The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments IE'12

The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments IE'12
26-29 of June 2012 (workshops on 26-27 of June 2012)
Guanajuato Mexico
www.intenv.org

**** Conference paper submission: 14 January 2012


Intelligent Environments (IE) refer to physical spaces in which IT and other pervasive computing technology are woven and used to achieve specific goals for the user, the environment or both. IE enriches user experience, better manages the environment's resources, and increases user awareness of that environment.
The 8th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE'12) will be held at the beautiful and historic World Heritage UNESCO city of Guanajuato (Mexico) famous for its subterranean streets, ancient churches, the Callejon del Beso (Alley of the Kiss), and owing its fame and fortune to rich veins of silver and gold discovered in the 18th century.

This edition continues a series of highly successful conferences that were organized in Colchester (UK), Athens (Greece), Ulm (Germany), Seattle (USA), Barcelona (Spain) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), and Nottingham (UK) in the past seven years. The conference provides a multidisciplinary collaborative forum for researchers and practitioners to present theoretical and practical results of Intelligent Environments work. This conference program will include workshops, invited lectures and special sessions of full and posters. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Ambient Intelligence
* Urban Intelligence
* Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing
* Context Awareness
* End-User Programming
* Human-Computer Interaction
* Affective Systems & Wearables
* Virtual & Mixed-Reality
* Middleware & Networking
* Hardware & Software for AmI
* Embedded Computing
* Theoretical Foundations
* Building Architecture
* Arts & Design
* Social Sciences
* Government and Law
* Green & Sustainable Design
* Tele-care and eHealth
* Educational Technology
* Smart Automobiles
* Industrial Automation
* Avionics and Space
* Robotics
* Evaluation Methodologies

Conference Program: The conference provides a multidisciplinary collaborative forum for researchers and practitioners from disciplines such as Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Building Architecture Art & Design, Sociology, Government and Education to present theoretical and practical results of Intelligent Environments.

Authors are invited to submit regular full papers as well as contributions to the Doctoral Colloquium, Posters Session or Demos & Videos Session.  Papers accepted in any of these tracks will also be included in the Conference Proceedings (see more details in Publications section below). The deadline for submitting to these tracks is the same than for main conference paper submission.   Contact details are offered further down in this document.

Awards: as in previous editions there will be a number of awards to reward quality and innovation. There will be prizes for Best Full Paper, Best Demo, Best Video and for the Intelligent Environments Application Challenge.

Workshops Program: A number of workshops will complement the main conference program.  Papers accepted in any of the workshops sponsored by this conference will be included in one proceedings volume that will collect the contributions in all workshops, see more details in the publications section.

Organising an IE12 Workshop: We invite people who would like to submit a proposal for organising an IE12 workshop to contact the programme chairs (pc@intenv.org) or download a Workshop-Proposal CFP from our website. IE workshops benefit from the support of the IE organisation and include a profit share arrangement with the organisers.

Important Dates:
* Workshop Proposals: 5th December 2011
* Conference paper submission: 14 January 2012
* Conference paper notification: 14 March 2012
* Workshop paper submission: 30 March 2012
* Conference Papers (Final Version): 16 April 2012
* Workshops Papers (Final Version): 14 May 2012

Publications:  all papers accepted in the main conference will be electronically available through IEEE Explore.  All papers accepted in the Workshops program will be published as a volume of the Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments Series (ISI indexed) of IOS Press and electronically available through ACM Digital Library.

Invited Speakers: as in previous editions, IE'12 will invite distinguished professionals through a number of Keynotes.  They will be announced through the website of the event in the near future.

Special Issues:  a number of journal issues will be published encompassing core areas of the event.

For enquiries contact:

General Chair

Victor Zamudio
Instituto Tecnológico de Leon, Mexico
gc@intenv.org

Program Chairs

Vic Callaghan
University of Essex, UK
pc@intenv.org

Juan Carlos Augusto
University of Ulster, UK
pc@intenv.org

Future Cities

Future Cities is an exciting conference that will be held in London on the 15^th and 16^th December 2011.  There are currently over 120 speakers registered at the event and a further 130 delegates in attendance over 2 days.  We have 10 speaker slots available and can accommodate a further 40 delegates.  The speaker and registration fees are £180 plus VAT.  To register as a speaker of delegate please click here.  Papers that are submitted for the Conference need to cover one of the following topics:

The City of Neighbourhoods.

The City of Enterprise.

The Connected City.

The Healthy City.

The City of Culture.

The Sporting City.

Deprivation and the City.

The Green City.

Display spaces are available at a cost of £499 plus VAT with delegate inserts at £199 plus VAT and to book one of these packages please click here.

