CAS/CADE Conference 2013: Codes of Engagement

8th – 9th April 2013 Watershed, Bristol

Organisers: Mark Palmer, Sue Gollifer and Nick Lambert
Partnership with Digital Cultures Research Centre UWE

 

 


The IOCT made a strong showing at the combined Computer Arts Society/Computing in Art and Design Education symposium at the Watershed in Bristol in April with papers by Ernest Edmonds, Francesca Franco, Sean Clark and also  Anthony Rowe of Squidsoup-who collaborated with IOCT on their Ocean of Light piece. There were exhibitions by Professor Martin Rieser showing the work for the Phoenix Digital Arts Commission Exodus and also Jackie Calderwood's work with Alzheimers' patients Living Voices. Other speakers included  veteran computer artist and educator Brian Reffin Smith   Pervasive Media artists  Duncan Speakman and Tine Bech and physicist David Glowacki using quantum field calculations to enhance interactive dance displays. Frieder Nake was unable to attend but supplied a video. 

Marking the 18th anniversary of the first Computers in Art and Design Education conference , where those born in 1995 have just become students. Many who then sensed the opportunities and need to make computers an integral part of Art and Design Education might feel that this is now a given. The symposium interrogated the question whether the integration of computers in Art and Design Education has  only been the prelude to a greater set of challenges?

It asked how  the landscape might change when we begin to teach pupils who’ve been taught how to code in schools? As computing moves off the desktop towards the ubiquitous and the physical and into what should be the natural domain of the arts, is the sector prepared? Can it cope with the demands of electronics alongside coding? Can it innovate and be creative if it doesn’t? With creative technology now being one of the highest recruiting areas within Computing Departments are new approaches demanded? 



    

De Montfort wins Green Gown award for Greenview App

We're delighted to announce that we won the Green ICT category in the EAUC Green Gown Awards last night. It was a fantastic evening and we were thrilled to share it with many familiar faces from the last few years alongside our colleagues from DMU's Square Mile Project that also won in the Social Responsibility category and the International Social Responsibility category. Particularly poignant for me as the event was held in the beautiful Great Hall at the University of Birmingham.

There were  key people without whom which this project would never have happened. Firstly - our sponsors/funders, JISC - Rob Bristow at the Greening ICT group at JISC has supported us tirelessly and without JISC funding this project, and its predecessor, DUALL. could never have happened. Second, the team behind the Greenview app from IOCT and IESD - Richard Bull, Dave Everitt, Gareth Howell, Graeme Stuart and Martin Rieser. Thirdly, the sustainability team at DMU are amazing - Karl Letten and Paul Fleming in particular. Finally, the IESD and the Faculty of Technology at DMU have been incredibly supportive of our, at times, slightly unorthodox ideas about energy visualisation.

Oh, and last but not least, thank you to to the EAUC for the award. We're very grateful.

ISEA 2012

ISEA12 Albuquerque

ISEA2012 Machine Wilderness

As contradictory as it sounds to hold a conference/exhibition on ecology in a remote location among the fragile sands of New Mexico,  ISEA12 had an ecological theme "Machine Wilderness". The associated air miles and car use were the unfortunate overheads. Outstanding works included François Quévillon's Derive (video) which visualised weather data embedded in the drawing of a reactive 3D graphic landscape. It was remarkable in its subtle rendering and potential for showing data in intuitive ways.

Other top works included The Hand of Man in Taos, 

The Hand of Man-Christian Ristow

A gigantic hydraulic hand driven by a data glove which was capable of lifting and crushing cards bodily. "The Hand of Man" moving sculpture by Christian Ristow, September 27 through to  30th , in Kit Carson Park is an interactive kinetic sculpture that you can operate. People were able to work with the artist and crew by slipping theirr hand into the sculpture's operation glove - a system that enables the giant sculpture to mimic your movements.  You can pick up cars that will be part of the exhibit, lift them 25 feet up, turn them about, and drop them to the ground! The Hand was designed and built by Ristow, a renowned artist in the field of animatronics. Ristow has been living and working in Taos since 2005, and built The Hand in 2008.  

Teri Rueb, Carmelita Topaha &  Larry Phan: No Places with Names: A Critical Acoustic Archaeology locative wilderness walk has already been blogged here, but Charles Lindsay: CARBONX  Dome piece also at Sante Fe, was another overwhelming experience.

