Author: patconley

Far Away So Close

patconley Projects , , , ,
Far Away So Close

Remote Sensing: Ecoid Workshop.

The Ecoid Workshop will be delivered by Luis Girao with support from Mike Phillips, Chris Saunders, Pete Carss, Musaab Garghouti.

“Idly, he wondered what these geometric forms really represented – he knew that only a few seconds earlier they had constituted an immediately familiar part of his everyday existence – but however he rearranged them spatially in his mind, or sought their associations, they still remained a random assembly of geometric forms.”

(Ballard, JG)

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big screeni-500 Projection

i-DAT is developing a range of ‘Operating Systems’ which dynamically manifest data as experience and extend human perception. Arch-OS [www.arch-os.com], an ‘Operating System’ for contemporary architecture (‘software for buildings’) was the first i-DAT ‘OS’, developed to manifest the life of a building (currently being installed as the i-500 (www.i-500.org) in Perth Western Australia. More recently S-OS was released (Social Operating System) and follow up with Eco-OS, an ecological operating system.

Eco-OS explores ecologies. Eco-OS further develops the sensor model embedded in the Arch-OS system through the manufacture and distribution of networked environmental sensor devices. Intended as an enhancement of the Arch-OS system Eco-OS provides a new networked architecture for internal and external environments. Networked and location aware data gathered from within an environment can be transmitted within the system or to the Eco-OS server for processing.

Eco-OS.

Eco-OS collects data from an environment through the network of ecoids and provides the public, artists, engineers and scientists with a real time model of the environment. Eco-OS provides a range of networked environmental sensors (ecoids) for rural, urban, work and domestic environments. They extend the concept developed through the Arch-OS and i-500 projects by implementing specific sensors that transmit data to the Operating Systems Core Database. Eco-OS also enables the transmission of data back to the Eco-OS ecoids to support interaction with the environment (such as light shows and the transmission of audio/music in response to the network activity).

Descriptor:

Eco-OS: Eco-OS consists of: the Core database, which collects, stores and makes available data and the sensors – ecoids.

Eco-OS Core Database: is an extension of the established Arch-OS Core database. The Eco-OS Core collects the data transmitted to it by the ecoids. The data is parsed up and published through a range of flexible tools (flash, Max MSP, Processing, Java, etc), feeds (xml, rss) and web 2.0 streams, such as Twitter and Facebook, which allow artists, engineers and scientists to develop visualisations, sonifications (music) and interactive projects. Eco-OS can operate in passive mode, simply collecting data from the environment or interactive mode, feeding back recursively through the environment.

Ecoids: are sensor devices (small pods) that can be distributed through an environment (work place, domestic, urban or rural). The sensors allow environmental data to be collected from the immediate vicinity. The sensors can be connected together through the formation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WNS) that enable the coverage of an extensive territory (several kilometres). Each ecoid has a unique id and its location within a network can be triangulated giving its exact location. Consequently locative content can be tailored to a specific geographical area.

Ecoids consist of programmable (Processing, Java, etc) embedded technologies (Arduino, etc) and network technologies (Zigbee/Xbee, GPRS and Bluetooth). Designed to be attached to objects (architecture, trees, rocks, etc), free form (water-based, balloons, free standing) or as mobile sensors. They can be powered or draw power from the environment (solar).

Ecoids can also be used to produce content be receiving instructions from Eco-OS. Distributed performance can then be orchestrated across a large territory through light displays or acoustic renditions.

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Timetable:

SMB302 is free from 11.00 to 17.00 on Friday 22nd, smb302 is free again on Monday 25th from 09.00 until 13.00 and SMB 303A if free on Tuesday from 09.00 until 17.00 hrs.

Friday 22/01/2010:

11.00 – 17.00: Introduction and Hardware Workshop. Smeaton 302.

Saturday 23/01/2010:

Team design work.

Monday 25/01/2010:

09.00-13.00 Further Hardware development. Smeaton 302

09.00-17.00 Software tools and packaging design. Software Babbage 213/221

Tuesday 26/01/2010:

Software and visualisation

Smeaton302 is available all day.

Wednesday: 27/01/2010

10-12. Final production and cleaning up. Babbage213

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Teams:

Teams will consist of 4-5 people. A mix of hardware, software, visualisation and product design skills is encouraged. Ideally PhD, Masters, MPT and DAT students should constitute these teams.

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Hardware:

Construction: The Smeaton labs will support the electronics development.

Kits consist of: Xbee Pro, Sensors (Humidity Sensor, Light Sensor, Temperature Sensor, Stretch sensor), Batteries, and connectors.

