaese puppet theater where black clad puppet masters accompany almost life-size puppets on stage, manipulating their movement. They are the shadows of agency - as are the players in Spectropia. The shadows of agency made concrete – the audience experiences a telepresent agency, an excess, affect, motivation - through the players. And this is just the beginning of an experiment. It could take many forms – your experience as an audience member could be as a player of the piece, seeing it on your computer screen and connecting remotely with another player via the Internet. Or maybe you’ll watch it as a movie without visible performers, one that is programmed to play differently each time it’s screened - the program as performer – an automaton or an artificial intelligence. It might be learning from audience response over time and adjusting itself to new input, or it might be playing performances recorded by performers at other times in other screenings.
Mutable improvisational media loops with the body to create place, a sensory, embodied experience. In this case, the virtual is a space of potential and affect. It exists as much in time and in physical experience as it does in media. Think of the players as shadows of agency - a meta layer a Brechtian revelation of the armature of motivation, and think of their impact on the audience as the suggestion of the potential for change as well as the dynamic improvising that delivers what the audience sees, hears and feels. Altering the sequence of time by recalling cinematic experience as memory lets us step out of the running meter of story or clock time and into the shrinking and expanding time of the mind. This subjective reading of time and experience is helping me to forge a new relationship to linear narrative, while it expands my concept of responsive environments - environments that combine computer programs designed to assemble and display media with interface triggers that accomplish this assembly in real time. Programs that perform, or perhaps I should say programs that perform the body, perform perception. My engines help me to analyze and re-construct time, memory and story to keep it constantly fluid and unfixed in a way that language can never completely achieve (the virtual potential of these engines is change itself).
Campagnola Emiliano - [Self & Society]
University or Rome 3, Provincia di Roma, Comune di Roma rm XI
We propose to stream an actor's open rehearsal for the symposium. We found affinities between Lermontov's Masquerade, the text we are using, and the theme of self and society. We will stream a 15-20 minute segment of the performance for symposium participants.
After this we invite symposium participants for an online iChat or Skype discussion along with Roberto Paci Dalo, director of Giardini Pensili.
The 21 of March there will be a one night long events and discussion about spring and night in the University of Rome Tre, I'm working to make a streaming performance should be beautiful if we can join the simposyum during that night
I can broadcast from rtsp://193.205.139.202/lettere.sdp
Anne Galloway - [Overclocking the City]
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Carleton University
Critical social, cultural and theoretical concerns have led me to the point where I'm interested not just in playing with technology in the city, but also in playing with and as part of the techno-city. For the 'Overclocking the City' theme, I'm especially interested in discussing and learning more about how this seemingly subtle difference involves profound political and ethical challenges.
On both theoretical and practical levels, I'm interested in the potential of pervasive computing to intervene in our experiences of what Giorgio Agamben refers to as "bare life" or states of political indistinction (such as experienced by refugees, migrants, military detainees, homeless etc.). I'm concerned that when we exclude people, objects, ideas and practices from our acknowledged connections we simultaneously remove any rights or responsibilities we have in relation to them. Not only does this allow practitioners to ignore different values and interests, it also encourages a false sense of objectivity or neutrality by claiming them as non-issues in the first place.
Rather than working within models of exclusion and reduction, I'm interested in the convergence of different values and interests. In this case, I'd like to collectively bring together--and with no need for consensus--our hopes and fears, our assumptions and expectations, surrounding responsibility and accountability in decidedly playful and networked publics/politics. In other words, what difference does the constitution and arrangement of players, playing pieces and playing fields actually make in our experience of urban public space? Who gets to do what, when and where? Who gets to be- or become- what, when and where? And who gets to decide any of this, anyway? How can new technologies be used to create new players, new playing pieces, new playing fields, new connections? And what do we do with the old ones?
Suhjung Hur - [Overclocking the City]
Art Center Nabi
Virtual and real worlds become a contested disctinction as new technologies such as locative and pervasive media become more and more prevalent. Especially in the domain of public urban space, people often got tangled in the situation where on and offline, virtual and real, private and public, and surveillance and voyeurism are mixed in complicated ways through various wireless technologies. I'd like to throw light on how the everyday use of mobile phone, wireless laptop, and other personal media have impact on our daily experience in urban life through picture-taking, constant up/downloading, and sharing of those information.
Benoit Maubrey - [Overclocking the City]
Die Audio Gruppe
My decision in the early 1980s to stop working with pigments and canvas came from a desire to interact directly with public spaces. By building loudspeakers into clothes I could intervene in any given environment in a temporary and cost-efficient way: loudspeakers and circuitboards are cheap and can be salvaged from surplus electronics and disguarded toys. My artistic tools are electroacoustic clothes: costumes and suits that are equipped with loudspeakers and amplifying systems that allow the individual wearers to react acoustically to their environment. Basically each person wears one part of a composition: the position of the individual "audio actors" and their movement within a space produces the final composition. The orchestration of the mobile sounds creates the final musical score (see AUDIO CLOTHES 1983-85). Series of different "audio clothes " are developed in regards to a particular theme or site as "Audio Uniforms" (see AUDIO STEELWORKERS, AUDIO VACUUM CLEANERS, GUITAR MONKEYS, AUDIO CYCLISTS) or in relation to a local culture (see AUDIO GEISHAS/ Japan, AUDIO JEANS/ USA, AUDIO HANBOK/Korea. In 1989 the AUDIO BALLERINAS started using a variety of electronic instruments in order to personally interact with their environment. Among others, light sensors that enabled them to produce sounds through the interaction of their movements and the surrounding light and movement sensors with which they could individually trigger electronic sounds. These were then collectively choreographed into "audio ballets". A variety of other electronic instruments (samplers, contact microphones, and radio receivers) allowed them also to work with the sounds, surfaces, topographies and electromagnetic waves of the space around them.
