Art
14 posts tagged.
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Art + communication 2004
Notes from Art + Communication 2004, organised by RIXC in Riga, Latvia, the final event in the Trans-cultural Mapping workshop series. Even Westvang and I presented our Timeland project. A trip to Limbazi for the opening of the Piens (‘milk’) project, milk routes through the EU, mapped through the personal stories of the people along them.
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ISEA 2004 conference
A short 2004 note from ISEA, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, held that year on a Silja Line ferry between Helsinki, Stockholm, Mariehamn and Tallinn. Polarfront kept event notes through the run, and Grandtextauto covered the installations and artwork.
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Time that land forgot
A 2004 project with Even Westvang from the Iceland inside-and-out workshop, a prototype for contextualising photographs by time and geography, designed to shift the balance of representation away from pure location and towards image and time.
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Photography and mapping from Afar
My contribution to ‘Afar’, an exhibition in Copenhagen where 25 international artists produced work to brief. For three months I recorded every walk, drive, train journey and flight I took while photographing daily life. Nine boards of images paired with GPS tracks drawn as simple lines show the transition from London to Oslo across a winter and spring.
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Mobile outskirts workshop
A bus full of GPS receivers, cameras and impromptu artworks drove fifteen hours from Trondheim up to the islands of Lofoten. The workshop wiki and media archive are being kept updated via fairly limited wireless coverage. A short dispatch from the Mobile Outskirts workshop in Lofoten, June 2004, part of the Trans-cultural Mapping workshop series . A painless and creative bus drive up the Norwegian coast.
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Outside In
Outside In was a two-day forum at Röda Sten in Gothenburg on 14–15 June 2004, about new voices, media and practices in the design and use of public space. The venue is extraordinary: below a suspension bridge, surrounded by huge concrete creations. Really windy outside, calm inside the lecture space. These are my notes from the talks, written on the day. Occasional asides in italics are things I’ve added looking back. I’ve left the note form mostly as-is. (I missed the first workshop of the day.) Putting memories in spaces. Spaces aren’t the same after having been disrupted. After ‘Reclaim the Streets’ or a Circle Line party you can’t see the space in the same way. Distinction between public and private. What is it? Public space doesn’t exist anymore. Ken Livingstone’s new City Hall is half-private, half-public, private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside. Do we need institutions in order to do events? Is that the only way to do them legally? What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism but the fear of looking like a pillock. Self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Example of the scooter, became a kids’ toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
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Notcon 04
Two things from Notcon 04 in London worth writing up: Spotcodes, very simple circular barcodes readable with a Series 60 camera phone, storing 42 bits of data and usable for positional tracking; and Reverend Rat’s 10-watt Bluetooth receiver, a hundred times more powerful than a Bluetooth dongle.
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Spatial annotation projects
A reference list I compiled in June 2004 during early PhD research into locative media and spatial annotation. It includes Murmure in Vancouver’s Chinatown, Yellow Arrow stickers, Grafedia’s hyperlinked handwritten text, Urban Tapestries and dozens of others. The list is preserved as a snapshot of a field at a particular moment.
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Transcultural mapping workshops
A brief announcement from May 2004. Two workshops on the calendar this summer. The Transcultural Mapping workshop (‘Mobile outskirts: cultural mapping of northern geographical outposts’), in Lofoten in June, looking at GPS, photography and field-recording in remote Norwegian coastal places. The Loop City workshop at the Outside In symposium (‘Emerging expressions, interventions and participation in public space’) in Gothenburg shortly after, on walking and mapping urban public space with Bill Hillier of Space Syntax. Update: new workshop website .
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Creative Crossings workshop
A triangular research network, practitioners from Britain, Canada and Finland, gathered in London to work on participatory and creative applications for mobile, locative and cross-platform media. Organised by m-cult, the Banff Centre and Arts Council England in April 2004.
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Travelogue
A 2004 note on treating digital photography as a narrative medium, sequences of photos that suggest movement, place, stories and journeys. With plans to tag each image with a GPS coordinate so the sequence carries place as well as time.
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Photography books
This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design. Photography has always run parallel to my design practice, and this list is the shelf I was building then: theory, practice, and the monographs I was learning from. Berger’s two books, Ways of Seeing and Another Way of Telling (the latter with Jean Mohr), are the essential reading. Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye is the clearest book on what photography became when it went digital. Hockney’s Cameraworks is the photographer’s-eye-view on composite image-making. The rest are monographs I was returning to: Graham, Gursky, Shulman on Modernism. The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy. John Berger, Jean Mohr. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com John Berger. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com William J. Mitchell. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Fred Ritchin. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Paul Graham, Andrew Wilson. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Marie Luise Syring et al. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Pierluigi Serraino, Julius Shulman. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com David Hockney. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Fabian Monheim. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
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Narrative books
This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design. This one is on narrative: interactive storytelling, theatre as a model for interaction, story structure, and the sequential-art tradition of comics. Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Brenda Laurel’s Computers As Theatre are the two foundational texts that frame interaction design as a narrative practice. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is the story-structure canon. And Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, along with Eisner’s books, are among the most useful things an interaction designer can read, more practical than most HCI books for thinking about pacing, framing, and the relationship between words and images. The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy. Janet H Murray. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Mark Stephen Meadows. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Brenda Laurel. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Joseph Campbell. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Jeff Wirth. amazon.com by Roger C. Schank, Gary Saul Morson. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Scott McCloud. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com Will Eisner. amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
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Honeysphere collaborative storytelling platform
A platform for collaborative storytelling on interactive television, audience members contributing to an unfolding narrative through a shared interface. A small team at Central Saint Martins researched the state of the field: existing web-based projects in community, gaming, multi-user space, and interactive narrative. The output was a research archive and a set of design patterns for collaborative television software. A 1999 student project at Central Saint Martins, London, by a team of six including me and Jack Schulze . Interactive television, in 1999, meant set-top boxes with return channels, BSkyB’s OpenTV platform, and WebTV, the technical ground was genuinely new. The project won the London Institute Award for Innovation. We presented the findings publicly at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2000.