Details of the event can be found here.  A selection of the current contributors include:

University College London Environment Institute

University of Michigan

University of Edinburgh

Bartlett School of Planning

Technion Institute of Technology

University of Cardiff

London South Bank University

Witts University

Strathclyde University

Santa Fe International New Media Festival
June 22 – July 8, 2012
Call for New Media Submissions
currents 2012, the 3rd annual Santa Fe International New Media Festival will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA – June 22 – July 8, 2012.  The Festival explores the role of technology and the diverse applications of New Media in the arts.
This year submission categories include single channel video, video and sound installation, interactive new media, animation, computer/software modulated sculpture, multimedia performance, experimental and interactive documentary video, Digital Dome projection, art gaming and web art.
The Festival will be held in several venues throughout the city: El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts, the Santa Fe Complex and the Digital Dome facility at the Institute for American Indian Arts. In addition to exhibitions currents 2012 will offer panel discussions and workshops, and two nights of multimedia performance. Festival events are free to the public.
Application Deadlines (via online submission or postmarked):
February 1, 2012 (most festival submissions)
March 1, 2012 for Digital Dome Submissions
For Application Guidelines and Submission Forms:
http://www.currentsnewmedia.org/submissionguidel.html
To view archives of previous festival exhibitions:
http://www.currentsnewmedia.org/currents2012.html

Major Blog posting on Third Woman Project

The Creators Project has published a substantial critique of the Third Woman project which was originated with the IOCT as a major partner under the emobilart European workshop.

The Creators Project cites it on  a Blog exploring new ideas in Media

The Creators Project was born from a partnership between Intel and Vice. Together the two companies met over a shared passion for art and creativity, and a common belief that there was a better way of elevating artists and supporting new work with them.They say of The Third Woman:

 

" What is important about The Third Woman‘s interactive component is that it engages its audience morally and intellectually. It goes further than asking them to guide the narrative, but to actually consider the decisions they are making in a larger context of the themes of the film. The film is not only aware of its audience as present, but also aware of them as opinionated, sentient, intelligent individuals. Many times when artists use the word ’interactive’ to describe their work they only mean it to be responsive or performative. It does not take into consideration that the complexity of human behavior offers only a very limited set of options for people to merely choose from. Although The Third Woman still only offers a limited set of choices, what sets it apart is how they seek to generate thought among their audience."

 

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/interactive-digital-noir-piece-combines-cinema-fashion-and-gaming

Sean Clark and Fabrika Arts Centre: Interact Gallery

Digital artist and IOCT PhD student Sean Clark launched the Interact Gallery on 5th September  at the Fabrika Arts Centre. Leicester's newest gallery for interactive and digital arts opened today on the first floor of Fabrika, in Humberstone Gate. It will act as a showcase for the best art works in the East Midlands and will be curated jointly by Sean Clark, De Montfort University and Adam Kirk of Fabrika. 

The show  runs until late October and the organisers hope that would-be artists will offer their works to the rolling programme, during which exhibits will be changed regularly.

Speaking at the opening, Sean Clark said "The transformation of the upstairs space is still underway but it is hoped to be completed in two weeks time. Over the next two months we plan to show the work of up and coming digital artists."

On show at present are a number of works by Sean Clark, such as his Memory Mirror, which captures video images of people walking in front of it and plays them back as ghostly images.

His work Drop Sketch is a wall of graphical images provided by people from their mobile phones, to which they have downloaded a special app. that allows them to make a sketch and upload it to the central gallery. 

Another panel shows a group of moving circles that nteracts with the viewer.

Also speaking the Launch event was Professor Ernest Edmonds, from IOCT De Montfort University, who told the meeting "innovations in interactive arts have often involved small and select groups of people. This gallery is ideal for interactive work. Leicester has had a strong tradition in this area over a long period of time. It was one of the first cities to mount an early exhibition of interactive art back in 1970/71, in what was then Leicester Polytechnic.

It was Albert Einstein who said that 'inventing the problem is more important than solving it.' This very much sums up what this exhibition is about.Leicester has for a long time been noted for its adventurous and experimental artists. Buckminster Fuller came here in 1971",  he said recounting some of the early approaches to interactive art experiments. Fuller was an engineer, designer, inventor and systems theorist. He invented the architecture of the geodesic dome. 

A book is due out in November which Ernest Edmonds has edited with Linda Candy: Interacting: art, research and the creative practitioner, to be published by Libri. In it, contributors will consider the many forms of interaction involved in the arts and in creative processes.

"I look forward to seeing the gallery playing its part in innovation and risk-taking as part of the artistic process, " Prof. Edmonds said. 

More information is available from the Interact Gallery web site.