The AUDIO PEACOCKS (since 2003) use plexiglass costumes shaped into a peacock's fan-like plumage. They are equipped with 16 loudspeakers and 150 watts power. The "audio-plumage" is highly directional and functions like an electroacoustic radar dish. An Audio Peacock can either amplify its own electronic instruments and /or voice using a microphone and sampler, or receive sounds from outside sources via transmitter/receiver and disseminate them in a space by orienting his high-tech "plumage". VIDEO PEACOCK is the most recent performance project from Benoit Maubrey. An Audio Peacock costume out of white plexiglass is used as a mobile projection screen. This is an audio-visual performance where the electro-acoustic quality of an Audio Peacock is visually enhanced via a video projector. Video-taped images can be projected simultaneously to the sounds on the costume. In a more spectacular sense the Peacock's own filmed image can be projected live onto itself in a form of "video-feedback". The self-produced voice and sounds can also be used to manipulate the images projected onto the costume.
THEATER AND STAGES: Over the years the Audio Gruppe has been consequently developing its repertoire. Some of its members have developed solos with a particular instrument: certain costumes have muted into highly indivualistic and self-contained sound units. These are individual "phonic" bodies that produce their own personal sounds and movements in intimate and close-to-the-spectator performances. Since 1997 after the conception of the AUDIO GEISHAS (sampler-and-stroboscope lighting duos) we have presented staged pieces consisting of collages of up to 12 different audio characters set in an around the audience.
Only recently I have developed the PHONOMANIACS and SOUND JUNCTION concepts which are site-specific sound events for 20-30 electro-acoustic costumes: multidisciplinary performances taking place both inside and outside the different rooms of a large vacant building. These are "modular" event -- that is, the exact composition and elements of this "sound opera" can only be determined according to the building and site. In general it includes the following audio costumes: AUDIO BALLERINAS (dance), VIDEO PEACOCKS (video+internet), AUDIO GEISHAS (light), AUDIO CYCLISTS (sport), BONG BOYS/ AUDIO VACUUM CLEANERS (street theatre), GUITAR MONKEYS (noise/music), and FEEDBACK FRED (performance).
Sheldon Brown - [Overclocking the City]
Center of Research in Computing and the Arts, University of California
Center of Research in Computing and the Arts, University of California
The ongoing computerization of urbanity is the current focus of my work. This transformation is far richer then the establishment of alternative sites of socialization, as it engages the messiness of the body and the real, creating an inevitable dissonance with the hierarchical structures of the algorithm. The results of this aren't always alienating, sometimes they are sublime. Is it possible to have one without the other? I doubt it.
Marc Downie - [Hybridity]
The Openended Group
What I care about right now: tools, computational performance and the everyday.
Michael Epstein - [Hybridity]
MIT, Department of Writing and Humanistic studies
I am a researcher in the MIT Program for Writing and Humanistic Studies and founder of a project called History Unwired (http://web.mit.edu/frontiers). The project started two years ago as a research proposal within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program to create narrative forms of media for mobile devices. In the last year we built a mixed reality walking tour of one of Venice, Italy's lesser known neighborhoods on 3G phones and Pocket PC's. The tour was an original blend of audio, video, human encounters, and interactive art installations, which told the story of five creative locals working between art and craft, traditions and innovation. We were also testing the idea of "dynamic citizenry", that is to give tourists information and experiences that will help them contribute to the civic goals of the cities they are visiting (in the case of Venice, dispersion, local crafts, and political awareness).
I will discuss how we worked different landscapes and social spaces into the mobile media. I'm interested in how to generate such real space participation in such mixed reality tours.
Carlos Javier Gomez de Llarena - [Overclocking the City]
artist
Cities are among the most complex artifices achieved by humanity. They are networks of sociopolitical order, economic and communication infrastructures that sustain the logistic needs of the crowd. They are also the birthplaces of culture and individuality. When the internet was introduced many claimed it to be the end of space and urban life as we know it. Virtual reality was the last urban utopia of the 20th century.
In the ealry 21st century, wireless emerged as the natural, most pragmatic evolution for our data driven society. This paradigm swinged ideas from the VR space into the succesor concept of Augmented Reality, where the internet and physical space not actually coexist but can live in symbiotic relationship even. This field now has the attention of academia and indsutry alike, but the danger of getting all wrong again is around the corner. The risks of placing technology over basic human and social needs can further alienate our ghettoized cities.
We must consider city life first and foremost, as we have been systematically eroding the foundations of what makes cities pleasant to live in. I propose an exploration of the opportunities which online networks and media pose in order to restore or reinvent our urban spaces from old and new. Can we use pervasive media to heal modern urbanism's scars on our cities? Can we make cities act smarter and as more humane interfaces to our society? How can the individual citizen relate and transition between neighbourhood, city-wide, regional and global levels of social belonging?
Carl Goodman - [Hybridity]
Museum of the Moving Image
Interview about the relationship between cinema and gaming, and how the focus shifted or incorporated gaming. How the two are mutually shaping one another. Questions about presentation, conservation, and the role of the institution in these efforts.
Elizabeth Goodman - [Overclocking the City]
Confectious
From Wikipedia: "Overclocking is the practice of making a component run at a higher clock speed than the manufacturer's specification. The idea is to increase performance for free or to exceed current performance limits, but this may come at the cost of stability."