The Sante Fe day included a visit to SITE whose More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness show was a knock out-albeit not particularly electronic ( In collaboration with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The exhibit will be on display until January 6th, 2013.)

Eve Sussman video still from "89 Seconds at Alcázar"Los Meninas

.

For me the out standing works were artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's replica of the chemical-weapon-baring trucks Colin Powell recollected from Iraq. And others focused more heavily on the technological advancements that blurred the line between documentation and reappropriation, such as Eve Sussman's video installation that recreates the scene of Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas."

50/50 Native Artists in Sa

50/50: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years presented by Museum of Contemporary Native Arts was an overwhelmingly sad experience , with every work reflecting confusion , anger and despair at the native dispossion and the tainting of Indian lands with radioactive fall out from Nuclear tests.

This exposed the contradictory nature of the whole event: sensitive eco-friendly projects addressing the despoiling of the wilderness by man's careless interventions, at the same time endorsing low rider and car-centered cultures in the region, and very little said about the grab for oil, the arctic sea ice melting the move away from nuclear and the terrifying future that global warming will bring. It was not complacent, but seemed far from the European consciousness about the global climate crisis and tthe radical changes needed. 

Steve Storz  Kanobis Amplifier Research Facility

On Taos day the sinister shed by Steve Storz  Kanobis Amplifier Research Facility (KARF) Phase II at the  UNM Klauer Campus in Taos NM, was an outdoor electronic sculpture installation that underlined the complicity of scientists in despoiling this pristine landscape in the name of 'freedom'.

However the focus on building DIY adobe shacks at Taos seemed nice and hippyish, but is not a realistic long-term solution. Engaging with Los Alamos was also a nice idea, but the attitudes revealed at the Sante Fe conference by the artistic director, implied a massive misunderstanding of the role of art:  seeing it only as a way of illustrating existing scientific materials more effectively, rather than as a radical way of completely rethinking methodologies.

The small contribution we made as a team ( Nina Yankowitz, Barry Holden , Martin Rieser, Rasmus Vuiori) was an interactive questionnaire using QR codes to probe the contradictions in people's attitudes to Eco issues. The resulting web database will be used to drive future online interventions using avatar humour to engage a thoughtful response to the crisis.

The main exhibition for ISEA2012 was displayed at a total of seven venues. It is based at both The Albuquerque Museum of Art & History and 516 ARTS, with off-site projects at the following five Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, the Rainosek Gallery at the UNM School of Architecture & Planning, Richard Levy Gallery and the Alvarado Urban Farm. The exhibition features work that combines art, science and technology, demonstrating the role art can play in re-envisioning the world. The over 100 artists are from 16 countries: Austria, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, the U.K. and the USA. The exhibition was juried and curated through an international call for proposals, which drew close to 1,500 submissions from artists and presenters around the globe. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the acclaimed Radius Books, which will be distributed internationally. 

It was a massive attempt to integrate electronic arts and the ecologic movement and as such deserves praise for both ambition and achievement. 

Posted 11 hours ago by Martin Rieser

Labels: New Technology Workshop/conference Exhibition Public Art Interactive art Interactive Narrative installation GPS Mapping New Interfaces locative psychogeography

Secret Garden

 

Secret Garden

A virtual reality/augmented reality hybrid performance opera/ballet.

 Martin Rieser/ Andrew Hugill

Introduction

Secret Garden is an attempt to recreate a contemporary version of the Eden myth in the midst of an urban environment. It will be available in two versions –a physical installation and as a virtual mobile experience linked to selected site locations. In its installation aspect, it will comprises eleven mounted iPads acting as viewports distributed around a circle in the Cube gallery at Phoenix Square. Peering into one of the viewports will trigger a view of an idyllic three-dimensional scene in the ‘Secret Garden’ and tell part of the mythical story of the Fall, through words, music and dance. This same content will soon be made available using Augmented Reality software to any visitor with a smartphone.

The Fall story is common to many of the world’s religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The structure of Secret Garden will be loosely modelled on the ten paths of the Sephirot in the Jewish telling of the story, which is itself also a symbol of the Tree of Life and the oldest extant version. Two contemporary human figures re-enact the story of the Fall, combining sung poetry and video vignettes with 3D generated environments, each scene dis­tributed to a different one of the eleven iPad viewports. The viewer’s presence triggers both music and action.

