New Media

A conversation with Dave Green of NTK at the EVNT workshop earlier this week at SPACE Media Lab started like this....

Me : So you have this conference coming up in July. Would it be appropriate for artists to come along to talk to programmers?

Dave: [---giggles-->
[---giggles more-->

The giggling kept going throughout our conversation. Perhaps it was because I kept making statements and asking questions that generalised programmers into a herd- comments about how they think, behave, communicate. It may also be that I falsely assumed that everyone has the same question as me perpetually ringing in their heads.

- Why don't artists in London work more closely with the programming community?-

Here within lies the record of the life of the Pixel Balloon, it's progress, hopes, and desires. So far the pixel balloon has gone through at least 3 embodiments

stage 1: embryotic stage (or whence the idea was first conceived and has the added association with the metaphor of an egg)

stage 2: perambulator stage (or when baby acquires two parents and is given a proper name)

stage 3: primary stage (or when baby becomes nuisance but is pushed into beauty pagent dispite many shortcomings)

pictures to come.

chapter the first.
Encounter with Max/MSP.

I came to Ravensbourne with limited skills, or indeed even the names of many of the software programmes I would encounter. One of them being the pervious mentioned Max/MSP. I do not try to shield my ignorance in anyway by stating that only 1 other student was acquainted with this software.

"In use worldwide for over fifteen years by performers, composers, artists, teachers, and students, Max/MSP is the way to make your computer do things that reflect your individual ideas and dreams." This is taken verbatim from the company website. (http://www.cycling74.com)

Victoria Garcia Zapatero Soto's installation addresses interactive multimedia processes to help the learning experience of autistic children. Visitors said "It's a really good idea, we enjoyed playing". A lady who works with autism said she thought it would work well with the target age of children the project aims at. Another lady said she thought it was cool! Our editor talked privately to Victoria and she said she's looking for investors and sponsors who can help her to form a prototype, and later a product which is affordable for families and institutions.

Allan Au's interactive installation caused mass disturbance and traffic jams in the corridors of the college. Moving image and animation BA students went beserk in front of the distorting images, amazed at the wonders of technology. Our special section editor caught Allan smiling in the corner, and thinking already about the next version of the Mirror Life Cinema.

Three dimensional projection surface as a body. A senso tracks the distance when vistors approach the sculpture, and accelerates or decreses the speed of the movie.

This may read a bit like a small child's reflections after having been to the fair or circus. I can tell you about lots of bright colours and new sounds / noises and nice people offering me things but there may not be much more to it...

Cybersonica 05 was made up of a number of quite distinct elements. There was the first two days at The Dana Centre and then another existence as The Art at Encompass at The Old Truman Brewery. There were symposia, performances, workshops and exhibits running throughout.

On the first day I caught parts of a session about Interactive Audiovisual Experiments. I chatted to Chris O'Shea afterwards because I found the ideas behind his work challenged things that bother me about lots of 'interactive' work that I think has a very narrow idea of what interaction involves. Particularly he talked about how important open source principles / ideas are to him.

Golan Levin likes to talk. His presentation lasted for nearly three hours, covering a historical overview of 'audiovisuality and interactivity' as well as a comprehensive presentation of his work since 1998.

I was thoroughly distracted from what could have been a gruelling experience by the dynamism and sensuality of the ideas and the work presented. << from Audio Visual Environment Suites

This work, done at MIT and Carnegie Mellon Universities in the USA, falls somewhere between software development, research into human interaction and art. He identifies his main focus as developing new interface metaphors where he explores "dynamic, audiovisual substance, gesturally created and manipulated".

Levin reminds us of the recent merging of Adobe and Macromedia and tells us of the importance for him of programming his own software to generate his interfaces. "If you use the same software as everyone else you find yourself dealing with the affordances of these softwares" and the danger of this is that your work starts to look much the same as the same as others using the software.

This may read a bit like a small child's reflections after having been to the fair or circus. I can tell you about lots of bright colours and new sounds / noises and nice people offering me things but there may not be much more to it...

Cybersonica 05 was made up of a number of quite distinct elements. There was the first two days at The Dana Centre and then another existence as The Art at Encompass at The Old Truman Brewery. There were symposia, performances, workshops, exhibits and things without names running throughout.

On the first day I caught parts of a session about Interactive Audiovisual Experiments. I chatted to Chris O'Shea afterwards because I found the ideas behind his work challenged things that bother me about lots of 'interactive' work that I think has a very narrow idea of what interaction involves. Particularly he talked about how important open source principles / ideas are to him.