As a sociotechnical practice, overclocking emerges from a desire for success by the terms of technology marketing: the newest, the cheapest, the fastest. On the one hand, overclocking emerges from an obsession with speed and a desire to stress a system to its limits. Overclocking is an ambivalent act, bringing instability along with speed. On the other hand, overclocking is a practice that denies the authority of the manufacturer to control the use of the hardware. It is productive misuse, voiding the warranty in an excess of creativity (which can include submerging computers in liquid nitrogen or heating oil). What would an overclocked public look like? A sped-up, fast-forward version of the present, with social connections made and dropped at ever higher rates? Ever more noise and ever less silence? Play not as pleasure but as highstakes test?
In game culture, overclockers are not necessarily the best players. Instead, they delve into the infrastructure that makes play possible. Overclockers are the plumbers of the infrastructure, tinkering with the cooling and heating mechanisms of a little city called the CPU. And as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation reminds us, "architecture is policy." And policy regulates action.
Looking at games and public spaces, overclocking appears as both a warning and an inspiration. Rarely are online games truly "public" in the old sense of public- they run on servers owned by individual or companies, using software licensed or bought. Yet in Second Life, an online virtual world, inhabitants forced change on Second Life's owners by "publicly" protesting - setting their avatars on fire in locations frequented by newbies. They were able to do so because Second Life built an extraordinary amount of user freedom into the architecture of their code. When we discuss the policies and actions in spaces that extend from the digital to the physical and back again, overclocking reminds us to look more closely at the infrastructures underlying the city of play, and question more closely the sometimes ambivalent values embedded into its architecture.
Robin Harper - [Self & Society]
Linden Lab
Digital worlds invite participation by citizens from around the real world. Real-time communication and powerful tools for jointly creating a social and economic environment in a digital world like Second Life offer the potential for collaboration and public diplomacy across international boundaries. Often though, people approach these worlds as a 'game', with role-playing and false identity creation serving as an integral part of the experience.
As these worlds develop, how will society and culture adapt to a technically adept, international, online work force that relies on technology generally identifed as 'a game'?
Claudia Hart - [Self & Society]
Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville
My students and I are interested in the possibility of constructing a group identity rather than an alternative identity with ideal body as is often the case in multiplayer games and on virtual sites such as Second Life. We are also interersted in defining a visual paradigm for such a group identity. This means defining what might be the difference between a group, the body of a group, a community and an architectual site; in other words, articulating the concept of a community as virtual architecture. We would be interested in participating in the project as a group being (we have named ourselves "the aggregate," should you be willing). We would also like to concretize this group body using a 3D model on the Maya platform.
Brian House
Research & Development at Counts Media Inc.
At present, my primary focus is the development of a platform for rich narrative experiences in the real world via txt-messaging. This has precedent in the work of Counts Media, particularly the Yellow Arrow, and that of Knifeandfork (http://knifeandfork.org) in the current piece "5 'til 12" at the Beall Center and last summer's Hundekopf.
This project touches all of Breaking the Game's themes, as we can see hybrid spaces created via technology, that the self and society inhabit, overlayed on the physical city. These spaces are symbolic and narrative - patterns constructed of stories both real and imagined that we collectively engage in telling. So-called pervasive technology is used as a means to expose the city's hidden layers and to create new ones, exploring emerging means of storytelling. Technology encourages stories that are dynamic and nonlinear, mapping closely to the ways in which the human mind and though process persist: multiple realities, stochastic storylines, deconstructed time, branching. While the most brilliant of novelists such as Jorge L. Borges and Italo Calvino and filmmakers from Akira Kurosawa to Quentin Tarantino have hinted at such techniques in the past, there are obvious limitations for passive media to go beyond mere representation of those structures. Games, on the other hand, with their rule systems, interactivity, and role-playing dynamic, have always involved flexible outcomes dependent on the players' choices. Arguably an important evolution of literature in recent history, incorporating these elements gives new media storytelling a game-like feel.
A first-person perspective makes the reader simultaneously the narrator, a central character, and even the creator of the story. As a result, the reader thinks, participates, and feels for the artwork, becoming emotionally involved with the story and ultimately its outcome. It's about actively acknowledging the role of audience perception: with wireless devices we can incorporate the unique perspective of the reader at a particular place at a particular time, letting physical reality (visual, auditory, olfactory) make immediate the sensory experience of an event in the narrative.
Together, these elements create a storytelling environment that is extremely vital: we're invited to experience the city as verbs, not nouns. The artistic and even soteriological goal is to let the actively creative mode of consciousness inspired by the context of the piece drift permanently into our everyday motions through our physical and virtual spaces...
Katherine Isbister - [Self & Society]
Behaviour Research Lab, University of Rensselaer
Representation of the self and the dance between self and others is shifting as we spend more and more of our time in mediated environments that we've co-constructed. The crafting of avatars and of social and physical dynamics among these avatars has a profound impact on our notions of ourselves both individually and collectively. There are opportunities for growth and exploration as well as cause for concern. During the Breaking the Game event, I hope to explore these issues with others, through the context of mediated social exchange itself.
Bill Jones - [Hybridity]
Garnett McKeen Laboratory, First Pulse projects
I have been actively involved with hybrid forms of media as a visual artist, writer, and editor for 30 years: from my seminal work with photography and video in installations and assemblage to my founding of the print magazine ArtByte to my current work merging real time 3D animation and music in the form of a live networked band where the musicians play the animations. My collaborator Ben Neill and I have explored distribution systems from major label distributed music CDs to broadcast TV, to intenet and wireless communication systems and are currently working on creating a 4 person networked ensemble which will premier at the World Financial Center in the spring in a month long series on hybrid musical/video performances which Ben is curating. We would be open to discussing and sharing our new work in progress in the form of on-line video and if possible (time permiting) in live on-line performances. Both Ben and I have crossed back and fourth between high and low artforms, from gallery and museum exhibitions to TV commercials to pop music venues and have made work about the consequences of blurring the differences in our interactive movie Palladio which premiered last year in Glasgow at the New Territories Festival and in New York at Symphony Space (palladiomovie.com). We believe that our experiences in both artistic and commercial realms while not unique point to a further broading and hybridization of genres, formal catagories and distribution systems many of which in which we are well versed and experienced.