The texts comprise original poems that tell this classic story in a timeless and relevant way, examining choices in a fallen world. The musical composition is adaptive and features vocal settings and digitally treated percussion. The virtual scenography consists of 3D designs based on an idealised garden space, inspired by the 19th century Mezzotints for Milton’s Paradise Lost by John Martin. Viewing the eleven viewports will gradually assemble the elements of a story in the user’s mind. The story is mysterious and mythical in nature, however, it is not necessary to see the viewports in any particular order, and a partial viewing will also provide a complete experience in itself.

 The installation is a unique virtual reality amalgam of poetry, music, and 3D panoramic images and motion-captured avatars. It plays with sound narrative and myth, transposed into a modern context, using technology both in production and delivery in a synthesised and holistic capacity. Audience movement from viewport to viewport will trigger vocal settings of authored verse  and head movements change the scene perspective in realtime.

The Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De Montfort University supported the project. The IOCT specialises in cross-disciplinary working that combines science and technology with the arts and humanities. The project will draw on expertise from the Faculties of Art & Design, Humanities and Technology, including the Fused Media Lab (for the virtual scenography), the Architecture Department (for the physical build of the installation), students on the Games Design degree (for the interactivity) and the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (for the music). Management will be provided by Professor Andrew Hugill (Director of the IOCT) and Professor Martin Rieser (Professor of Digital Creativity), who are the creators of Secret Garden.

EXODUS

FROM KAMPALA TO LEICESTER

Exodus

Martin Rieser - Institute of Creative
Technologies at De Montfort University

Audio Trail and Installations
14th August – 30th September

Sean Clark programmer testing Trail

Wall trail in Phoenix Cafe

Interactive Video multi-scree

This digital commission in one of a series of events and activities across Leicester that marksthe 40th anniversary of the expulsion ofUgandan Asians and their subsequent move to Leicester.

In August 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin gave the Asian community 90 days notice to
leave the country. They were forced to leavealmost everything in Uganda and seek refuge in other countries such as Britain and Canada. The digital commission consists of a trail linking New Walk Museum and Art Gallery and Phoenix, a video installation in the Phoenix café multiscreen and a large wall graphic showing the trail and providing access to QR codes, located in the Phoenix café.

Trail
New Walk Museum & Art Gallery
to Phoenix

Using personal testimony from Leicester’s Ugandan Asian community, the trail revisits the
dramatic events in 1972 and shares memories about arrival in the UK and settling in Leicester ithe 1970s, while celebrating the community’s continued cultural and economic impact on the City.

The trail follows a route from New Walk Museum & Art Gallery to Phoenix, with QR codes located on posters in shops and windows along the route. Scanning the QR codes triggers the audio commentary telling the story of the exodus. Onarrival at Phoenix, visitors can interact with the video installation and wall graphic in the café area.

To follow the trail, iPhone users should download an app from Empedia, via www.empedia.info. You can then follow the trail, scanning the QR codes located along the walk (or on the map on the reverse) to release audio information. The map on the reverse can be used as a route guide. Android phone users can follow the trail without downloading the app, provided they have a QR  code reader downloaded on their phone. For iPhone users, information on the trail can also be triggered by GPS position if this facility is
active on your phone. By using this trail, you willbe downloading data to your phone, and your network provider may charge for this.

Installation

Phoenix Cafebar

When you arrive at Phoenix, the video installation on the café multiscreen allows you to edit your own journey through videos created specially for this commission.

The videos celebrate the current exhibition at New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, using film footage of journeys across narrative textile surfaces. The textiles were created by community groups and professional artists, with lead artist Ashok Mistry, for the ‘from Kampala to Leicester’ exhibition at New Walk Museum & Art Gallery.

This video installation is a unique development using iPhone or iPad tones to control the nine video windows. You can visit reception to borrowearphones and iPads to participate - just plug into the wall fitting and edit your own journey through the videos.

The large wall graphic allows you to follow the audio trail in the comfort of Phoenix’s café. Scan the QR codes to trigger the audio commentary using iPads, iPhones or android phones.

