News

DATA SPACES ix

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DATA SPACES ix

Mike Phillips presents i-DAT’s Operating Systems, focusing on the emergence of the Fulldome version of the Urban API.
Saturday 23 May – 14:15

DATA SPACES

http://ix.sat.qc.ca/node/383?language=en

DEMOS & WORKSHOPS

Series of 4 demos-workshops around current practices and experimentation about immersion in the data spaces :

PRESENTATIONS LINE-UP

  • FÉLIX PHARAND-DESCHÊNES (CA)
    SCIENTIFIC VISUALISATION
  • MARKO RITTER (DE)
    MOUVEMENT OF THE POINT OF IMMERSION
  • MIKE PHILLIPS (UK)
    DATA VISUALISATION
  • SÉBASTIEN GRAVEL (CA)
    IMMERSIVE STREET VIEW

Happiness lies somewhere at the end of a bell curve…

This is a presentation/demo of instruments, analytical tools and art works that have emerged through a series of ‘Operating Systems’ (OP-SY/) that have been cultivated at i-DAT (www.i-dat.org) over the last decade to explore techniques for harvesting and analysing data from a variety of contexts. They employ a range of digital processes coupled with ethnographic practices that can be described as a “techno-ethnography’.
Like a matryoshka doll, these Operating Systems recursively collapse in on themselves. Somewhere the body sits (a body that is neither ill or super fit, simultaneously an individual and a crowd) located in a physical architecture (software for buildings) framed by a Social network (where happiness lies somewhere at the end of a bell curve and true love can be found in a slice of pie chart) and all sitting snugly within a complex ecology (harvested environmental data to bring the landscape a little closer). Some of these things also find their way into Fulldome spaces…

 

EMERGENCE : RE-COGNIZING COMPLEXITY

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EMERGENCE : RE-COGNIZING COMPLEXITY

Mike Phillips, Bill Seaman and Dan Neafus present, chaired by David Mcconville, on the ix panel convened around Pierre Levy’s keynote:
http://ix.sat.qc.ca/node/359?language=en.
Saturday 23 May – 9:00
Phillips presentation, titled: “Die Geister, die ich rief…”  explored the behavioural problems of collaborating with our new found friend, Artificial Intelligence. How AI was probably something always lurking on the fuzzy edge between our desires and nightmares, and that we may just be conjuring it into existence now that a digital substrate has emerged to give it form.
(“The spirits that I called”). Der Zauberlehrling / The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Goethe, 1797.

MEDIACITY 5: 01-03/05/15

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MEDIACITY 5: 01-03/05/15

i-DAT partners with the School of Architecture and Design to deliver the:

THE FIFTH MEDIACITY CONFERENCE REFLECTS ON A SOCIAL SMART CITY.

The conference addresses the approaches and the corresponding design responses that meet the challenges of social, citizen-centred, smart cities and communities.
It will offer reflective, high quality theoretical and design-based responses to the question of how media and ICTs create can alternative responses to current societal challenges.
 
CONFERENCE PAPERS

The final confirmed conference paper programme to be released late April 2015.
All conference sessions will take place in either Room 205 or Room 206, Roland Levinsky Building,Plymouth University.
For full conference programme please click here.
Conference Paper draft Programme (please click here for pdf version of Conference Paper draft Programme)

 
WORKSHOPS

The conference will host three 1/2 day workshops on Friday 1st May.
Conference participants are welcome to join any workshop.
 
URBAN INTERVENTIONS
The MEDIACITY 5 Exhibition-Urban Interventions takes place in the Roland Levinsky Building (RLB) foyer (CrossPoint (X.)) 1-3/05/2015
RLBxsmall
X. will be a focal point for an exhibition of Urban Interventions that leaks out across the city of Plymouth.  The work on display, by architects, artists and designers, investigates the theme of the conference through a series of interventions, events, instruments, workshop by products and data sonifications and visualisations.

About MEDIACITY 5…

Negotiating Principles of Exhibition Design – The National Gallery of Ireland

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Negotiating Principles of Exhibition Design – The National Gallery of Ireland

Negotiating Principles of Exhibition Design:
i-DAT’s Paul Green (http://i-dat.org/paul-green/) is presenting “Negotiating Principles of Exhibition Design” at the National Gallery of Ireland Research Day 2015: Friday 6 March 2015. CONDITONS OF DISPLAY:RESEARCH & PRACTICE: The National Gallery of Ireland is holding its fifth postgraduate Research Day exploring new ideas, projects and research.
As the NGI approaches 2016 and the re-opening of its historic buildings, it faces the challenges of re-hanging and re-imagining the collection, all of which will be informed by the myriad conditions and concerns of display.
Venue: Gallery Lecture Theatre; Admission free, book in advance to education@ngi.ie
For information contact education@ngi.ie or 01 663 3509 or 663 3579
http://www.nationalgallery.ie/en/Learning/Adult_Programmes/Research_Day_2015.aspx

Digital Art Masters graduate helps develop Android Wear

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Digital Art Masters graduate helps develop Android Wear

Meet Emmet Connolly.