Philippe Bekaert - [Hybridity]
CreW
We're combining stage theatre and technology, currently omni-directional video. This is how it looks on stage: The audience (we call them immersants), wears video googles, headphone, walks behind a motorized wheel chair, is able to look around at will in omnidirectional video movies we capture, stream, view with own-designed and implemented camera systems and software. There's just a few people at a time, in shows of ca 30 minutes, in our current show, there's just one immersant at a time. At the same time, a professional actor (Peter Gorissen, and others) is having a monolog with the immersant, intermixing instructions (puts "challenge") accurately responding to the immersants behaviour, and texts by locally "hip" writers (Peter Verhelst, Saskia Decoster). Images (and most of the concept) by Eric Joris (film director, graphic artist and designer, comic strip author "Chelsy" 1991, ...).
Our main findings / propositions for the workshop:
- you can't make an omni-directional movie, I mean: a cinematic approach makes no sense.
- need to "engage" the immersant by putting challenge or other forms of interactivity (to be worked out for most part)
- immersant (You, hence the name of our current shows: "U" = You in Dutch) becomes the protagonist ---> consumer/producer at the same time.
Last two points bear significant similarity with computer games.
Paul Kaiser
The OpenEnded Group
Not available yet.
Friedrich Kirshner - [Self & Society]
Artist
The openness of modern day computer games and the technological and cultural education of gamers have brought to life a new form of gameplay often referred to as "creative play". Computer gaming worlds, originally intended to be played by certain rules to achieve certain goals are transformed into social spaces and often used to express one's own creativity. One of the many forms of creative play include virtual puppeteering in online-worlds to shoot virtual movies, known as machinima. We are witnessing a change from simple gameplay concepts to open-ended environments triggered and first realised by the creativity of the end-user who transforms her/his need for more compelling and more engaging forms of play, re-purposing the possibilities given to him by today's computer gaming worlds.
In the future, we will see this form of creativty embedded into gaming concepts and thus move from computer game worlds to computer toy worlds - or to state it in different words: From digital boardgames to digital lego.
John Klima
Artist
Although I enjoy being the hyperbolic exemplar of everything wrong with new media art, I find it unfathomable why in Barbara Boxer's 2005 New York Times review of the Boston Cyber Arts festival, she points to a major frustration with "Train": if you don't press the button at the right time, it doesn't work. This is no different than saying, as a criticism of Quake (or any first person shooter), if you don't press the fire button at the right time, your gun doesn't shoot and the bad guy kills you.The single most important requirement of all my work: you have got to learn to play. This might be as simple as pressing one big red button in "Serbian Skylight" (1999) or as seemingly complicated as the interactive voice response system of "Train." When you get home with the hot new game title in your hands, eager to pop it into your console or PC, do you know how to play the game? Of course not! It takes time to learn the new interface, it takes time to get the feel for the controls. Slowly you come to understand how the game functions, and in truly great games, you catch the flow of the game, you feel it, it is an emotional response. Usually, there is some familiar paradigm that helps you along the way. The new game might be a first/third person shooter, or a real-time strategy game, and therefore has its familiar requirements for play. The best games exemplify a sophisticated balance of familiarity with innovation.
Lauren Klotzman
Sarah Lawrence College
We are at a critical juncture in the creation and marketing of American mainstream videogames: The immense success of more abstract, ludically-founded games such as the Sims, The Warioware Series, Super Monkey Ball, Nintendogs, etc has challenged the recent notion that games which strive for hyperrealism and narrative and cater to the white male heterosexual market have the greatest financial potential. Now, as one of the three primary console manufacturers openly courts a market counter to the straight white male, there has been a widespread instance of debate over what have been dubbed "girl games" the validity of which is often dismissed under the notion that the games amount to no more than "casual gaming" due to their reliance on gameplay rather than narrative, abstract elements, and short length. Regardless, these games are a step in the right direction in the quest for greater gaming gender equality in that they 1) combat the idea that designing games for the adolescent male is the most lucrative path for developers and 2) work to destroy the notion that the female market should be segregated from the mainstream. In my opinion, a good deal of these games popularity stems from what made earlier games like SimCity, PacMan, Sonic the Hedgehog, Space Invaders, etc so successful across the gender binary: an abstracted player character that is easy for the player to identify his/her self with, non gender coded marketing, and a structure founded more on gameplay than narrative.
While it would be easy to stand by and acknowledge that the market is moving in a more progressive manner, I believe that this trend will fade and that this time of opportunity should be used to create politically-minded games that work to combat sexism and the white male utopian game. I propose that in order to work towards removing the misogyny from videogames, one should remove the gender signifiers in order to provide a clean slate of virtual gender equality, creating a nongendered utopian MMO experiment. The abstract player characters that would result would be easily identified with and eliminate gendered othering. Through the use of abstract avatars, this experiment can be applied into an experimental environment in which there is no race, hetero- or homo- sexuality, or any other identity signifiers. The experiment calls virtual identity and interaction wholly into question: if one removes gender from the equation will there be greater sexual anxiety or acceptance? What elements of identity would be retained? How does the absence of these signifiers affect community? In any case, the continual production of these straight white male utopias is not only alienating a huge market segment, but also stifling the creative potential of gaming: An experiment such as this would be not only a step forward in the breaking of this hegemonic market presence, but also a step towards more creative and radical American game development.