See the website for event details, including the digital commission and screenings at Phoenix Square and a range of activities at New Walk

Please be aware that some of the testimonies in
the trail contain information that some people may
find upsetting

Digital Textuality with/in Performance
Arnolfini Bristol
 2012 May 3-4, hosted by the University College Falmouth

There was a good DMU presence at this seminar programme under the HERA networks initiative:

Participants attending this ELMCIP  investigated the relationship between e-literature/digital text and performance. Members of the ELMCIP project, international speakers and practitioners  discussed the function and understanding of performativity and its relationship to digital literature through a series of papers, presentations and practical engagements.

"Although the field of e-literature is rife with references to performance, they have tended to remain relatively untheorised. In the main, analysis or investigation of performance is restricted to either the relationship between the textual output (on the interface or projected into a performance space) and the live body responding performatively to that text or else generating text through performance. There has been little attempt to fold digital text performance into the wider context of the 'turn to performance' among the humanities in recent decades. 

It is against this background -- of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, the ethnography of ritual, performance of self and gender, performance writing, etc. -- that the conference will take place.While continuing the investigation of live performance, we will be seeking to broaden the scope to include: interactivity; the performative gesture of the hand and fingers (digital text) on the interface; the performativity of language itself on the screen; social performance, or how digital texts ‘perform’ us; the performance of codes and scripting; and the performance of the machine itself, i.e., what does an engineer mean when s/he talks about performance? In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital environment (dispositif) and, in order to give a fuller account of this complex of performative modes, we will also be investigating how they interact with each other."

•  Conference proceedings, along with artist’s pages, will be published in a dedicated issue of the journal Performance Research (2013)
  
  UCF ELMCIP seminar - Arnolfini Bristol
  
  
  Machinic Performance and architecture
  
  Jerome Fletcher (UCF) Performance and the Digital Text.
  John Lumley (Univ. of Nottingham) Machinic performance.
  
  The place/role of the body in digital performance;Body and machine
  
  
  Alexandra Saemmer (Univ. of Paris 8): Reading (de)coherent
  hypertexts: a creative performance based on a close reading of the
  German hyperfiction Zeit für die Bombe
  
  Maria Engberg (BTH): Touch and Gesture as Aesthetic Experience:
  
  Clive Fencott: Performance as a Categoriser
  Joerg Piringer: Software - performance of code.
  
  Cristophe Collard (Free Univ. of Brussels): Jesurun’s digitalist Firefall:
  Staging the analogical relation as cognitive performance.
  
  
  Giovanna di Rosario (Univ. of Jyvaskyla): ‘Reading’ Performance:
  Eugenio Tisselli’s Wen
  
  David Prater: "Davey Dreamnation and the Performance of Self"
   How digital language performs. Reading digital performance. Presentation of work
  
  Christine Wilks: Out of Touch - a digital text performance
  
  Martin Rieser (Univ. of Kingston): Performed poetics in multi-linear narrative situations
  
  Paula Crutchlow: Make Shift
  
  Annie Abrahams
  cris cheek
  
  Joerg Piringer
  Donna Leishman
  J.R. Carpenter
  

Civil War Guide on iPad

HISTORY™ has created an app for the iPad: The Civil War Today . It explores every phase and aspect of America’s north-south conflict with daily updates that unveil the events in real time over the course of four years.


The Civil War Today leverages the iPad multi-touch interface, enabling subscribers to delve into thousands of original documents, photos, maps, diary entries, quotes and newspaper broadsheets like never before.

App Features

• This Day in Civil War History

  Daily Civil War updates from April 12, 2011 through April 26, 2015.
  

• Quote of the Day

  Compelling quotations from the men and women who lived through the war.

• In the Headlines

  Explore every page of historic newspapers from each day of the conflict.
  

• Day in the Life

  Through their letters and personal diaries, follow the lives of 15 people who experienced the Civil War firsthand.
  

• Photo Gallery

  A collection of original images from the period in high-resolution.
  

• By the Numbers

  The war through surprising facts and figures.

• Battle Maps

  Follow in the soldiers’ footsteps with historic battlefield maps.
  

• Casualty Counter

  Measure the true cost of the war through the lives that were lost.
  

• North South Quiz

  Civil War knowledge with the daily North vs. South quiz.
  

• Game Center Integration

  You can earn Civil War era appropriate achievements for your engagement with the application.
  

Link http://www.history.com/interactives/civil-war-today