GoGreen Week and IOCT

Online totaliser day view for GoGreen week

Well...inspite of our major contribution to the new Greenview App,  the University GoGreen week ( http://gogreenweek.dmu.ac.uk/) passed unevenly, with IOCT down in the energy league tables because of its relatively small size-where any small discrepancy in use was magnified disproportionately-hence the turning off of a few items on standby leading to a 28% saving for the day. Hence this tweet!

"@greenviewdmu Greenview

Also huge congratulations to @ioct_dmu who, after a visit by dmu energy team, reduced consumption by 28%!! @ahugill #dmugogreen"

The Vice Chancellor writes as follows:

Staff and students cut electricity use by 12.3 per cent in one week.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at DMU for doing their bit to make Go Green Week such a success.

The final figure shows we managed to reduce our electricity consumption by 12.3 per cent across the campus, which was a huge saving of 30,871kWh – all in the space of seven days.

To put it into context, the energy saved would be enough to power nine homes for a year, or toast more than a million slices of bread! We also saved more than 16 tonnes of carbon dioxide!

It was a fantastic effort which shows the big savings that can be achieved by following a few simple steps to make sure computers, lighting and other electrical equipment are switched off when we are not using them.

I don’t think any institution of our size has ever attempted such a campaign and it reflects the importance DMU puts on environmental issues and sustainability.

It was also a fitting tribute to our 14 Japanese students from Tohoku University, who were visiting De Montfort University (DMU) for a week’s holiday as they continued to rebuild their lives following the earthquake and tsunami in March this year.

When I invited them to stay at DMU I wanted to do something to show our solidarity with the Japanese victims of the earthquake. Reducing electricity consumption seemed a simple but effective thing to do and help us remember how they are  having to cope with drastically cutting energy use after major power plants were destroyed.

We have learned a lot from Go Green Week – but please remember our drive to save energy does not stop here.

We all have a part to play in reducing electricity consumption and cutting carbon emissions on campus.

There are lots of opportunities to do this, including taking part in the Green Impact project which is a competition between departments and teams to see who can be the greenest. For more information on Green Impact please contact me  kletten@dmu.ac.uk

For more information about the green initiatives happening at DMU please visit www.dmu.ac.uk/sustainability

Thank you again - and let’s keep saving energy.

Professor Dominic Shellard

Vice-Chancellor of DMU

The Future of Locative Media

Mark Tuters at ISEA 2011in Istanbul spoke of the spectrum of media art practice in the mobile arena as ranging from the personal and local to the relational and transposable. He acknowledged the fetishisation of the local, but held open the medium’s potential for challenging the exploitative effects of globalisation on hidden labour by tracking all product components. Site-specific thus becomes ‘tracing the elsewhere”. 

For me this data as power proposition still fell within the realm radical individualism and so was still inside the framework of the neo-liberal project. Mark Shephard on the same panel spoke of ubiquitous conditions and the new possibilities for new media détournment 45 years after the Situationists. He suggested artists should abandon the locative as the dominant frame and add on the concepts of time and identity to enlarge the artistic possibilities of the medium. Ludic Being might be the new mode for Situationist media. The visual examples he juxtaposed were parcours runners in a Russian estate (as modern examples of détourment) with a clip from Cliff Oakley’s dystopian film The Catalogue where consumer profiling and surveillance meet in grim harmony. I think what we could postulate is rather that there are two domains-the “digital tame” of social media, online consumer culture and even radical digital arts and the “wild” of critical conditions in the world where poverty and disempowerment have yet to find a political voice in pervasive digital art.

I believe both speakers are still working within the paradigm that existed before the demise of the neo-liberal economic project and that collective and focused action through pervasive media art , which has some idea of where it would like to move the dominant ideas, is an altogether more difficult and painful proposition, but one where Mark Shephard’s extension of the frame could be the most readily applied and move beyond individual détournment to something more coherent in terms of collective ideas and commitment.

Greenview Website Launched

Greenview Research Group

The Greenview Research Group is based at De Montfort University in the Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development closely linked to the IOCT. It was formed as a result of three research projects funded by JISC’s Greening ICT programme. The common factor between all three projects is a desire to tackle the problem of environmental sustainability through increased visualization of the impacts of our individual and collective actions, notably our increasing energy use and consumption of goods and services.

The site is intended to be both a repository for our JISC projects and documentation as well as a resource for those interested in the issues of sustainability. Alongside details of our JISC projects it profiles other relevant projects and people based in the IESD and IOCT at De Montfort University.

Slides from Evaluating Impact: NLab, Amplified Leicester, and creative innovation via social media

Thanks to all who attended this seminar on 8th June 2011. The slides are available below and the video will be uploaded later.











