20/04/08. i-DAT presents The Play Algorithm – A(n):= [r = 1,2,..N] (B Aga, Katina Hazelden and Mike Phillips) at HOMO LUDENS LUDENS 2008, LABoral, Gijon, Asturias, Spain. The Play Algorithm is an element of Social Operating System (S-OS) (www.s-os.org). LABoral continues its ongoing task of exploring notions of play and its concomitant interrelationship with present-day society.
8 February – 6 April. i-DAT, in collaboration with Plymouth Arts Centre, presents: ‘S-OS: a Social Operating System’ for the city of Plymouth. S-OS is a collection of creative interventions and strategic manifestations that provides a new and more meaningful ‘algorithm’ for modeling ‘Social Exchange’ and proposes a more effective ‘measure’ for ‘Quality of Life’. The S-OS project provides an Operating System for the social life of the City of Plymouth. It superimposes the notion of an ‘OnLine’ Social Operating System onto ‘RealLife’ human interactions, modeling, analyzing and making visible the social exchange within the City.
Social Operating System:
8 February – 6 April. i-DAT, in collaboration with Plymouth Arts Centre, presents: “S-OS: a Social Operating System” for the city of Plymouth. S-OS is a collection of creative interventions and strategic manifestations that provides a new and more meaningful ‘algorithm’ for modeling ‘Social Exchange’ and proposes a more effective ‘measure’ for ‘Quality of Life’. The S-OS project provides an Operating System for the social life of the City of Plymouth. It superimposes the notion of an ‘OnLine’ Social Operating System onto ‘RealLife’ human interactions, modeling, analyzing and making visible the social exchange within the City.
8 February – 6 April 2007
i-DAT, in collaboration with Plymouth Arts Centre, presents: ‘S-OS: a Social Operating System’ for the city of Plymouth. S-OS is a collection of creative interventions and strategic manifestations that provides a new and more meaningful ‘algorithm’ for modelling ‘Social Exchange’ and proposes a more effective ‘measure’ for ‘Quality of Life’.
The idea of a ‘Social Operating System’ (referencing computer Operating Systems such as Mac OSX and Windows) has emerged through the prominence of OnLine Social Networking Software such as Facebook and Myspace. These websites, the software that drives them and the online communities that thrive around them form a “platform for online living where all social activities are integrated.” Wired (2007).
The S-OS project provides an Operating System for the social life of the City of Plymouth. It superimposes the notion of an ‘OnLine’ Social Operating System onto ‘RealLife’ human interactions, modeling, analyzing and making visible the social exchange within the City.
Whilst town planners and architects model the ‘physical’ City and Highways Department’s model the ‘temporal’ ebb and flow of traffic in and around the City, S-OS will model the ‘invisible’ social exchanges of the City’s inhabitants. Plymouth Arts Centre will be converted into a ‘Central Processing Unit’ to run S-OS as a RealLife Social Operating System, generating creative interventions and strategic manifestations on, by and for the citizens of Plymouth.
i-DAT, a Centre of Expertise at the University of Plymouth, is a catalyst for creative innovation across the fields of Art, Science and Technology, facilitating regional, national and international collaborations and cultural projects. As a networked organisation and ‘cultural broker’ i-DAT’s transdisciplinary agenda fosters ‘open innovation’, Knowledge exchange and reciprocal relationships between companies, institutions, communities and individuals.
Plymouth Arts Centre and i-DAT present a series of new projects and residencies that have been developed through an ongoing collaboration that explores new systems and technologies for artistic production, dissemination and participation that challenge the traditional models of creation and consumption of art.
Plymouth Arts Centre: 38 Looe Street, Plymouth, PL4 0EB
Tel. + 44 (0) 1752 206114 / Fax. + 44 (0) 1752 206118
S-OS: Informal Music Andy Prior, Justin Robert About Informal Music ‘Informal Music’ records and mixes the acoustic environment of the City of Plymouth. Presenting the noises and traces of human communications in and around city, Informal Music mixes field recordings of social exchange (conversations, songs, whistles and rants). The resulting signals provide an acoustic residue or echo of human interaction. The processor can be modified through interaction with the S-OS: Index Application.