Please bring your laptops to allow better connectivity with the systems (University ports/restrictions etc can cause problems).

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Software/plugins:

Xbee interface, php, Processing, Java, Flesh, VVVV, Quartz Composer, www.nodebox.net

http://www.arch-os.com/downloads.html

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Production Phases:

Construction: electronics workshop developing the xbee hardware systems.

Interface: connecting the xbee to a PC.

Network: Mesh network of xbee ecoids.

Broadcast: xml feeds from the xbee network to the internet.

Visualisation: generatibg visualisations from the xbee feed.

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Tools:

Mobile: rss feeds, java apps, pachube for iPhone.

Dome: 3D Studio max, Blender, Unity 3D, Quartz Composer (and audio).

GreenScreen. Greenscreen templates.

Web: Pachube.com, etc…

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Collaborators:

These individuals and organisations will be building on this Far Away So Close workshop. There are of opportunities for involvement in these collaborations if you would like to taker this work further.

1: Dr Chris Speed: Edinburgh College of Art: http://ubiquityjournal.net/

Check out the PHYLOGENY WORKSHOP. SAT 20 – SUN 21 FEB 2010

2: Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World. www.ccanw.co.uk

3: North Devon Biosphere Reserve. http://www.northdevonbiosphere.org.uk/

4: James Moore. University College Falmouth. http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/

5: Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nagoya, Japan. And festival: http://setouchi-artfest.jp/

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Dr David McConville

patconley Advisory Network
Dr David McConville

Dr David McConville is Co-Chair of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, a nonprofit organization facilitating convergences across design, art, science, and technology to identify and cultivate whole systems strategies for addressing complex global challenges. McConville is a media artist who designs immersive visualization environments that provide new perspectives on humanity’s home in the cosmos. He is also co-founder of the Elumenati design and engineering firm and creative director of the Worldviews Network, a collaboration of artists, scientists, and educators using storytelling and visualization to facilitate dialogues about community resilience in science centers across the United States.

Professor Chris Speed

patconley Advisory Network
Professor Chris Speed

Professor Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has a BA in Alternative Practice (Brighton Polytechnic, 1992), a Masters in Design (Goldsmiths 1999), and a PhD from Plymouth University (‘A Social Dimension to Digital Architectural Practice’, 2007).
Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how network technology can engage with the fields of art, design and social experience through a variety of international digital art exhibitions, funded research projects, books journals and conferences. At present Chris is working on funded projects that engage with the flow of food across cities, an internet of cars, turning printers into clocks and a persistent argument that chickens are actually robots. Chris is a co-organiser and compére for the Edinburgh www.ThisHappened.org events and is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity.

Chris was PI for the TOTeM project investigating social memory within the ‘Internet of Things’ funded by the Digital Economy (£1.4m) and the related Research in the Wild grant: Internet of Second Hand Things; PI for the JISC funded iPhone app Walking Through Time that overlays contemporary Google maps with historical maps; PI for Community Web2.0: creative control through hacking, a £40K feasibility study that explores parallels between virtual society (Internet) and actual society (communities); Co-I to the Sixth Sense Transport RCUK funded Energy project (£900k) which explores the implications for the next generation of mobile computing for dynamic personalised travel planning. He is also PI for the Travel Behaviours network funded by the RCUK Energy theme (£140k) and Co-I to both the EPSRC Creating trust through digital traceability project (Hull) and Learning Energy Systems project (Edinburgh).

Professor Paul Thomas

patconley Advisory Network
Professor Paul Thomas

Professor Paul Thomas is an associate professor and program director of the fine arts program at UNSW Art and Design. Thomas initiated and is the co-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference 2010,2012 and 2014. In 2000 Paul instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2002, 2004.

Thomas is a pioneer of transdisciplinary practice. His art work takes not only inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there. Thomas’s current practice is in collaboration with Associate Professor Andrea Morello, Quantum Nanosystems, UNSW, looking at the probability of the electrons superposition in the development of quantum computing. Thomas’s previous projects investigated silver, the mirror and quantum theories of light and parallel universes in the work Multiverse. Thomas’s nanoart works ‘Nanoessence’ explored the space between life and death at a nano level and Midas’ was researching what is transferred when skin touched gold. The Midas and Nanoessence installations were in collaboration with SymbioticA, Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia and the Nanochemistry Research Institute, (NRI) Curtin University of Technology.
Thomas has exhibited nationally and Internationally and his current publications are Nanoart; The immateriality of art and Relive Media Art Histories, co-edited with Sean Cubitt.

Professor Mike Phillips

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Supervisor
Professor Mike Phillips

Mike Phillips is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at University of Plymouth, the Director of Research at i-DAT.org and a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium.