Evaluating Impact: NLab, Amplified Leicester, and creative innovation via social media

View more presentations from De Montfort University

Visit the 2011 Annual IOCT Masters Student Showcase - 12&13 May

The IOCT Masters in Creative Technologies is a unique creative technologies programme. The course has been carefully designed to support you in developing and strengthening your individual creative technologies practice within the context of the increasingly multi/inter/trans disciplinary environments and collaborative digital world. You'll be part of a diverse and stimulating creative community, based around the purpose-built Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University. This groundbreaking cross-discipline approach pioneered by the IOCT has been described by Jerry Fishenden, National Technology Officer of Microsoft UK, as "a potential blueprint for the next generation of R&D" commenting, "This commitment to bringing together disciplines in new and exciting ways will help develop the UK's reputation as a leader in the creative industries." 

The Masters programme will bring together eScience, the Digital Arts and Design and Humanities in a way that will cross traditional disciplines and boundaries, encouraging innovation and developing new modes of collaboration in eScience and digital arts research. The course is broad in range and flexible in structure and is designed to appeal to applicants who wish to study at higher degree level and is equally suitable for those wishing to take Masters as a qualification in itself as well as those thinking of moving on to doctoral research.

Event Registration Online for Institute of Creative Technologies Masters Showcase 12-13 May 2011

New App from Cuttlefish

 The Article below is reproduced from the Huffington Post Blog. It is related to the on-going relationship between Cuttlefish Multimedia and the IOCT who have been working in parallel on the Empedia Platform as part of an sKTP:

In art and myth, the journey is usually a heroic quest, dripping with metaphor. But what if a journey involves, instead of a highly-sought destination and revelation, simply bouncing between ports in the most banal way possible, like on the cross-channel ferry between Dover and Calais?
For artist Simon Faithfull, the anti-heroic banality of this crossing made it a perfect launching ground for his Limbo project (commissioned by the Film and Video Umbrella), which transmits and geo-locates, in real time, digital drawings made by Faithfull via a custom-made iPhone app. For a full six days (May 14th through 19th), Faithfull stayed on the ferry for an unorthodox artist residency orchestrated by artconnexion, a French art organization, going back and forth in this "window between states" while he created -- and instantly broadcast -- drawings on his iPhone. (They can be viewed not only via the iPhone app, but by following the project on Facebook or Twitter. ) Drawings of the water, fellow passengers, passing ships, luggage, signs, shorelines, and docks were all posted in real time via the app, along with precise latitude and longitude. The ubiquitous nature of smartphone use is such that Faithfull was able to carry out this residency in perfect anonymity, looking like any other passenger passing the time checking e-mails or text messaging.
As a teaching artist who splits his time between London and Berlin, and thus spends a considerable amount of time in airports, Faithfull is all too familiar with those never-thrilling netherworlds between states; this experience has been part of the inspiration for Limbo, the premise of which is to turn that negative into a positive with a mobile studio that broadcasts to the world.
Faithfull has been making electronic device drawings for over 10 years -- in 2004 he traveled to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey on an Arts Council fellowship, where he transmitted via email drawings made on a Palm Pilot -- so in addition to broadcasting new drawings as they are completed, the Limbo app presents a full geo-located catalogue of over 500 observational sketches that Faithfull has made throughout the world over the years. The app provides a world map view, allowing the user to find drawings near their current location or anyplace they select.
The bespoke Limbo app created for Faithfull by Jude Venn of Cuttlefish is customized not only in terms of the user experience, but on the level of the drawing program. Unlike older devices, the new smartphone drawing programs tend to render anti-aliased lines -- creating a smooth non-pixelated stroke; but Faithfull wanted to keep the raw pixel quality of his early Palm Pilot work, so his drawing program allows for a more low-tech, jagged line. "I'm not interested in having the program interpret and try to correct my strokes," he says, "It's a jagged line but it's my jagged line."
Faithfull describes Limbo, which carries the subtitle "an expanding atlas of subjectivity," as an open ended project; he will continue indefinitely to create and transmit drawings wherever he goes, "mapping my subjective take on the world."
About that subjectivity: Faithfull is interested in the power of day-to-day observations, which, when translated into memories become a highly personalized reality, "a sort of parallel world." Limbo, likewise, begins with observational, subjective sketches which, once they are posted online or broadcast to iPhones, become a powerful memory world that eventually seems more real than its subjects. So real are these drawings that Faithfull occasionally sees the real world in a strange new light. He notes how odd it seems to go back to a place he's drawn: "It jumps out and seems bizarre that it actually exists...It seems the world is copying me instead of me copying the world."
For more on the Limbo project, as well as Simon Faithfull's other projects, visit http://limbo.simonfaithfull.org. To follow on your iPhone, Limbo app is available on the iTunes app store.

Images Reproduced courtesy of Simon Faithfull.