S-OS: Routines Routines Collective About Routines No one really knows Plymouth – and you can bet that if you asked every one of the 240,000 residents to draw a map of their city, each map would be significantly different. Each one of us gets to know Plymouth from our own particular perspective. We construct ‘mental maps’ of the city from the routes that we take to and from familiar places, such as our favourite shops, the people that we like to visit and our place of work. These routes become ‘routines’ and form patterns that reflect our understanding of the city. ‘Routines’ documents a few of the routes that people take during their day. This documentation consists of: A) GPS tracks recorded over a day and are replayed in real-time. B) Photographs of conversations or exchanges with other people that occurred at times through out the day
S-OS: Cyborgian Geographies Shaun Murray About Cyborgian Geographies Shaun Murray’s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them. Modern architecture has failed to provide architects with these now very necessary tools to create architectures that are fully in tune with the wide gamut of artificial and natural ecological conditions. For those of us interested in the architecture for the new cyberised, biomachined inhabitants of the twenty-first century Murray’s research and propositions are a beacon in a still dark landscape of the future.
S-OS: Happies Chris Saunders About Happies How happy are you? By measuring the little exchanges that take place daily you can calculate your personal ‘Happindex’. Personal Happindex’s can be collected, pooled with others and processed to measure Plymouth’s overall Happindex. The Plymouth Happindex can then be plotted to see how it performs against other more established indexes such as the FTSE, Nasdaq and Dow Jones. To generate your Happindex you will need to either download the Happies Application to your mobile by visiting www.s-os.org or visit the S-OS exhibition at Plymouth Arts Centre and transfer it to your phone using Bluetooth. Run the application and register the exchanges that happen to you. Your personal Happindex will be calculated. Select the upload feature and it will be added to help calculate the overall Happindex for Plymouth. You can also add new ‘exchanges’ to the Happies list.
S-OS: dn[T]3 Plymouth Visual Thesaurus Gianni Corino, Andrea Giacobino, Gabriele Isaia, Motor About dn[T]3 Plymouth Visual Thesaurus Plymouth dn[T]3 or Plymouth Visual Thesaurus is an interactive video installation for public spaces like galleries, squares or mall, indoor projection and ideal for huge outdoor projections, a collective digital graffiti. This project balances art, information design, linguistic psychology and social computing. Through a very simple interaction process the project means to show emerging knowledge pattern in the way we perceive our urban and social space and come out with new vision about collective way to organise knowledge on some current local and global issues. The project applies a folksonomies model, typical of Internet digital world to real world, but instead of describing and classifying digital goods people are asked to contribute to the creation of a meta-knowledge about real objects, everyday situations, emotions, concepts, everyday social life, etc. The aim is to build a semantic ecosystem, a memetic ecology of the city shown it’s social capital, through a collection of tags. The semantic e analyses words sent via SMS with an inferential engine – custom folksonomies engine – and tracks each word received as: absolute frequency, relations frequency. Interaction is free, in real-time and easy, people just need to send theirs free association words (tags) via SMS and immediately they become part of the project visual thesaurus. The SMS methodology of communication has been chosen because of the special relationship we have with the mobile phone and with words through it: sometimes intimate, symbolic, or emotionally involving. The word (tag in our case) flows from small to big, from private to public, from personal to collective.
S-OS: ten’segrity Dan Bater, Mike Phillips. About ten’segrity The tenosegrity Application allows visitors to the S-OS exhibition to submit camera phone portraits to the tenosegrity database via Bluetooth. Once submitted their portrait can be interconnected within the tenosegrity collective, each connection can be weighted using a simple star rating to indicate levels of familiarity and separation. Subsequent interaction with the application reveals the social tensions that bind a community through the dis/con-tinuous push/pull forces of tension and compression, or attraction and repulsion. The integrity of the tensions captured within the tenosegrity application provides a numerical value of social synergy and degrees of separation. tenosegrity outputs the value of the synergetic forces within these volatile social relationships.
