Iglab @ Hamilton House
by helen on 28/7/2009
This month we are at Hamilton House Stokes Croft Meet us in their new canteen.
We start at 7:30 as usual and will prob still be playing at 10:30.Come and Play.
sign up here.
This month we are at Hamilton House Stokes Croft Meet us in their new canteen.
We start at 7:30 as usual and will prob still be playing at 10:30.Come and Play.
sign up here.
Iglymics is the first in a series of events put on by the lovely people at Simon Games (that includes me) to promote the Interesting Games Festival which is returning to the streets of Bristol in September 2009. Read my report at the Team Rubber Blog and see more of Liz' images on this flickr stream.
Yesterday I attended the Web Developer Conference, on behalf of Team Rubber. This event organised for students of the Web Design degree course at the University of the West England was at the The Watershed Media Centre in Bristol. The attendees where split roughly 50/50 between students and professionals from and around Bristol. To read my full posting go to The Team Rubber Blog.
All hail the Ego Bentley Laptop, now I’m no techy genius, but I am a lover of nice, pretty things
(and a reference to my name always helps), of which this is a perfect example.
Outside it’s lush, inside however it’s pretty average with an unnamed AMD 64 chipset,
2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive with a 12.1″ display. At $20k i wont be getting it in the near future, but it is
something that would be perfect for tapping away on in a Starbucks with a skinny mocha light frappachino.
via: Laptop Mag
and Slippery Brick
A bacon related post from the Team Rubber Blog. 'Baconnaise' anyone??
Cake post.
Many Happy Returns and all that………This time for Andy Parkhouse at Team Rubber
A two tier maderia sponge cake with home made sugar paste icing.
Well, what a weekend! I spent Friday chasing people over the city dressed in what can only be described as an uhhemm 'eclectic' combination of clothing and with my sports shoes letting me down – I just about live to tell the tale, check out my post over at the Team Rubber Blog and you can see the weekend in all its glory in 30 seconds too -
igfest in 90 secs from iglab on Vimeo.
AntiVJ’s Joanie and Nico are residents at The Pervasive Media Studio where George and I have our Graduate Residency. They work with projections and a week or so ago they performed in Bruxelles, for Nuit Blanche Bruxelles. Here is a little video which totally took our breath away, watch out for the building bricks.
Weve had a good week with for development, after going along to Dorkbot this week we spoke with Tarim
regarding wet bots (or spiders, crawlers, and many more) and how to physically collect the data we want
from blogs. Since then George has been developed scripts to trawl, find, collect and display instances of
i wish from a google blog search
.. Here we have a single wish that is called and displayed on a page.
Here we have all the results drawn from one search page and a lovely title to give it meaning and also a
link that we have put there for testing purposes, where you can see where we drawing the sentences from.
We want to use the potential of the internet as a library of knowledge, opinion and culture and re-represent
it in a public space, taking the private musings of people and presenting them out of context, thus changing
the intended meaning and (re)creating narrative. We hope that an amalgamation of the the two ideas mentioned
in the last blog will suitable approach this theme.
The results from the drawing of information from blogs is like the realisim that was caught on camera in early
fly-on-the-wall documentaries, I say this because both are knowing participents allowing themselves to be
exposed however, (most) people wont know of our search for instances of I wish and therefore wont change as a
result of (more) exposure.
Its been a busy week for the two of us as we settle in to the Studio and get back in to the swing of working together
(granted, it has only been a matter of months since we left uni, but that is a lot of down time. . .) We have been
reworking our initial ideas and now have two projects which we will be talking about developing for the duration of our
residency, with a view to using the Encounters Festival as a platform to display them.
These ideas are works in progress..be kind.
The Wishing Well will allow visitors to send and receive wish messages through text message, the most recent additions
to the Well will rise to the top, users will be able to mix up the contents by stirring the top of the well, allowing
other wishes to float to the surface. Please click on the image below for more detail.
Diagram of Wishing Well Project
Branching Narratives will allow users to contribute small segments of stories to our narrative tree.
Each of these segments will be represented as a leaf on the tree. Wed aim to combine entries from a
variety of sources such as, internet searches, text messages in addition to a touch screen interface that
George has been developing, it will be positioned nearby the projection of the growing tree.
George and I thought of the Seeds of these two ideas on a walk home last week, we had spent all evening in the
studio wracking our brains as to what sort of project we wanted to make. Although we both produced After We Come and Go
our individual interests had not yet, in our mutual agreement, combined fully to create a piece that is representative
of our collaborative creative practice. Take this picture for example;
first prototype
What we have here is a screen shot of an application that George made in Flash this week to
test linking and branching from text inputs (click the image to enlarge). Firstly, creating an
app like this would have been inconceivable this time last year, in addition, we would not have
been as aware of the importance of prototyping (or indeed our proposed idea). The project proposals
and application that we have written this week show a development in our practice, away from that
preliminary period of learning to a stage where we can apply what we gained from After We Come And Go
technically and focus on communication, functionality and usability.
