I missed the first session as I was trying very hard to pay my hospital bills from my previous time in Melbourne. It got to the point where I was explaining on the phone, look there is a crazy American who wants to give you money for treatment. Why haven't I gotten a bill? They tried explaining the concept of socialized medicine to me, but it hasn't really sunk in. I am still in shock at a hospital with no billing department, with no way to actually take my money for treatment.
Anyway, click for more my notes from the rest of the morning here...
Hanna Lovise Skartveit
Visualised system dynamics models: use simulation software based on system dynamics modeling to create interactive media learning tools
Explore how video can be incorporated into simulation models/games
In planning, there are basic assumptions and computer modeling can help clarify these assumptions.
System dynamics is a methodology for analyzing and understsing complex systems over time.
It is being used in business, development studies, ecogological systems, cultural heritage.
This can be used to plan sustainable development. You can see these interconnections. For example, you can simulate what happens when two people share the same hot water tank--who gets how much under what conditions.
You can get these simulation effects with editing. The Kurliscue (check) effect shows how to get context: he filmed an actor with a neutral expression and contrasted this with a coffin and a child--audiences imparted different emotions to the same face.
This simulation model can generate stories: characters can have a common goal (eg shower temperature) and can react with each other (eg playing with the water controls).
We can usel this to simulate world herigate (Eg. Quito, World Heritage city) Interviewed locals about the city and possible future scenarios.
===bsession 2
Jeremy Yuille: Real time: sonic performance in game RMIT
Working on Life Signs, which creates an artificial world populated using a game engine and procedural techniques.Uses a generative procedural system: nothing exists until you start the game. Worked with Troy Innocent to communicater using graphis (see iconigraphia.org check!)
You fly around in black space, see geometric permutations called "play primitives". Each of these has a DNA and sound properties--you can latch on and play it. You weigh how many different outcomes can I get vs how much computing power do I have--how many frames a second will play here? We found that we could not run any sound performance synthesis software (e.g maxmsp, cps, pd--real time sound producing software kits). We wanted to use sound in a game in a continuous manner. Thinking about discrete and continuous--the way sound relates in the world.
Sound cannot be held or related outside of time. this makes it difficult to map to visual streams of information. You can stop a video and see an image, but you cannot stop a sound. Look at ways of producing sound--unfortunately, we can't do this yet--we can't bring continous transitions between sounds. Can we combine the sounds of a violin and a tuba at will--creating a tulin? Need to make sound cards with proper synthesis--real time techniques for producing sound synthesis for interactive applications.
We need sound people to jump up and down making lots of noise to show that we can't make sound the way we need to on a computer.
?Jim Andrew's NIO
Laetitia Wilson: INteractivity or interpassivity A question of agency in digital play University of western australia
interactivity as a way to influence a work, make a choice, and affect change. Yet interactivity seems useless as a theoretical concept: oversimplificaiton to put the user on an equal par with technology. So let's use interpassivity as an alternative term, which is a mode of relating that involves the consensual transferring of emotion or meaning to an image or object. (e.g., Laetitia gets nervous in front of an audience, and would create an interpassive structure so she could give the lecture without actually being in the room.)
The avator is a surrogate self, but is mallable and changeable. Agency provides a level of choice and control. As in EverQuest, there is an integration of self and avatar. you can have many avatars in many spaces.
What role does a character play in a digital realm? Interpassivity can be done not only to achieve something but to prevent something from happening--a deferral of responsibility onto the symbolic.
An avatar does not have a life on its own, which highlights the gap between the user and the virtual world. There are many facets to digital relationships.
Proxy by Robert ??(check) Game have to answer questions to create a psychological profile. You win by maintaining a sane psychological state. There is an action space to browse the net with your agent and collect information. You can manipulate boxes of information and shoot down information if you don't like it. (hmmmmmm.. I Want this game. to be able to just shoot down the invading information seems so wonderful!)
Caleb Stuart University of Canberra:The object of performance: aural performitivity and live laptop sound
Laptop performances are performed on stage. in Permaaudio, there is no stage--it is a small stage.
I'm going to show you a video clip about sound, but it won't have any sound whatsoever.Showed a performance of live laptop music--people listened in silence on hard floors in a darkened room and had no problem with it. Showed David Hanes with a laptop (mucking about with the synthesizer)
What is this audience thinking? Why are they able to sit and enjoy the sound when most say that laptop performances are boring?
The argument against laptop performances is that laptop performers are not doing anything up there (the performer checks email, does tax returns while the laptop is playing...) This argument comes from a distrust of what is going on in stage--the audience can't see what is going on or where the music is coming from. (in one part of the video, the laptop performer has forgotten to turn on his computer. So while the music is playing, he is looking to plug his computer in...) The audience don't know where to look, who is performing, what the performer is doing at the computer.
Julian Knowles projected his laptop on the screen to make transparent that he is working hard and fast with arrows clicking. This may have been a mistake and destroyed the performance, as you watch the visuals and connect between what you hear and what you see on the screen.
At permaaudio, there are no visuals, no projections.