S-OS: Index B Aga, Mike Phillips, Justin Roberts. About Index The S-OS Algorithm: A(n):= [r = 1,2,…..N], where A(n) is probably the value of Social Exchange or the Quality of Life, and [r = 1,2,…..N] are the numerous calculations that happen within a city. These calculations constitute an invisible fabric woven through the everyday processes of social exchange (a smile, a swap, a sneer) and can be understood as a Social Operating System when made manifest through the use of digital technologies. Each of the S-OS applications exhibited in the S-OS exhibition generates a value. The S-OS Index takes the various value feeds from across the exhibition space (as represented by ‘r’) and allows visitors to the exhibition to prioritise one input over the other. This last ambiguous human interaction provides the final value of A(n)! The calculation is complete.
i-DAT has developed a programme of digital media workshops for Children and young people through an ongoing collaboration with Creative Partnerships, AimHigher and numerous schools and community organisations. i-DAT is currently engaged with the delivery of Widening Participation workshops (over 1000 participants over the last 2 years) for AimHigher and several research and networking projects for Creative Partnerships (Infinite Infants, aimed art reception level play environments, and Projecting Plymouth online resource for young peoples creative production projects). Many of the viral technology projects, such as the v-mOb workshops are also targeted at engaging young people in creative production through a range of new and domestic technologies.
“It’s about creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to
reality – worlds in which we can extend, amplify, and enrich our own
capacities to think, feel, and act.”
(Laurel B, 1993, Computers as Theatre Brenda Laurel, Addison-Wesley)
The current series of workshops actively involves young people in playful engagement with the production and publication of their own mobile music videos. The workshop takes the aspirations of Brenda Laurel’s ‘imaginary worlds’ one stage further by providing participants with a mechanism to share their desires across a community of peers. Workshop participants will be able to create dynamic micro-masterpieces by capturing, producing and distributing mini-movies.
The workshop explores the creative potential of the worlds most ubiquitous communications system: the Internet. As well as being a resource of near infinite information, it is also a mechanism for communicating ideas and distributing them to a potentially massive audience.
Having said this, the workshop is essentially about having fun with computers, probably the most simple and effective way of learning about these complex technologies.
The main part of the session will take place in the University of Plymouths Digital Media Studios. Here the music videos will be created on, and for mobile phones. The workshop is completed by a session will then take place in the Immersive Vision Theatre. Participants will get a chance to experience its cutting edge surround sound system accompanied by immersive generative visualisations, whilst being given an understanding of the origins of fulldome environments – from domed architectures, planetariums, multi-projector film environments, flight simulation and virtual reality.
Driving the workshops forward is a bunch of dedicated student ambassadors from the BA/BSc Digital Art & Technology course. Drawn from across all years of the programme the team bring a range of contemporary experiences to the workshop participants.
NB: Workshop participants are encouraged to bring their mobile phones (especially Bluetooth enabled camera phones) as well as a CD or MP3 of a music track they like to the sessions.
The SwanQuake User Manual is published by Liquid Press/ i-DAT for igloo (http://www.igloo.org.uk/): ISBN Number: 978-1-84102-172-0 .
SwanQuake is a surreal semi-abstract inhabited world, home to a series of potential encounters. These may be theatrical and dreamlike, sometimes uncanny perhaps even frightening, at times quotidian and familiar. It’s these interactions that inspire curiosity, wonder and the desire to continue looking and sensing. However, despite the title ‘mashup’ of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here…
More information on the SwanQuake website: www.SwanQuake.com
VJ’ing on buildings. (14/11/2007) Mix live visuals on the front of a building through using the audio you generate on your mobile phone. i-DAT presents: Noogy 2.0 a large scale interactive installation at the front of the Portland Square building at the University of Plymouth.
Noogy 2.0, which goes live during Motion Plymouth Festival on the 14th of November 2007, is the latest upgrade to last years Noogy that made headline news.
Noogy 2.0 will combine a rich mix of the physical and virtual by incorporating ‘smart’ buildings and mobile phone technologies into a dynamic building size interactive VJ system.
