A couple of slide decks for talks I gave recently: last Wednesday a guest lecture for the Interactive Arts class on Responsive Environments as an art form.
Then the previous Wednesday, a presentation to UTS staff on Second Life, in the context of other available metaverses and with some focus on its uses in education.
My slides tend to be all pictures – there’s enough text with me talking over them without writing it all out again so you can read what I’m saying. It does mean though that they don’t stand alone when I stick ‘em on the web. You’ll just have to look at the pretty examples 
Archive for the ‘interactive art’ Category
Slide decks – Second Life in Context / Responsive Environments for INteractive Arts
Thursday, September 4th, 2008Augment yerself
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008I’m on the AIMIA Augmented Reality panel tonight. Will be chatting about ARToolkit and the AR work we do at CCS and UTS – Ian Gwilt’s work in particular, as well as my own mixed-reality research and Magic Hopscotch.
Magic Hopscotch
Monday, July 7th, 2008We’re live! Just in time for the start of the school holidays, Magic Hopscotch is up and running and open to the public at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. The timing is important because this is a prototype of an interactive artwork designed for children. Doreen Ee, my collaborating technologist, put in a magnificent effort to reconfigure the code for the floor pads that control the piece, after we were compelled to rewire them last week.Shan Weiley, my partner and constant collaborator, has started participant observations and we are already getting some wonderful insights. More later, because i’m writing on my phone and more than a few words is painful The launch is on thursday the 10th of July from 2-4 pm, email me if you’d like an invitation. Heartfelt thanks also to Deborah Turnbull our erstwhile beta space curator and Matthew Connell at the phm.
Update: now tracking this project at Sky Blue.
Permeating the Magic Circle
Monday, June 23rd, 2008The inimitable Doug Easterly addressed CCS today on Permeating the Magic Circle – exploring “the physical and conceptual boundaries that demarcate work and real-life from play and game activity”. He’s well known for his artistic practice with SWAMP addressing these very issues. Doug’s research looks into play, drawing on Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Caillois‘ critiques of it, and of course Czikszentmihalyi on Flow. On that last Doug has formed a beautifully clear exposition of the standard critique of games: that they draw users into a state of Flow not for the high-minded goals of learning or self-actualisation, but instead for the baser purpose of merely keeping them in the game for its own sake, or for the sake of “coin drop” (in the parlance of the video game arcade industry). By drawing out a distinction between flow and device mesmerism, Doug shows that it’s not games, their holding power, or flow itself that is evil – but rather the purposes to which they are put.
The depth of his research is compelling him to dive down into evolutionary psychology, just to find a place to stand… bringing in references from Leda Cosmides [wp], Jared Diamond [wp] and Stephen Pinker [wp]. A PhD is certainly a great excuse to do some absorbing reading.
After the talk we got into an engrossing discussion of hermetically sealed virtual realities (silly) vs. mixed reality (marvellous), mind/body dualism (outmoded) vs. holism (somewhat more sensible) and absolute transhumanism (fun but overblown) vs. whatever is actually going on (much more complicated, and even more fun). Doug saw an early sketch of the mixed-reality piece I’m currently installing down at the Powerhouse Museum, so I’m hoping to get the computer vision part of it working properly before he heads back to NZ at the end of the week. More about that in another blog post
generative music
Thursday, November 15th, 2007an animated description of mr. Maps
but you really need the whole song to understand what I mean…
Literature Review: Design for Creative Collaboration in Virtual Environments
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007I’m finally happy enough with my first literature review to call it done – so, here it is. I’m new to this kind of writing and to the field, so I’ll leave the comments thread open on this post; any feedback is good.
Updating – I’ve extended my review with a section on future research, incorporating some wider reading from areas of study that I think have been insufficiently applied to the design of place in CVEs.
Repeatability
Monday, May 21st, 2007If interactive art is still experimental, then we sometimes need to step back and remember how the experimental method goes. It’s not enough to constantly seek novelty. We also have to ensure that our experiments can be repeated, and see whether we get the same results.
Since interactivity involves humans, we won’t. That’s no reason not to try. The differences in response may tell us something about how humans have changed in the intervening period. Our own understanding may have changed, and the results of the experiments may therefore tell us new things.
Also, at the very least we should be reminded of what we’ve learned, so that we can build on it. I so often see interactive art that tries to do too much, or fails to understand what will happen to the work once people start to play with it, explore it, ignore the instructions, break it and subvert it.
I have a concrete suggestion here. Let’s recreate some of the waypoints in our history. I’d like to see Myron Krueger’s Videoplace up and running in the Powerhouse Museum, and Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Hole in Space installed in oh, Sydney and Perth, or Newtown and Harajuku. Ah, the classics!