Moving from a visual object and spectatcle into an aural realm. We are moving content to be sound as object. Sounds are objects that you grab in your ears. The sounds spin around the room, coming out of the walls, ricocheting off the floors. This is a psycho-acoustic drone environment. Audience picks up on the sound as objects, sit with eyes closed, not interested in the computer operator, letting the sound object into their ears, concentrating hard for 20 - 40 minutes. The more they concentrate, the more performative the sound gets. It screams and yells and invades your body.
DISCUSSION:
Disagree because people are interested in how the sound is produced and performed. Where is the edge in the performance? (one edge is how the PA is going to cope).
Thursday session 3
Lonne Malmborg role of art and design in IT education in the digital bauhaus Malmo University
This is an educaitonal center which offers bachelors, masters, and phd in design, art, technololgy and communication. It offers an interaction technolgoy program (now an interaction design program--as interaction design is now a more recognized term). The challenge is to combine the physical and digital and to work with an art and design perspective when desining innovative interacitve concelts. This uses audmented environments and ubiquitous computing.
How do we get design perspectives into software? Winograd (1996) "Bringing desgin to software" coined the term interactive design, shows a convergence between conventional design fields, socially oriented computer studies, architecture, art, sociiology, and media studies. It emphasizes innovative thinking when designing digital systems and focuses on the affective dimensions of human response. This adapts principles and techniques from filmakers, musicians, visual artists and other designers.
"Desining for the full range of human expeinece may well be the theme for the future of design."
What can software bring to design and to art? Change the issue around. by augmenting issues in our environment.
Showed her student projects where the task was to work with peripheral awareness, rather than direct signals) This uses other sensess than the keyboard screen and traditional input/output devi ce:
Silver Fox --When smells of cofffee reached a certain level in the cafeteria, the silver fox had coffee steam coming out of its nose
Shimadzu-- shows the battel between new conomy and most basic nature. Compares hits to a website with growth in a yeast culture.
speed--interactive movie--students cut a movie into short pieces to show how the computer changes the way you access material
k-tree--a web based application about a sculpture by Jan Cardell, submit compositions to the tree/statue and tell what time it should be played. (ktreek3mah.se)
a taste for bitters--a series of portable, personal devices. For example, a pair of shoes set out a high pitch tone if you stand on both feet at once.
Is information technology in context a technical, social, or artistic field of study.
Instead of asking how art and design can contribute to sfotware design, ask how computation technology can contribute to design and art by helping us to reflect and augmenting object and our environments
Mike Leggettt University of Technology Sydney Path scapes interface design and visual indexing
Writing is a technology of the industry. Pathscapes is a work that explores ways that knowledge systems can be presented visually rather than textually. Based on the realization that CHI relies heavily on metaphores from mechanical age (windows, files, trashcans) These can be contrasted with game icons and maps which use images. How can we develop these discourses to stimulate users imagination and memory. Tools like macintosh suite ILife show more reliance on visuals than on words.
We use maps and images at first, then use recorded landmarks (e.g the church, flowershop, corner) See Ozmemoria and preretoricians (check?)
Showed a demo of his prototype where the system is driven by gesture. raise cursor to the top of the machine to go forward.at cetain points, can see images around the edge, which are cue points for launching a narrative. These narratives explore aspects of voice a--the different perspectives that can deliver knowledge. (At first, people didn;t know where they were in the narrative and wanted stories to have a specific source.) so words are reinstated as a shadow of text. Option remains not to step into the shadow of words but to remain in a visual index.
See website of exeter Cathedral (printed in paper) -600 years ago, used visual computations to show the biblical stories, here it is in a visual database).
Pathscapes is a tool, rather than a fixed artists statement. The eventual idea is that people could drag and drop their asociations with visual memory to store ideas, narrative, images.
Text is the written word, whereas narrative would be a spoken piece.
Davd Cameron, John Carroll Charles Sturt University To the spice islands: An interactive performance project
School based project to engage with historic events and dramatic inventions, similar to Bill and TEd's excellent adventure. Spice Island uses weblogs, video, real life performances. The project explores connectivity, interactivy and dramagitc forms in a digital framework. This is built aorund the Dutch Spice trade in the 16th century and centers around the shipwreck of Batavia in 1629 (Murder, cannabilism, madness--treasure island meets deliverance). this involved Dutch school children aged 10 - 11 and university students, and matched levels of dramatic engagement with online materials.
As children's knowledge of the subject increased, added layers of digital material--progressed from email to weblogs.
Interactive Process Drama--combines interactive and process drama to allow both participant and spectiator to be present at the same time, which:
erases differences between participant and spectator
permits holding two worlds in mind at the same time.
Think about the immersive asthetic (see Jane McGonigal).
Boal "Rainbow of Desire" 1995 uses term "Metaxis" dramatic frame rather than a rhetorical frame.
tools of engagement:
website (diegetic--involved in the storyline itself)
in role presentations
digital stills
weblogs
quick time clips
digital video shown in classroom
real life performance which used online conventions such as log on log off to bring drama students in and out of character.
website shows the shipping company, and provides a fictional frame. Content was researched by the students, includes historical information. This is an immersive environment using low end technology. this shows an in role interrogatin of the material to solve the problem/mystery. www.csu.edu.au/newmedia/batavia
Posted by at May 22, 2003 01:53 PM