– VJ’ing on buildings. (14/11/2007) Mix live visuals on the front of a building through using the audio you generate on your mobile phone. i-DAT is presenting Noogy 2.0 a large scale interactive installation at the front of the Portland Square building at the University of Plymouth. Noogy 2.0, which goes live during Motion Plymouth Festival on the 14th of November 2007, is the latest upgrade to last years Noogy that made headline news. Noogy 2.0 will combine a rich mix of the physical and virtual by incorporating ‘smart’ buildings and mobile phone technologies into a dynamic building size interactive VJ system. How too ‘Noo – J’: Just dial 07511 253710 and Noo – J away. The sound you produce down the phone will generate the visuals on the fly across an area of 50m2 consisting of 9600 LEDs. Standard rates apply (the rate you pay might vary dependent on network provider)http://www.noogy.org/ (rather poor phone movie..) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqWS9m0osh0
(11/12/2006) 11 December 2006.
thesongrooms.org launch concert at The Unicorn Theatre, 147 Tooley Road, London SE1. Featuring children from Richard House Hospice, London, Island Hospice, Zimbabwe and a choir from St Gabriel’s Primary School, London SW1. With support from professional musicians including DJ, MK, Ricky Rankin and Theo Gordon.
i-DAT has produced thesongrooms.org for Rosetta Life. thesongrooms.org is a new web 2.0 online music composition, recording and archiving site that enables marginalised young people with terminal illness to make music and upload it to a website where others can share the pool of sounds and add to it. Musical workshops lead by top professional musicians are taking place at children’s hospices in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK. Leading musicians including Sandi Thom, Karine Polwart and Ricky Rankin have agreed to lend their skills to making the top tracks as successful as possible. By July 2008, thesongrooms.org aims to reach more than 6,000 children and young people in hospices and hospitals, as well as involving 12,000 online users from a wider public audience including primary and secondary schools.
AWARDED FURTHER FUNDING. i-DAT’s Infinite Infants project has been awarded further funding from Creative Partnerships to extend the research until 2008.
Infinite Infants is a transdisciplinary practice based research project exploring the potential for networked, sustainable ICT resources for children. The research is an inquiry into the potential for situated and collaborative learning via telematic spaces, by exploiting the qualities that digital technology affords, such as non-linearity, tele-presence and interactivity. The project is currently working with three Primary schools in the Plymouth area, and more recently has incorporated a SEN school located in Cornwall. If you would like to know more about the Infinite Infant’s project, have suggestions for participation or would like to get involved please contact: katina.hazelden@plymouth.ac.uk
Jago Eliot (24 March 1966 – 15 April 2006).
We say goodbye to Jago, a life force and vibrant student and researcher at i-DAT, the pleasure was all ours. After joining the BSc MediaLab Arts programme Jago went on to excel at the MA/MSc Digital Futures programme before continuing with i-DAT to achieve the Artist Fellowship in Creative Technology by Hewlett-Packard in Bristol. Thorough out this time we plotted to cultivate St Germans as a nexus of international digital magic and innovation. We fondly remember his pneumatic Telematic performance, the lurking in telephone booths and the electrifying live tele-dominatrix experience, biting down on the rubber mouth guards with our feet in buckets of water. Experiences only to be surpassed by his telematic homage to Vito Acconci’s Seedbed and the live webcast of his son, Albie, from his mother, Bianca’s womb. Thank you for the support with Interstices, and the Planetary Collegium sessions held at Port Eliot. But the pièce de resistance would surely be the upside-down rainbow at Jago’s funeral.
Update: It’s a year to the day after Jago’s departure and I am wondering back to my hotel room at some conference in Boston. Staggering through the lobby I hear the faint sounds of “What a Wonderful World”, beautifully sung at Jago’s funeral by his brother Louis, swooning from the bar. There, like a choir of angels from beyond, there, surrounding the piano and singing their hearts out, a troupe of drag queens, for certain a telematic message… “I’m thinking of you!”
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