Michael Langeder - [Hybridity]
student of architecture [TU graz, austria]; currently: student of architecture [UPV valencia, spain]
Flimmerflitzer
As a vj, mosthly acting in crowded areas such as clubs or festivals, we try to produce more than video samples cutted after each other, layed on top of each other, added some effects and repeated a whole evening long - we try, with using the programming environment "pure data", to produce an interaction between music, visual output and the physical surrounding area - the hybridity of our work is the implementing of pre-produced 3d objects (maya, 3d max, rhino), controlled and influenced virtually by frequencies sended from the audio mixer to the pd patch and physically by a game-control-pad connected via usb - we often just try to import 3d models, or parts of them, that we currently treat for architectural projects and try to reinterpret them while producing totally different virtual spaces or motion graphics - the visual output may influence your work as an architect and vice versa - our intention of producing live visuals in a club athmosphere is not telling a story like a movie or animation wants to do, it`s more about giving the physical environment a added value with projecting virtual scenes and graphics on it - audio and video are melted and may influence the way of the common space perception... the contribution to "breaking the game" could be a recorded a/v sample or a original pd patch used for producing live generated 3d visuals...
Ji-Ming Lin - [Self & Society]
New York University Dept. of Culture and Communication
The physical world and the virtual world are two separate worlds. Therefore, an online environment is useless without a means of translation between the physical and the virtual-an interface. In MMORPGs, the player taps the keyboard and drags the mouse to control the actions of the avatar; simultaneously, the avatar actualizes in the virtual world the desired actions of the player in the physical world. Two sets of different actions in separate worlds are thereby connected, granting the player a presence in the virtual world.
With the correspondence between the two worlds, the avatar functions as the alter ego of the player. This alter ego allows the player to explore and experiment with her actions, appearance, and identity, ideally to better represent her inner self-be that a rough dwarf, a spry archer, or anything else. The virtual avatar on the screen functions like the reflected self-image of the player in a mirror: the avatar looks the way the player sees herself, and moves the way the player wills her to move. In having control over such things, the player is assisted in exploring and understanding her own identity, as described in Lacan's mirror stage theory. The only difference between virtual worlds and mirrors is that the avatar does not reflect the exact appearance of the player. This is not a negative point, since in transcending superficiality, the avatar is capable of presenting more accurately the player's true inner self.
These two separate but connected worlds experience constant interflow. Firstly, the identity in the virtual world and the identity in the physical world can mutually influence each other, together forming the identity of the player. Secondly, experiences in the virtual and physical worlds interweave to form the life of the player. Thirdly, the two worlds exist at the same time, and players are not always immersed in only one of them but travel between the two. We have all eaten dinner as we battle ogres in dungeons, or broken away momentarily from an online world to satisfy a real-world need in the bathroom, or logged off to catch our favorite TV show; the traversals are endless. It would be an interesting experiment to test which circumstances in the physical world are sufficiently salient to pull the players away from various circumstances in the virtual world, and which are insufficient; this experiment would test the relative immersion of the player in the two worlds under different sets of circumstances. As life becomes a hybridization of the virtual presence and the physical, one is never entirely in one world or the other.
Rafael Lozano Hemmer
Artist
Not available yet.
Thomas Lowenhaupt - [Overclocking the City]
The Communisphere Project
Queens Community Board 3, city of New York
As part of a community effort to develop a park near LaGuardia Airport in New York City, I've begun using secondlife.com for modeling and decision making purposes, i.e., designing various park layouts and deciding which park to build. See http://www.cb3qn.nyc.gov/page/77950/ as a start point for the park effort. See the blog and wiki links at the bottom of tha page.
While the traditional park design and decision making processes gain in many ways from the use of secondlife, I'm interested in exploring how we might continue the virtual park as an ongoing aspect of the real park.
What type of interactions can one imagine between those in the virtual world (at home, work, ...) and those at the completed real park? How can those at the real park utilize the existsance of a virtual park in their play? What elements should be included in the real park to facilitate interaction with virtual park.
Paul Marino
Artist; Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences
Not available yet.
Morgan Oliver - [Hybridity]
Otago Polytechnic School of Art, Master of Fine Arts programme
My MFA project is titled "The Archaeology of the Digital". Part of this research is centered around digital games as a site for pop culture production. This encompasses themes such as game modification, process and labour, the military and its indoctrination of a young male technoculture, machinima and digital games as autopoetic systems. I am currently involved in making a virtual space for my own conference and am very interested to participate in a discussion surrounding these ideas.
Jerry Paffendorf - [Overclocking the City]
Electric Sheep Company's Futurist In Residence
I would like to present in audio and images on the diverse body of work in virtual worlds I've been involved in over the last two years, including:
-Second Life Future Salon (futurist discussion group with the Acceleration Studies Foundation, treating SL as another city in the real life Future Salon Network)
-Second Life Relay For Life (first walkathon fundraiser in cyberspace with the American Cancer Society that raised over $5,000US in virtual currency)
-Democracy Island (real life civic participation and deliberation via Second Life with the New York Law School)
-The Happening (mixed-reality "mirror world" event with Electric Sheep Company, recreating, navigating, and projecting a real space into the virtual world)
While Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash and vision of the Metaverse are most often cited in thinking about the future of virtual reality and the 3D Web, I'm equally inspired by David Gelernter's notion of Mirror Worlds: virtual recreations of the entire planet down to street level navigable by avatars and used to track realtime information about the real world. Virtual worlds like Second Life are headed in the Metaverse direction, digital maps like Google Earth are headed in the Mirror World direction, and the two will be meeting somewhere.