SEMINAR Evaluating Impact: NLab, Amplified Leicester, and creative innovation via social media 4pm 8th June, IOCT Lab

I'm pleased to announce this forthcoming seminar by Dr Souvik Mukherjee, Impact Research Fellow, Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University

Evaluating Impact: NLab, Amplified Leicester, and creative innovation via social media
Wednesday 8th June 2011, 4pm at the Institute of Creative Technologies De Montfort University, Leicester, UK . Coffee and refreshments. All Welcome

Since 2005, DMU has initiated a series of projects which share a common focus of exploring social media as a means of stimulating creative innovation in business, non-profit, and community life in and around Leicester. They include NLab and CreativeCoffee Club (funded by HEIF, the Higher Education Innovation Fund) and Amplified Leicester (funded by NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). Professor Sue Thomas has devised and directed these activities across the Faculty of Humanities and the Institute of Creative Technologies.

Emergence has been a dominant feature of all the projects and, despite being driven by different agendas, each has informed the shaping of the others. An important element has been the creation and evolution of spaces, both physical and intellectual, which support:

• the application of academic research to real-life problems
• the connection of cutting-edge research into social media innovation with local creative businesses
• the creation of a network linking De Montfort University with small businesses, non-profits, and local agencies

Dr Souvik Mukherjee has evaluated the impact of these projects both in relation to their importance for the Research Excellence Framework and with regard to indications of future developments building on current achievements. In the process, he has also gleaned valuable insights into the REF Impact agenda which will be of interest to colleagues in a wide range of disciplines.

Dr Mukherjee is a Research fellow in the Department of Media, Film and Journalism in the Faculty of Humanities. He is currently involved in analysing the impact of social media projects on communities, especially in relation to business innovation and transliteracy. Having completed his PhD on storytelling in New Media, especially focusing on videogame narratives, Souvik has published and presented papers on a range of related topics. Besides New Media, he also takes a keen interest in e-learning and has been involved in analysing online media and virtual learning network usage in higher education. After completing his project at DMU, Souvik intends to return home to India to develop New Media research networks there. Research blog: Reading Games and Playing Books

The Third Woman in New York

OVERVIEW

The Third Woman film-game explores the theme of pervasive global threats of bio-engineered terrorism in the 21st Century. Participants interact with the film by voting on choices based on moral and emotional perspectives embedded in the film.

An interactive Mobile Video Game using sensing (via QR codes) on phones capable of using barcode reading software. Text options are sent after scanning. Choosing one causes film materials to be sent to participants’ mobile phones and also casts a communal votes for a large screen selection. Photographing a QR barcode on a costume automatically downloads a text and when selected, a video clip presents thematic content by progressively revealing the chosen layers of a multipath contemporary film drama.

INTERACTIVE COSTUME PERFORMANCE

The Model-Performers, The Algorithmics, wear interactive costumes printed with QR-code images. They weave in algorithmic patterns across the stage, freezing in poses to trigger instructional visuals. Spilling off stage into the audience, the performers invite people to play the film-game and create new versions of the film determined by communal voting. Participants playing the game become part of The Third Woman Interactive Performance.

Models mingled with the audience to enable the scanning of QR codes on costumes. These released text options which allowed the previewing of multiple versions of the same scene on smartphones.

The coherence of the experience depended on a user successfully choosing from the texts delivered to their smartphone. There are nine options possible at each choice point. Choosing one allowed a user to review a version of a film scene on their smartphone.

The main screen counts down during the scanning process and morphs a QR code image into a film-related image and displays the texts as they are selected by the audience. The selection of a text automatically cast an audience vote for the most popular scene version to be played on a larger cinema screen in the venue. In such a way the audience constructed the choice of scenes which are shown as a completed film at the session end.


The Third Woman interactive Performance & film-game was held at Galapagos Arts venue in Dumbo Brooklyn New York on 8th May 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:


Homage to Graham Greene
Film clip "THE THIRD MAN" (Carol Reed 1949) by CANAL+IMAGE UK LTD

FILM-GAME THANKS:
Nita Tandon for the idea of “Vienna Underground”
Anna Dumitriu for the idea of “Miazma”
Eeva Kaipainen for “Virus-Art”


FILM-GAME PRODUCTION SUPPORTED BY:
Aalto University, Research group aivo AALTO, Helsinki, Finland
Aalto University, Department of Media, Medialaboratory, Helsinki, Finland
Arts Council of Finland
AVEK / The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture, Finland
Bath University Computer Science, UK
NY Art Projects LLC
Södertörn University, Department of Media Technology, Sweden
University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria


FILM-GAME PRODUCTION:
OBLOMOVIES OY in association with IOCT / FUSE MEDIA/ De Montfort University, UK © 2009

Further information:
www.thirdwoman.com
www.nyartprojects.com

Urban Digital Narratives: Athens

 

