Author: henriettaknight

Powderham Castle & Higher Uppacott – VR & Fulldome.

henriettaknight Projects
Powderham Castle & Higher Uppacott – VR & Fulldome.

Developed by: Musaab Garghouti using Unreal Engine 5 testing Nanite and Lumin.

Outputs: Dome production and Interactive VR experience.

 

Process:

Used 3d scans from the Artec Ray and Leo – Raw scans produced over 60 million polygons. The raw scans with no optimisation were used for the dome production – Such high poly models are usually hard to work with as they require high-end hardware and are time-consuming to manipulate. However, Nanite enabled rapid manipulation which significantly helped the process of building the environment.

Developed for the GOALD (Generating Older Active Lives Digitally) Project:

The GOALD project uses intergenerational groups to examine how to design and deliver digital resources to provide and engage older people in structured activity programmes with the aim of improving their health and wellbeing. The project examined how to design and deliver digital resources to provide and engage older people in structured activity programmes and improve health and wellbeing.

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/centre-for-health-technology/goald

 

 

 

 

A Manifesto for Creative Producing

henriettaknight News
A Manifesto for Creative Producing

Christiana Kazakou has been accepted into Ars Electronica’s 6-week global programme titled “A Manifesto for Creative Producing,” which brings together creative producers from various disciplines and backgrounds.

This interdisciplinary collaboration emerges as a critical linchpin in an increasingly interconnected world, with the results on display at this year’s festival edition.

A common commitment to collaborative process, relationship building, and creative problem solving can be seen across industries and sectors. The creative producer creates spaces for open-ended creativity, multiple perspectives, and unexpected connections that will help us imagine different realities, and forge different paths that allows us to take responsibility for a more equitable digital future.

During an exciting 6-week programme, emerging and established Creative Producers will have a space to gather and develop; to critically reflect on our role and its impact on the New Digital Deal; and to co-author a manifesto for Creative Producing.

The program will engage the participants in an open, playful, and collaborative process to further define practice and capture a global perspective.

Hedy Hurban Santander Award

henriettaknight News
Hedy Hurban Santander Award

Hedy Hurban has recently been awarded a Santander grant as part of her research project to collaborate with a performer in Pittsburgh, U.S.A. at Robert Morris University.

The grant will enable her to travel to Pittsburgh to carry out experiments using prototypes she has built that use sensor systems to capture gestures and movements to which sounds will be attributed and output in the form of an interactive dance performance.

The research involves exploring rich cultural traditions such as Spanish Flamenco and the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey by augmenting performer’s costumes with technology to create a unique immersive sound experience for both the performer and the audience.

Donald Rodney at Celine

henriettaknight News
Donald Rodney at Celine
Celine 2021
493 Victoria Road
Glasgow
G42 8RL
11 Jun — 27 Jun 2021
Tue – Sun, 12pm – 6pm

Artist-run gallery Celine plays host to the first ever ‘solo’ presentation in Scotland of the late Donald Rodney. A leading member of the BLK Art Group formed in the early 1980s, Rodney made work characterised by pioneering engagements with new technologies and the appropriation of mass media and pop-cultural imagery in order to examine and critique racialised identity and its socio-political consequences.

Rodney was an inspiring figure during his life and his prescient work has transcended his untimely death. It maintains great relevance to this day as new generations of artists engage with the issues raised by Rodney and his contemporaries to inhabit the vital discursive field that he worked to establish in the landscape of British contemporary art. The exhibition is supplemented by a screening of a video portrait of Rodney by Trevor Mathison and Edward George and an in-conversation event with artists Keith Piper and Alberta Whittle, alongside a screening of The Genome Chronicles by John Akomfrah.

Curated by Ian Sergeant

Supported by Glasgow International

Counter Optimizing the networked social

henriettaknight News
Counter Optimizing the networked social

Friday 07/05/2021:

Helen Pritchard is chairing the panel “Counter Optimizing the networked social” at 9.15pm with artist Ben Grosser, VISA researcher Mohsen Minaei and MIT scholar Alex Berke.

At the 3rd obfuscation workshop organised by, TU Delf, Cornell Tech and funded by the ERC. https://www.obfuscationworkshop.org/about2021/

 

 

The 3rd Workshop on obfuscation

In the Spring of 2020, as we were in full force preparing the 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation, COVID-19 was recognized by the World Health Organization as a pandemic. In waves that hit all parts of the world with varying degrees of severity, the pandemic continues to rip across most of the globe. With lockdowns, people’s and governments’ dependency on digital technologies have been intensified. Platforms of all kinds have become the site of small pleasures of a socially distanced life as statistics (numbers of deaths, new infections, R-rates) have become an essential part of people’s daily orientation. Facemasks have entered the space of facial covers, a space that was contentious long before the trajectories of droplets became common knowledge. Governments, pressed by the urgency of the moment, turned to tech companies with their already rolled out global tracking infrastructures for scaling up public health services like contact tracing. In the process, false dichotomies were presented as the only real choices, options between lockdown or surveillance, economy or the social.