I would also like to lead a tour of Sheep Island in Second Life ("inworld" home of the Electric Sheep Company) and several other locations.
Nadia Palliser - [Overclocking the City]
ISEA Intersociety for the Electronic Arts - The Design Academy, Eindhoven
I am interested in how 'immaterial information' drifting in the city might surface more and become a (tactile) means for urban communities to manifest themselves and communicate to each other in public spaces. At the same time I wonder how privacy wishes and urges of anonymity relate to this and how both might be combined and defined?
I am working on a project at the moment concerning the future of the library in the city which offers an interesting place of overlapping information sources, searching anonymity, ongoing automation and oldskool local services. Since the law has passed which grants the state access to library information, ways to safeguard traditional privacy in the public space of the library are dwindling - in which ways might users find new ways to define their borderlines of privacy while at the same time activating themselves through mobile technology? How might the library facilitate these ways? Hoe might new concepts of shared space be defined in the urban setting of the library by using mobile technology?
I would like to develop these ideas, relating specifically to location awareness, issues of privacy and the use of mobile technology.
Christiane Robbins - [Hybridity] [Overclocking the City]
Jetztzeit, MAP, USC
I-5 Passing Lane is ... a journey of aesthetic inquiry across disciplines, across cultural discourses, personal narratives, regional and across the mythos of California itself, combining the seduction of the road trip, documentary, fictional and remediated cinematic images/narratives, with a recombinant use of data, locative, sensors, surveillance and distributed media and technologies. I-5 presents us with an imaged, telematic and nomadic experience-at once branded, familiar yet somehow embodying an alien presence.
I-5 Passing Lane captures a distinct, synergistic moment - the unprecedented growth of the urban / suburban population spread into 'our nations' breadbasket, the distended simulacrum of iconic urban spaces which are improbably embedded into bedroom communities, the ubiquitous presence and trace of the automobile and future mass transit, the rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, and widespread influence of wireless and locative technologies roaming across the wide open topographies of our psyche and landscape. These are ordinary scenes whose very ordinariness make them subversively utopian. It is this very ordinariness which unleashes a flood of historical nostalgia - a warmth and comfort to a past that we have never really known. This brave new valley is expecting an unparalleled influx of 10 million people within the next 20 years. I-5 Passing Lane will offer two distinct aspects of aesthetic inquiry and production: 1. U-Stor-it, a series of digitally constructed images; and 2. Call Box, an hybrid digital media project utilizing the intersections and commonalities of spaces created along.
Call Box exploits the material trace of our own mechanized mobile presence. Audience members will unknowingly trigger an unexpected and evocative response from others who have 'gone down this road before'. I-5 consists of multiple transmission stations located at the interspersed CalTrans call boxes situated along the defined route of the Interstate beginning in either the Bay Area or Los Angeles and branching out throughout the vast expanse of the valley.
Bharat Rao
Polytechnic University, New York.
Soh-Yeong Roh
Director, Art Center Nabi, Korea - [Self & Society]
My question in all these new forms of art is 'where and how does the user count?' To put it in other words, 'where do we find significant/interesting links between artistic representation and cultural practices of lay persons?' If these new forms of art are to have effects on everyday lives, as they seem to be proposing in various ways, what would be some viable strategies? I am interested in the link between artistic representation and everyday lives of the lay persons. I would like to discuss some case studies on this.
Jesse Shapins - [Overclocking the City]
Counts Media / UnionDocs / Stadtblind / Glowlab
We have heard for years now that urban environments are once again at the center of cultural and social innovation. Derided as they were by Le Corbusier and other Modernist reformers for their chaos, inefficiency, and unnecessary ornamentation, dense and vibrant cities all over the world have been growing rapidly during the past decades, both as tourist destinations and dynamic habitats. In what is an extension and illustration of this trend, fundamental transformations in digital technology have created a new dimension of urban experience that is gaining momentum globally.
These changes have reshaped everyday life in the city and given rise to an ever-evolving field of urban arts, fueling the reinvention of the discipline of psychogeography. Originally coined by the Situationist International in the 50s, it was defined as "[t]he study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." The Situationists hoped to escape the numbing spectacle of modern life through practices such as the dŽrive, a playful but attentive drifting through urban space, which sometimes continued for days at a time.
New technologies have provided the opportunity for some exciting experiments in psychogeography, creating the possibility of a derive that may never end. In June 2005, I curated an exhibition called "Loving Berlin Ð Woche der Berlin-Liebhaber" that brought together various projects that confronted these issues. In particular, I participated directly in collaborativ works Yellow Arrow (http://yellowarrow.net) by Counts Media (http://countsmedia.com), "The Colors of Berlin" (http://diefarbenberlins.de) by Stadtblind (http://stadtblind.org), "The Commons_Berlin" by UnionDocs (http://uniondocs.org) and "Berlin by Chance" (http://knifeandfork.org/bbc) by posstourismusbŸro and Glowlab (http://glowlab.com).Ê
All of this work embraces the democratizing potential of new media, is fueled by collaborative structures, embodies a growing global community, displays an open and playful engagement with commercial culture, focuses on real world experiences, and utilizes the city as the ideal stage for interaction. Whereas the artists of the past focused upon the individual production of Òworks,Ó these groups and their projects illustrate a shift towards artists developing collaborative platforms that expand the artistic process into the public realm and open channels of creativity.