One of the major events for us this week was experiencing Mscapes and repositioning our opinions of them. Always Someone Somewhere is a Mscape walk by Dunacn Speakman which approaches the theme of memory, we were drawn to its fragmented narrative which was triggered by the marking of locations on the ipac. This approach to locative media really made us engage with the piece and was a far cry from our preconceived ideas of Mscapes being a flash game on a smaller scale (yes, sorry, we did really think that). In comparison to Dunacans piece the SouthWest Sound application was not as multi layered or rich in terms of narrative, but nevertheless a fun experience, especially when the sounds from the virtual speakers overlapped and worked as taster as to which direction to take.
I have spent most of the day looking at collaborative story creation and stumbled across Addventures (thanks Wikipedia).
An Addventure is a search based drama and an interactive fiction and often the narrative is communicated through a text
only command line interface, I lost a lot of my time this afternoon immersed in Anchorhead, a horror game created by by
Michael S. Gentry (1998), where by the protagonist, the wife of a university professor is exploring her new town (there
is more to it but I found it confusing at first and by the time I had worked it out I felt like I should do some work
I
have sworn to revisit it tonight!)
As a fan of the matrix, I was instantly drawn to its green and black command line interface and once I had got to
grips with the imperative sentences (walk south or open window) it was easily navigated. As mentioned earlier I
had to play with it a lot before I fully mastered what I had to do and as a child of the digital revolution, the
absence of images to illustrate my surroundings confused me at first as I skipped through the instructions (tut tut).
However once I had realised the importance of the descriptive passages I was able to navigate myself around the mentally
envisaged town of Anchorhead.
When using this game, I was reminded of Geoff Rymans hypertext novel 253, beacuse I felt that although my path through
the game would be determinded by my own decisions I was inevitably being pointed in the direction of an ending, an ending
which would become more apparent as I progressed through the game.
Possible applications of this style of game and user experience, could be the creation of a front end management system
for a story like this, which would enable users to be authors and to have a say in the progression of the narrative.
However, this idea made me question the validility of open ended immersive complexity in the formation of narative
you cannot rely on users inputting text that will make sence (as we found with After We Come and Go) and I am reticent
to apply censorship to projects I create. A way of approaching this would be to allow users the right to be an
administrator of sorts and perhaps have a voting system in place to allow the deletion of input.
Games such as Anchorhead can be coded in C and other such languages, there are object orientated programmes such as TADS,
a freeware programming system that allows you to programme games like these.
Today is the first day of our three month residency at The Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. During our time here we
will develop one major project that we will see through to a finished piece. Alongside this we endeavor to work on
several smaller projects that will prototype ideas to explore tactile interfaces, wearable computing and location
based media.
Our main project will utilise user-generated content, a theme that has been present throughout our past collaborative
work. Our time at the studio will begin with a research period whereby we will develop our learning brief by defining
questions that we will approach with our work. The brief for this project is yet to be confirmed, however, initial
thoughts include projections that utilise motion graphics and text data, most likely created in either Flash or VVVV.
We plan to negotiate with Encounters Film Festival to create a piece that will engage with the digital platform
and approach themes such as user generated content and immersive technology. Current ideas for harvesting data
include; scanning blogs using recursively created keywords and using SMS and Bluetooth data.
Helen and George are recent graduates from the University of West of England where they completed a Media Practice
degree both specialising in interactive media.
Georges interests are wide and varied although they generally revolve around making beautiful things with technology.
Recent activities include, writing VJing software in Pure Data, hand building a multitouch surface, working with user
generated content using Action Script, PHP and mySQL, getting tangled up with his Arduino cables, creating fractal
based motion graphics using VVVV, and recently collaborating with London based company Musion to create holographic
installations.
In his spare time George likes to party hard, watch cartoons, ride his bike, cook, play with his sound system,
travel and read.
Helen is one of the most passionate and energetic people that you will ever meet. Coupled with her people and
organisational skills she makes one hell of a producer. Over the last three years Helen has produced numerous
works across film and new media platforms, as well as supporting the studio development team at Team Rubber.
She is deeply immersed within the Bristol media industry, supporting events such as Encounters Film Festival,
Venn Festival, Cine Formation, and QuWack(e). She has also been a regular assistant at the Bristol Media events
for the last two years, where hundreds of the cities creatives come together for networking and socialising.
When Helen is relaxing she is usually spending time at home baking cakes, getting her head around new media
theory, playing Sim City, looking at the constructs of language, or more often than not, reinstalling windows.