Martin Rieser will be conducting another locative media workshop in Athens in early April to test the Empedia software, developed under an sKTP with Cuttlefish Multimedia. He will also participate in a one day symposium at the Centre for Research in Athens, sponsored by the British Council and HTC

Toni Sant: Franklin Furnace

 

Toni Sant is Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough. He has also lectured about performance and new media at New York University and the University of Malta. http://www.tonisant.com

He will deliver a talk on the pioneering art of Franklin Furnace including Jenny Holzer and Laurie Anderson on wednesday 16th March at IOCT Lab on Gateway at 5.00pm

Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality

The Hybrid City workshop:
 Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality
 28 February - 4 March 2011

City intervention and Presentation of the work
 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 5 - 25 March 2011


The University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC), in
collaboration with the New Technologies Laboratory of the Faculty of
Communication and Media Studies, of the National and Kapodistrian University
of Athens, organise from the 28th until the 4th of March 2011 the workshop
"Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality" led by the British artist Professor Martin
Rieser of IOCT, De Montfort University, in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of artists, researchers and postgraduate students, as part of the action "Global
Gateway" and of the EU funded program "Civil Society Dialogue - Istanbul
2010 European Capital of Culture".

The aim of the workshop is to study the elements of the urban environment of
Athens and to form a new trail as a structure of narrative, thus enriching
the city with interactive content that reflects its contemporary
transformations. Inspired by the post¬ers and the graffiti encountered in
the city, and taking advantage of the possibilities given by mobile
communication technologies (GPS, QR codes etc) and the internet, the
workshop aims to connect the urban surroundings of Athens to opinions and
statements of its inhabitants regarding the challenges imposed by current
social, political, and financial circumstances; Anger, disobedience,
opposition, dysfunctionality. The features of the contemporary metropolis in
the midst of a period of crisis will be the main focus of the project,
posing at the same time questions about the role and mediation of technology
in urban everyday life. Can the new possibilities offered by technology
really capture the needs and the atmosphere of a city like Athens? Can
patterns and characteristics of urban life be identified when studying the
use of these communication systems?

The work that will be formed after the completion of the workshop will be
presented at the premises National Museum of Contemporary Art, on the
internet and in the center of the city (at the streets Skoufa - Navarinou -
Tzavela). From the 5th until the 25th of March the visitors of the museum
and inhabitants of Athens will be invited to follow the project's trail and
discover the different parts of the project's narration. Special QR codes
will be placed in selected locations of the city and by scanning them with a
mobile phone, access to the audiovisual material created during the workshop
will be given. Combining elements of installation art, urban intervention,
gaming and performance, "Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality" reflects
Rieser's long term practice on art and technology.

Wireless City Amsterdam

Professor Martin Rieser spoke at a Conference organized by the Mediafonds in collaboration with the Sandberg Institute at the state theatre in Amsterdam: 

Wireless Stories. New Media in Public Space
A review of the day is below. In addition he participated in a one day masterclass with 8 potential teams for the Mediafons awards (€100000 per project ) at the Sandberg institute

________________________________________________________________________


Symposium Review

By: Anja Groten

The symposium was opened by the director of the Mediafonds Hans Maarten van den Brink, followed by an introduction of the program by Annelys de Vet, director of the design department at the Sandberg Institute and moderator of the day. Annelys gave a brief insight in the current use of locative media. She spoke about physical spaces that become digital and digital spaces that are empathized more and more with the physical. As well she pointed out the current urge of the topic, which was proofed by the huge amount of visitors attending the conference (600 participants). 

The first speaker of the morning block about publicness, Michiel de Lange just finished his PHD about " Mobile Media and Playful Identities". Lange gave a rather abstract and theoretical view on "narrative" and the importance of storytelling, publicness and wireless media".

He explained the narrative relates to human identity as human life can be seen as a stage. Publicness, the physical or media space furthermore is the space for similarities, the space where we can share our stories. But publicness is also a space of differences, which provides the possibility to remain private and individual. 

With his last point wireless media as the new way of storytelling, Lange presented some actual examples, like Esther Polak's project about tracing the milk trade (milkproject.net) or the well known GPS city game Pac Manhattan. (pacmanhattan.com)

Especially Polak's project shows well how very complex and abstract content, such as the milk trade from Latvia to the Netherlands, can be translated by the use of locative media to something visual and accessible .

(www.bijt.org, themobilecity.nl)

Dick van Dijk of the Waag Society showed as second speaker how locative media can actively involve users and how it is able to change behavior in public space. 

One of the projects he showed was 7 scenes, a city game that makes the history of Amsterdam accessible by actual experience. With this hands-on project van Dijk demonstrated that apart from research and experimentation, advanced technology can actually relate to society and is able to add value to learning processes. The idea of 7 scenes is very simple. By actual walks with the historical map of Amsterdam children could understand and remember information better than only by reading or hearing about it.