Today, perception is the ultimate battlefield for power. In an age of pervasive mediation and the ever-decreasing production value of material goods (especially in the more industrialized nations), the conceptual space of immaterial valuation is the sweet spot for all those seeking change. Advertising and political propaganda aim directly at manipulating perception, going to any length of trickery to convince the individual of their message. Truth, never a genuinely solid concept, is now more fluid than ever.
It is the aim of these projects to challenge the assumed truth in pervasive messaging and mainstream meaning. Perhaps they seek a change in their underlying pursuit of an old objective: revolution. Revolution not in the traditional sense of overthrowing the state, but in the steady, yet widespread transformation of perception. They are critical by nature, seeking to invigorate questioning. It is a new practice of a subtle politics of liberated thought.
Bo-Seon Shim - [Self & Society]
Art Center Nabi
I am interested in the identity formation within the virtual space, the recognition of others, the mode of communication, and the cultural and political frameworks. I will compare a variety of Korean on-line communities in terms of their political opinion, cultural taste, and communicative modes, each of which leads to differentiated identity construction. Through this investigation, I argue that the identity formation process on the internet occurs not in a vacuum but in particular contexts where sets of rules, norms, and symbols provide actors with tools and guidelines for their action and discourses looked upon as proper and, at the same time, distinct. In sum, identity is not a fixed category but fluid sociocultural construct mediating and mediated by the interaction between agency and the surrounding media environments.
Brooke Singer
Preemptive Media; Asst. Prof. New Media at Purchase College, SUNY
In my work currently I am utilizing aspects of the so-called "Web 2.0," like user mapping and bottom-up classification systems that are highly participatory and user-driven. When you add mobile media to the mix, which are off the desktop, location-based and integrated into everyday life, you have a new platform ripe for experimentation, community building, information sharing and activism. How can media artists-activists successfully put these tools to work without foregrounding the technology or limiting participation and audience to a technocratic elite? How does one design this type of work that is so nascent and untested? As web/mobile media applications become more human-centered and responsive, planning becomes a matter of understanding flexibility, scalability and sociability. What disciplines, thinkers or stories can we turn to for guidance? How does game playing (new and old) impact the development of locative media art for better or worse? What aspects of game theory can we pilfer to help us build an audience, encourage deep participation and manage large user input? How can we design projects so that experience does not become rigidly dominated by data acquisition via ICTs and allow for multi-sensory, layered and open-ended situations? The two projects that I am developing that are using these newer web technologies and locative media are Purpool (in conjunction with Peter Ohring) and AIR, a Preemptive Media project. Preemptive Media will run a AIR public workshop at Eyebeam in New York City in May 2006 and the full project launches in September 2006.
Dr. Gregory Sporton
Director of the Visualisation Research Unit at the Department of Art, University of Central England,Birmingham, United Kingdom
Transformative technology: technology as part of consciousness.
The shift away from the use of technology as a tool offers some serious challenges to traditional art as it is practiced. Whilst it is increasingly clear that art practice has adopted technology to digitize existing analogue processes, it is equally clear that this has allowed for the expedential expansion of vapid non-art, based entirely on the potential volume of work that can be created in the mash-up.
For the Visualisation Research Unit, the challenge is to properly integrate technological practice into artistic practice. Notwithstanding efforts of interesting pioneers, the efforts of the Unit are now focussed on what can be done with technology that was not available to artists in the past, and that can still have the qualities of art. This means that art can be found in the lines of code more often than it can be discovered in Photoshop renderings, or that the complex detail of gaming and the interface experience for users are probalby more legitimate as art than simply moving to technology as the means of production.
The means of experience through technology present challenges beyond those of usability and engability of image/experience making for technological platforms. If art is actually about something (and it isn't clear that it is anymore), then technology itself is the locus of creativity (and possibly the locus of art in the domain of technology).
Stamatia Portanova - [Hybridity]
University of East London
Taking Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy as a point of departure, I propose a non-phenomenological approach to dance and its encounter with digital technology. Beyond the notions of technology as a physical extension of the living organism, of its functional use by the conscious human subject, or of its imitative aim (the machine unsuccessfully trying to render or substitute human movement), I would like to discuss if, and how, new and un-thought effects can derive from this encounter.
With the aid of various mathematical operations and calculations, dance notation and choreography write a kinetic score, already moulding the shape of a body's displacement in space and attributing precise values to the limited possibilities of the body's anatomy, through the use of numbers. Being based on counting and clear cuts, rather than on the imprecision of analog demarcations, digitisation represents another possibility of expression for the vagueness of movement-ideas, replacing the inexact quantities and fluid dynamics of thought and movement with discrete numbers, submitting the indeterminacy of matter to a new form of codification and control operating through the numerical discrimination of very small differences. This discussion explores how the hybridity of digitalised choreographic processes brings forth new potentials and new stimuli to realise apparently impossible movements and idiosyncratic phrases that go against biological and anatomical possibilities, allowing the exploration and discovery of previously unknown capacities and the overcoming of past beliefs and ideas in dance and, more generally, artistic creation.
Eddo Stern - [Self & Society]
C-Level
MMOs - a new world order. Are MMOs gonna extinct single player games? How will a switch from single player (non live) to Multiplayer (live) gaming affect future game desgin? Hardware hacking or "hacking from outside" - ideas of gameplay hacking vs aesthetic hacking, what role does game hacking have in a future dominated by MMOs - do MMOs stifle artistic creativity? are MMOs perceived as the new dictatorial or egalitarian city states?
Helen Thorington - [Hybridity]
Turbulence.org
A discussion of what we mean by "hybrid" or "hybridity". Does the term replace a term like "intermedia" -- which has been used for works that fall conceptually between traditional or established media? does it imply a fusion, as "intermedia" does in which something new is formed? Or is it a way of talking about the coexistence in any given undertaking of the virtual and the physical? where the purpose may still be to produce (say) music, or literature, or performance?