He’s a graduate of the Digital Art & Technology masters course run here at Plymouth University, and a close friend of i-DAT’s.
He got in touch after reading the November 2014 newsletter which mentioned Mike Phillips and his flashy Android Wear smart-watch.

Mike Phillips and his smart watch
Mike orders a coffee from the office Nespresso machine using his Android Wear watch

Emmet emailed to tell Mike that he’d started the project which turned into Android Wear as one of his 20% projects at Google – the famed ideas-time given to employees there. Other 20% projects have resulted in Gmail and Adsense.

Said Emmet: “I was working as a designer for Google in Zurich when I started a 20% project to build a computer watch, then moved to Silicon Valley to develop and launch it as Android Wear. Most recently I’ve moved back to Europe for a job as Director of Product Design at Intercom, where we’re building simple ways for people and businesses to communicate.
“Messaging is quite simple but so powerful and flexible, and I think there’s lots of ways of exploring how to use it as a medium in itself. We write about design on our company blog”

Of course, we asked him how he thought he’d been served by gaining his Masters in Digital Art at Plymouth University, and he said:

Regarding Plymouth, what I really took away from my Masters was an idea of how to explore new ideas and projects even if I didn’t have a complete understanding of them up front. That it’s okay to get just lost and go exploring, and that interesting directions can come out of that. There was a real multi-disciplinary approach that kept us from being boxed into one way of thinking. So much of design and technology today is about constant change, and so specific technical skills become obsolete within a couple of years. It’s a lot more important to learn how to explore new materials, draw connections between ideas from different fields, think critically and iterate on your own work, and generally learn how to keep learning.

Read Emmet’s musings on his blog and he’s on Twitter here

E/M/D/L workshops in Vienna, February 2015

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E/M/D/L workshops in Vienna, February 2015

 

We’ll be cultivating fulldome art in Austria in February, thanks to our partnership in an international fulldome network.

We will be hosted by the Digital Art Department University of Applied Arts, Vienna, between the 1-12 Feb as the UK partners in the European Union-funded project E / M / D / L /  – European Mobile Dome Lab for artistic research: http://emdl.eu/
From February last year until September 2015, there is an E/M/D/L programme of residencies in Canada, Greece, United Kingdom, Germany and Austria.
Each residency is focused around a domic architecture, equipped with cutting-edge technologies for immersive visualization and sonification.
Besides hosting these sessions, we and the other partners are working to conduct artistic research, both theory and practice, in this emergent art form, accompanied by a series of public presentations, demonstrations and performances.

Through the international commissions and collaborations the E/M/D/L project will culminate in the production of a series of digital artworks in the form of interactive full-dome environments.

Finally, these works that generate new technological and aesthetic paradigms which will be presented in the world’s most sophisticated purpose build art fulldome structure – the Satosphere at SAT in Montreal, Canada.

FulldomeUK 2014 winners

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FulldomeUK 2014 winners

The winners of FulldomeUK 2014 have been announced.
FulldomeUK is a festival of fulldome art that we co-founded and that we help to run. This took place late last year, and the winners – the people at the cutting edge of the cutting edge of media – have been announced.
These films were selected by an independent jury from a shortlist curated by the festival’s organising committee. And the winners are (with a taste of the judges’ comments)…
Best in Show – Beat
“Beat has the best potential for bringing visual storytelling to the Fulldome form, providing a psychological landscape. Abstract expressionism finally has a voice through Beat”
Best student – Die Wundertrommel
“Playful exploration of Fulldome and a cool reference to old tech zoetrope – punches above its weight”
Best Use of Dome – Infinite Horizon
“Elegant and minimal, understated immersion. Great soundscape.”
Best Sonic Experience  – Ride Zero
“Great immersive sonic expression, synthetic experience… big up the jungle massive!”
Best Experimental – Beat
“New perspectives and exciting potential for collaged video in Fulldome.”
Best Narrative – Vessel
“Exceptional presentation of narrative form within the dome medium.”
 