(waag.org)

Helena Muskens and Quirine Racke were introduced by an expressive performance of Annelys de Vet who suddenly collapsed on the stage quite theatrically and apparently very convincing. Some people were hearable shocked and shouted the light should be turned on. Parts of the audience instead were less surprised and rather amused, since they were already introduced to Annelys' extra ordinary presentation methods.

Eventually the light went on again and the happening was dissolved by a movie about groups of people collapsing in public space as flashmob-actions.

Following Muskens and Racke showed their (less dramatical) movie Diamond Dancers, which is about invisibility in public space. 

The movie showed elderly ladies who are dancing together some kind of square dance on Dam Square in Amsterdam. Although the action of the dance was presented as a flash mob, the question was to expect why this was considered a flash mob since the action was rehearsed and staged and didn´t involve the use of social media. Unfortunately the question remained unanswered. 

Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen (lust.nl/lustlab.net), started as the first speaker of the second block of lectures which had the focus of Audience and Interaction. He gave a brief historical and anthropological tour of The Digital and showed amongst other examples the known Lust-project where they turned the city of The Hague into an airport. 

The question came up how the audience reacted towards the highly visible intervention, which I thought was quite an interesting question. "The pedestrians were more pleased than the shop-owners and elderly people were afraid a war would start", was the response with a little ironic undertone. The discussion of ethics, responsibility unfortunately did not occur.

After the Danish PHD student Tobias Ebsen gave a more than detailed insight in the institution he is operating in, the Center of Digital Urban Living (DUL) and the Media Facade Research Group of the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The works he showed all contained very big facades, which were transformed into interactive platforms for self-expressions of the pedestrians. The impact of the projects remained hidden behind rather sober explanation.

Matthijs ten Berge talked about Illuminate Outdoor Media and showed the Moodwall which was a 24 meter long interactive media wall installed in the Bijlmer, Amsterdam. 

Michael Epstein, CEO of Untravel Media (untravelmedia.com) as well as Martin Rieser, professor of digital creativity, (martinreser.com, thirdwoman.com) introduced a focus on storytelling, playfulness and gaming by using mobile technologies.

Epstein showed with three projects how crime plots and dystopian fiction can literally become real. In "A Machine to See With" the user is player and actor at the same time. Guided and followed by a voice, which could be the voice of some kind of "Big Brother melted with your therapist", the users was physically involved in a bank robbery and sometimes even met other players/actors on the same mission.

Rieser gave some insights in The Third Woman, a dynamic crime story with three alternative scripts which the user could choose from. The scripts are written in fragments of about a minute. The more fragments watched the closer a resolution of the mysterious "Third Woman".

While most of the talks were showing new media as a playing field of experimentation in a creative but very abstract way, the last talk A sense of Place by Bregtje van der Haak changed the perspective on the subject matter to a very personal and observing one.

Coming back from six month of teaching and living in Hong Kong she presented images and small videos of her observations. Those images were selected in a way they were telling not only the story of her stay, but a story of a society which functions and behaves totally different than our western society does. She spoke about people she met and their stories, about the world as their stage, about the believe in the after-life as an actual place and part of the whole, about the story of migrant workers and their networked life and about the new center of the world, China.

It seemed the previous talks created a consent as they all embraced technologies such as locative media as an exciting and new field to explore. Hence the similarity of the lectures sometimes gave the impression of repetition. 

The personal approach of the last talk instead added new perspectives and insights to the subject matter and was the perfect ending of the whole event.

Greenview Bid Success

Greenview

A £40,000 joint bid between IESD and IOCT  to JISC for energy use visualisation through mobile phones and augmented reality has been successful

Overview

Greenview aims to follow on and build on the successful DUALL project, funded by phase 1 of JISC's Greening ICT call. DUALL utilised a socio-technical solution to the design of a simple web based information-feedback tool that could report electrical consumption of ICT equipment back to users. Greenview aims to refine the ICT tool further into a more sophisticated smart phone application that connects staff and students in De Montfort to the energy consumption of their buildings.