His R&D orbits a portfolio of projects that explore the ubiquity of data ‘harvested’ from an instrumentalised world and its potential as a material for revealing things that lie outside our normal frames of reference – things so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum. For more information see the i-DAT web site at: http://www.i-dat.org.

Phillips is an active member of an international transdisciplinary community that engages with immersive, interactive and performative technologies. He manages the Fulldome Immersive Vision Theatre (www.i-dat.org/ivt/), a transdisciplinary instrument for manifesting (im)material and imaginary worlds and is a founding partner of FullDome UK (http://www.fulldome.org.uk/).

He has secured a portfolio of national and international research funding, including: Arts Council England (GFA’s and National Portfolio Organisation status), NESTA, AHRC, EPSRC, British Council, EU (European Culture Programme, ESF, EU FP7), as well as significant industrial support and sponsorships. Phillips has an extensive PGR supervisory experience with 77 completions and currently 21 PhD students across i-DAT, CODEX, Roy Ascott’s Planetary Collegium, and 3D3.

Dr Gianni Corino

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Supervisor
Dr Gianni Corino

Gianni Corino.
Dr. Gianni Corino is Associate Professor in Interactive Media, i-DAT’s Creative Producer and Programme Leader for MRes Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University. His interdisciplinary research explores the idea of performativity, embodied and social networks and emergent technological practices. In latest works he investigates the relevance of the ‘thing’ and the ‘object’ from a philosophical and social perspective in the context of the Internet of to propose alternative design approaches to the field and to facilitate this he established the “Smarter Planet Lab” as an interdisciplinary facility in partnership with IBM – Hursley Innovation Centre.
He has published on journals and books

across various disciplines (social, design, media), his latest article talks about a theory object called Thingbook, The Society of all Things (Humans, Animals, Things and Data). Previous projects include Remote Risonanaze, Quixote or Dn[t]cube. Remote Risonanze (in collaboration with Piero Gilardi and Elisa Giaccardi), is a sonic installation controlled via a virtual reality platform over Internet; Dn[t]cube (in collaboration with Lorenzo Verna) is a participatory interactive installation to generate semantic ontologies; Metrobosco (in collaboration with Chiara Boeri), a participatory installation  for urban redevelopment; Quixote, a locative media project and Transactional Props, a cybernetic installation about and for the IoT.

Birgitte Aga

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Researcher
Birgitte Aga

Dr Birgitte Aga [B] is a creative technologist, researcher, producer and designer with an MBA in innovation and a PhD in conversational AI. She has 20 years of experience initiating and producing R&D with a focus on the creative application of emergent technologies, in particular conversational voice and text-enabled experiences.

She also creates conversational AI artworks, curates exhibitions, presents at international conferences and delivers a program of workshops that claim, drive and develop technological innovation for cultural, artistic and social impact. Central to her work is an ethos of collaboration with people, companies and cultural venues, driven by an ambition to engage the next generation of young people (in particular women) in designing future AI technologies.

Birgitte is also a South West Creative Technology Fellow (UK) for automation/AI, co-organiser of the Fulldome UK Biennial (UK), part of the  i-DAT Research & Design Collective and in receipt of funding from the ACE Artists International Development fund (UK).

mail: baga@plymouth.ac.uk

https://birgitteaga.com/

Marc Fournel Canada Council for the Arts Grant – New Media Residencies:

patconley News , , , , , ,
Marc Fournel Canada Council for the Arts Grant – New Media Residencies:

Marc Fournel
i-DAT has been awarded a Canada Council for the Arts ‘Grants to New Media and Audio Artists: New Media Residencies’ for the sound and installation artist Marc Fournel. This follows initial funding from the Canada Council for the Arts for a research visit to i-DAT in September 2007, where Marc presented a first version of his installation SKIN-PÔ. This new award will enable Marc to develop a project incorporating Arch-OS and the Immersive Vision Theatre (Full Dome). Watch this space for further developments:

Distributed South Residencies: Stanza.

patconley News , , , , , ,
Distributed South Residencies: Stanza.


8 February – 8 March. In residence developing a new work / 9 March – 6 April Installation of new work. For one month the London based artist Stanza will be developing a new piece of work in residence in Plymouth Arts Centres upper gallery. The concern of the residency is for the artist to create a new piece of work. Stanza specializes in net art, networked spaces, installations and performances. His works explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within context of architecture, data spaces and online environments. This residency is made possible through the Distributed South initiative supported by Arts Council England to raise awareness of media arts in South of England. Distributed South is managed by SCAN and Space Media.