Fulldome UK 2014 success

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Fulldome UK 2014 success

A festival of dome media co-founded by i-DAT and staged earlier this month was a resounding success – but there’s work to do to further the medium, according to Professor Mike Phillips.
Fulldome UK took place at the National Space Centre in Leicester on November 7 & 8, with screenings, immersive experiences, competitions, debates, performances and forward-thinking visions in sound and image and an audience of artists, academics, VJs and dome-techies.
“It was an extraordinarily successful festival and now we need to bring this stuff to wider audiences,” said Mike. “This festival was for ‘domies’ but the mission for i-DAT and its relationship to Fulldome UK is to expand the audiences and free the artform from the dominant model of science edutainment”.
Mike said that Fulldome UK 2014 demonstrated highly immersive pieces of dome-art alongside the more commonplace science presentations in surround-sound and vision aimed at kids and their parents.
He said: “What we’re trying to do is liberate the dome from the dominant model of science edutainment to free creative artists and designers so they make much more qualitative immersive experiences.”
“If you go in there thinking this is cinema, you’re missing half the trip,” he said. “The whole point is that the dome disappears and you can move through it and beyond it.
“There is amazing 3D potential that you don’t have in cinema. This completely immerses you. It wraps around your face! Yes, it’s the wonder of virtual reality and surround vision but you get much more spatial potential and the sense of presence is heightened.”
He said he saw exciting examples of fulldome uses at the festival, from experimental shorts to real-time live performances, covering a range of fulldome possibilities. “Everything that could be done was demonstrated in some form. The potential was made manifest,” he said.
Alongside i-DAT’s Birgitte Aga, Mike was a judge in the fulldome art competition and he praised the work of Tim Seger who won Best in Show for his abstract-impressionistic narrative piece Beat and the romantic piece Vessel by Aaron Bradbury – which demonstrated the data on what really happens when one sees one’s true love for the first time.
Mike’s favourite was RFID’s live performance (check their showreel here), “a real-time, abstract journey through digital universes of a kind of flocking, swarming, particle space with an incredible live soundtrack.
“The whole thing was navigated live – again a revolutionary thing for fulldomes – and it had a wonderful, totally abstract narrative. It was a playful, exploratory experience of total immersion,” said Mike. Other highlights included performances by United VJs and Ghostdog and Azyl.
Fulldome UK 2014 was the 4th festival, following the event’s inauguration in Plymouth in 2010.

New phone app Artory promises to boost Plymouth’s culture circulation

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New phone app Artory promises to boost Plymouth’s culture circulation

A brand new app promising to be the ‘ultimate guide to Plymouth’s art and culture’ soft-launches next month (December) – and it’s based on i-DAT’s Qualia emotion-measuring technology.

Artory is a free app that leads users to the city’s culture hotspots and then rewards them with exclusive offers. Artory-users will have a chance to earn Art Miles by visiting venues and leaving feedback. These can be exchanged in participating cultural venues all over the city for drinks, discounts and VIP offers.
Artory-users will have a chance to earn Art Miles by visiting venues and leaving feedback. These can be exchanged in participating cultural venues all over the city for drinks, tickets or discounts.
Venues and attractions will be able to fill the app with what’s on listings and events, helping to promote Plymouth’s cultural assets to a connected audience of city residents and visitors.
Art Miles earned in one venue can be used in another venues, thanks to the collaborative approach taken by the organisations involved.

Artory will be available in app stores for both iPhones and Android devices from December 15. The app’s official launch will be in January 2015.

Although what’s on apps are commonplace, the crucial difference with Artory is that it offers visitors incentives for leaving feedback about what they thought about the show, the exhibition, the film or the attraction.

This is because Artory is based on the ‘analytics engine’ Qualia, developed by i-DAT at Plymouth University, University of Warwick and Cheltenham Festivals 2013. This mood-measuring technology makes it easy for app-users to record their feelings and emotions about the art and culture they’ve just viewed.

This is a huge step forward from the usual feedback forms that present culture fans with paperwork just after they’ve experienced a show or a performance.

Evaluating audience feedback is a vital task for culture organisations, giving them important information that can support funding applications or direct future programming. So by making that data-collection easy, fun and tangibly rewarding, Artory helps both the city’s culture attractions and its visitors.
The app’s launch marks the culmination of a year of work for arts organisations working together to boost local culture, despite Plymouth’s unsuccessful bid to be City of Culture 2017.

This city-wide initiative has been led, designed and produced by i-DAT and Barbican-based Plymouth Arts Centre (in conjunction with Elixel and the Plymouth Culture Guide Group: Theatre Royal, Barbican Theatre, Plymouth City Museum and Gallery, The Gallery Plymouth College of Art, Peninsula Arts Plymouth University, KARST, Ocean Studios, Take a Part, Effervescent, Plymouth Dance, Plymouth Culture Board).

The app is funded by i-DAT, Plymouth Arts Centre, Destination Plymouth, Plymouth City Council and Plymouth Culture Board.

The software behind Artory is open-source, meaning that once it has been piloted in Plymouth, it will be available for use by other cities to promote their cultural activity.

Venues participating at present include Theatre Royal, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Ocean Studios, Peninsula Arts at Plymouth University, Barbican Theatre, KARST, The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Take a Part, and Plymouth Dance.