 

Aims and objectives

Aim: To design a leading edge smart phone and web based application enabling building users to understand the energy consumption of the buildings across DMU.
Objectives:

1. To design and launch a campus wide ICT tool connecting building users to the energy consumption of buildings and the ICT infrastructure.
2. To help the extent building users impact the performance of the environment they are in.
3. To understand the potential of augmented reality tools to engage individuals in behaviour change initiatives. 
4. To engage the creative and developer community at DMU in sustainability issues

Project methodology

The project will gather the information from sub-meters across the campus which monitor half-hourly electricity, gas and water.
Software will incorporate the design of major interface components, including collaborative gaming elements, display alternatives, (adaption of map-based and Augmented reality systems for mobile platforms using GPS) using streamed data sets from intelligent metering and its required interpretive software.
Technology such as social media, augmented reality, GPS technology, and wiki or crowd-sourcing knowledge approaches to engage with the public in what we would term "hybrid " city environments.
This ability to reach out and map layers of information onto the cityscape will form the foundation for further developments to support this bid. Pilot interface tests will occur in situ with a variety of controlled groups for evaluation in set scenarios of components: display overlays, collaborative elements etc.
Finally, the tool will be launched across the campus and a rigorous analysis undertaken based on the evidence of any changes to consumption (as shown in the meter readings) and interviews.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

We anticipate that the outcomes of the project will form an institutional exemplar project that places sustainability at the core of DMU's CSR agenda, and connects into the aim of the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme to provide "improved leadership to the sector in the role that technology can play in developing effective institutional strategies."
Specifically there will be a campus wide ICT tool (using augmented reality) connecting building users to the energy consumption of buildings and the ICT infrastructure. This will be open source and available for download by other HEIs.

Project Staff

Project Manager: Dr Richard Bull IESD (DMU)

Project Team:

Professor Martin Rieser
Institute of Creative Technologies (DMU)


Dave Everitt
Institute of Creative Technologies (DMU)


Gareth Howell
Institute of Creative Technologies (DMU)


Farhan Faruk
IESD (DMU)

Adaptations and New Media Symposium

A
 Symposium
 on
 Adaptation
 for
 New 
Media

January
 25,
 2011
 Hugh
 Aston 
Building
 De
 Montfort 
University

The Department of English's Adaptation studies and the IOCT have joined forces to co-host a one day symposium on the changing nature of adaptation in relation to new media forms. The symposium brings together academics from across the UK and Europe to focus on the new problems associated with adaptation for such diverse platforms as gaming and the Web.It 
features 
papers 
ranging
 from

computer
games,
 mash‐ups, 
interactive 
narratives 
and 
interactive 
film,
 technological 
innovations,
 representations
 of 
technology 
and 
new 
media.


The
 conference 
is open 
to 
anyone 
interested 
in 
how
 the 
entertainment

industry is 
constantly
 adapting 
to 
new
 technologies.


The 
conference
 will

be 
introduced 
by 
award 
winning
 writer,
 Kate
Pullinger,
 who 
will 
talk
 on

Nothing 
New 
Here:
Books 
as
 Apps,
Enchanced
 e‐Books,
 and 
Digital

Stories’,
 relating 
her 
own
 experience 
with 
the
‘enhanced 
abridged 
audio

ebook’ 
adaptation
 of 
her
 2009
 novel,
 The
 Mistress
 of 
Nothing.

The

conference 
will
 close 
with 
a
 screening of
 Martin
Rieser’s
 The Third

Woman interactive film for mobiles based on The Third Man

We 
intend
 to 
publish 
the 
three
 best 
papers 
in 
a 
special
 edition
 of

Adaptions 
Journal
 and
 the
 remainder 
can 
be
 published 
online
 on 
a

dedicated
 website


Ernest Edmonds Talk

The Institute of Creative Technologies and the Computer Arts Society jointly hosted  a well-attended talk by Ernest Edmonds at 5pm on 19th January at the IOCT Lab at De Montfort University
 

Biography

Ernest Edmonds was born in London and studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Leicester University. He has a PhD in logic from Nottingham University, is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Charted Engineer. He is a practicing artist.

He lives and works in Sydney Australia. His art is in the constructivist tradition and he first used computers in his art practice in 1968. He first showed an interactive work with Stroud Cornock in 1970. He first showed a generative time-based computer work in London in 1985. He has exhibited throughout the world, from Moscow to LA. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is collecting his archives within the National Archive of Computer Based Art and Design.

He has over 200 refereed publications in the fields of human-computer interaction, creativity and art. Artists Bookworks (UK) has recently published his book "On New Constructs in Art". Ernest Edmonds is Professor of Computation and Creative Media at the University of Technology, Sydney where he runs a multi-disciplinary practice-based art and technology research group, the Creativity and Cognition Studios. In Sydney, he is represented by the Conny Dietzschold Gallery.

Ernest Edmonds has held the position of University Dean, has sat on many funding and conference committees and was a pioneer in the development of practice-based PhD programmes. He founded the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference series and was part of the founding team for the ACM Intelligent User Interface conference series. He has been an invited speaker in, for example, the UK, France, the USA, Australia, Japan and Malaysia.

Director Creativity and Cognition Studios, UTS

Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Transactions

Founding Editor Knowledge-Based Systems

Visiting Professor Sussex University

Visiting Research Fellow Goldsmiths College