Obfuscation strategies represent creative ways to evade surveillance, protect privacy, improve security; as well as protest, contest, resist and sabotage technology. Obfuscation methods render data more ambiguous, difficult to exploit and interpret, less useful. They rely on the addition of gibberish, meaningless data; they pollute, add noise, randomize. Obfuscation invokes an intuitive form of protection: it distorts that which is visible to render it less (or in)visible. It hides the trees among the forest.

 

CalArts-Now|Swerve – featuring Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting

henriettaknight News
CalArts-Now|Swerve – featuring Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting

The CalArts Center for Integrated Media’s (CIM) online curatorial initiative, archive, and virtual studio viralnet-v4.net launches its 2021 edition with three new projects: a podcast series titled Now|Swerve — featuring Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting on the project:  Figurations of Timely Extraction, an examination of the dynamic crossings of time and matter, geological time, and other multitime-spaces that pierce what they call “the technocolonial apparatus.”

https://blog.calarts.edu/2021/03/02/center-for-integrated-media-presents-three-new-projects/

World on a Wire: Pete Jiadong Qiang Play-through

henriettaknight News
World on a Wire: Pete Jiadong Qiang Play-through

https://www.newmuseum.org/calendar/view/1710/world-on-a-wire-pete-jiadong-qiang-playthrough

Please RSVP for this online program here.

Artist Pete Jiadong Qiang will join Michael Connor, artistic director of New Museum affiliate Rhizome, for a screening / play-through and conversation exploring Qiang’s recent interactive works. The event will revolve around the artist’s concept of the “HyperBody,” a transformative, fluid, group-determined identity composed of community material from gaming, comics, anime, and other fandoms, crossing over between physical and virtual space. Qiang explores the concept of the HyperBody in videogames and installations that incorporate practices drawn from videogame and online fan culture, including modding (making user-determined enhancements), crossover (bridging characters from various fictional words), and shipping (desiring romantic connection between fictional characters).

This event is presented in conjunction with “World on a Wire,” the first exhibition in a new partnership between Hyundai Motor Company and Rhizome of the New Museum to showcase leading digital art globally. Qiang’s work Dungeon: Maximalism HyperBody is currently on view at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, and online at https://worldonawire.net.

Pete Jiadong Qiang is currently a PhD student in arts and computational technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was trained as an architect (RIBA Part 2) in Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Sponsors

“World on a Wire” is a special project of Hyundai Motor Company and Rhizome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pete Jiadong Qiang is an Associate Lecturer at i-DAT.org

Queer Motto API

henriettaknight News
Queer Motto API

On Thursday (28/01/21) evening, Dr. Helen V. Pritchard’s new browser based art service, Queer Motto API, made in collaboration with Winnie Soon (Digital Design, Aarhus University) will be launched. The work is commissioned by of one of Europe’s most significant festivals for art and digital culture – transmediale, Berlin. https://transmediale.de/. Previous iterations of the work were shown at ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 and Exhibition Research Lab.

https://gitlab.com/siusoon/queer-motto-api

Figurations of Timely Extraction

henriettaknight News
Figurations of Timely Extraction

PRITCHARD, Helen; ROCHA, Jara; SNELTING, Femke. Figurations of Timely Extraction. Media Theory, [S.l.], v. 4, n. 2, p. 159-188, dec. 2020. ISSN 2557-826X. Available at: <http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/123>.

Vol 4 No 2 (2020): Mediating Presents | Media Theory (mediatheoryjournal.org)

http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/issue/view/7

The contributions to the special issue see time not as a neutral backdrop to, but as actively constituted by and constitutive of, (digital) media, and develop broad understandings of both media and the temporality of the present/present temporalities. The special issue develops theoretically informed and engaged understandings of digital media presents, drawing from and expanding a range of theoretical traditions, including feminist, queer and anti-racist theory, science and technology studies, media theory, philosophy and cultural theory.

Pritchard,  Rocha  and Snelting build on a mixed methodology combining ethnography with practice-based experimentations  with  game  engines and  4D  earth  modelling  software to  untangle the  complex  worldings  that  emerge  parallel  to,  yet  irreducible  to, the  logics  of contemporary    extractivist    capitalism, and    outline    affirmative    modes    for understanding timely extraction differently through complexity and alliance.

Sea Snails and Jellyfish Game

henriettaknight Other

Getting up close with sea snails and jellyfish
Our changing climate will affect species of all shapes and sizes. But understanding what that means in the first days and weeks of a creature’s life has always been a real challenge. Now scientists are using robotics and time-lapse cameras to examine the embryos of fish and shrimp, snails and jellyfish, and see how climate change is affecting their size, shape, movement and heart rate. Senior Research Fellow Dr Oliver Tills will say why this level of knowledge is more important than ever and how his technology could help species survive in the future.
FUTURES2020 is funded by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions; delivered collaboratively by the University of Bath, Bath Spa University, University of Bristol, University of Exeter and the University of Plymouth.