Victoria Vesna - [Self & Society]
University of California at Los Angeles
Database Aesthetics
Yanna Vogiazou - [Overclocking the City]
Design Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London
I would like to see this as an opportunity to exchange ideas and knowledge with fellow researchers/ design practitioners in the field of emerging and pervasive technologies. I am particularly interested in the design of hybrid or mixed reality games that capitalize on the dynamics of social interaction and unpredictable user behaviour to create novel experiences in the physical world, motivated by the participation in a virtual one. My previous experience with the CitiTag project (see url in the form field above) focused on studying emergent behaviours in the city as part of an iterative design process for ubiquitous computing social applications. These user research studies were realised through the design and evaluation of a location-based, wireless game of playground tag.
I am currently collaborating with colleagues within the Design Department at Goldsmiths on developing research methods and creative process for the design of ubiquitous computing applications. There are many unknows when designing mixed reality games and social applications; several contextual factors (identified in CitiTag studies) can influence the user experience, so one of the challenges is to learn to design pervasive computing applications that are strongly bound to the context of use. Another challenge is the methods we are using for the design and evaluation of these experiences; because traditional HCI approaches focus on interactive products or tools, we now need to develop a broader set of design-led methods and processes for designing and contextualizing interactive media that blend with the physical environment itself. My current work involves mapping a set of exploratory and generative methods in the design process itself, so I would like share some of these methods and processes and if possible try them out through a developing project.
Finally, I am hoping this symposium might be a good starting point for some interesting cross-disciplinary collaborations across practitioners from design, computing, architecture and social science.
Ken Wark - [Self & Society]
Author/Game theorist
The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.
-- Theodor Adorno
On Ni Annie Wan - [Overclocking the City]
Center For Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington
I'd like to discuss how to define "games" in general, such as how artists deal with the term "playful" and how they engage game concept, e.g open-ended structure and role-playing in media arts.
I'm particular interested in mobile gaming and how does it interact with our physical space. Mobile computing and locative media arouse people's interest since the idea of mobility or nomad, we, as a participants/ users is enabled to be "everywhere" and "get connected". But ironically, because of the technology/ medium itself, we are being "trapped" and manipulated by this mobility, e.g our virtual presence via SMS, mobile phone conversation, Wi-Fi, etc, our location can be easily tracked by our mobile service providers/ others and the bluetooth panic attacks our privacy, e.g our mobile phone's contact list.
Karen Wong
Independant curator - [Overclocking the City]
[please note that this is part of a larger text, serves to situate where some of my theoretical concerns lie. information is not particularly new as was not written so recently]
How does one reconcile aspects of the immaterial and the electronic with its volatile nature in conjunction with 3dimensional, physical spaces which also have their demands based upon basic architectural orientations, on which way is up, gravity? We 'bring things to light' through the use of screens, privileging the image, playing with scale, size, given distances. Is non-linearity really based upon personal navigations through sites and cyberspace? Presentation strategies must move pass the dependency upon the screen as a means of engaging with the work. They delve into particularities of the digital, the virtual and the immaterial and invent new languages and syntaxes that will also subvert architectural frames and spatio-temporal experiences as we know them today. Such strategies will need to begin thinking about programming rather than occupying space. Systems and protocols, circularity of language and logics, implants, distances and data, hyperlinks, dynamic texts are already indices of and structural blocks upon which to innovate, think, create these situations by which new/other experiences of the virtual may emerge. New communicational processes which include dynamic programming, generative interfaces, computational linguistics, will subvert the entrenched notions of art as an object - hence the computer as a frame to house the work - developing new relations of wo/man-machine and moving towards distinctions being made between human and artificial life. Then perhaps, new events born out of activities proper to artifical beings, may allow exploration of more complete sensory stimuli and engender immersive and diverse phenomena that will engage the senses in an imbricated and coherent way. This will inevitably require a shift away from modernist and capitalist psychology of human to object relations. Architectural considerations in relation to new media and digital technologies are already undergoing diffiicult and unwilling transformations - materiality is simply not as fluid as immaterial data.
In the migrancies that emerge, belying the intimacy between media and mediated environments, the particularities of networks, bandwiths, access, data control, imminent frontiers between the electronic and the molecular present challenges that excede intellectual and experiential demands, and include technological ones.
Perhaps they will offer other comprehensions of 'written spaces' in interactive and multi-linear form, informed by simultaneities, delocalised temporalities and conditions and nomadic, mobile states that articulate hypermediated architectures.
BREAKING THE GAME WORKSHOP TEAM
Klaas Rysschaert, Founder of The Design Nation
Lead designer, programmer, Breaking the Game website
Dirk Standaert, Co-founder Codefellas bvba
Project management, programming, Breaking the Game website
Francesc Izquierdo, Co-founder Codefellas bvba
Programming, Breaking the Game website
Jason Dovey, artist
Quake 3 modification
Jason Lewis, OBXLabs
Programming, PDA communication with virtual world
Yannick Francken, Expertise Center for Digital Media, Hasselt University, Belgium.
Research, programming, 3D virtual projector
Els Viaene, artist
Quake 3 modification, sound design.
Matt McChesney, Workspace Unlimited
Programming Quake 3
Simon Piette, Society for Art & Technology (SAT), Montreal.
Programming network setup
Patrick Bergeron, Innobec, Softimage, Workspace Unlimited
OpenGL programming
Thomas Pottie, Joril, Student Sint Lucas, Media
Exploration website interface
Aaron Dupon, Student Sint Lucas, Media
Exploration website interface
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