News

Monday 4th November 2013. 6-8.00pm Rockets and Rascals, 7 The Parade PL1 2JL.

Free Entry, all welcome. Digital Art and Technology Visiting Speaker Series 2013-14.

Paolo Cirio is an award-winning media artist known for his controversial and innovative works of net-art, street-art, video-art, software-art and experimental fiction. His subversive projects are often covered by the global media, occasionally with legal consequences. The well-known “Hacking Monopolism Trilogy” took on internet giants Facebook, (Face-to-facebook) Amazon (Amazon Noir) and Google (Google-Will- Eat-Itself). Recently resident at Eyebeam New York, Paolo’s workexplores the social, political and economic influence of information, through the media and techniques necessary for spreading it.

http://www.paolocirio.net/

Wednesday 16^th October, 17.30-18.30pm. J.Craigie Lecture Theatre, Roland Levinsky Building, Plymouth University.

Paul Thomas will be presenting his work and resent publication exploring Nano Art.

Examining art that intersects with science and seeks to make visible what cannot ordinarily be seen with the naked eye, Nanoart provides insight into new understandings of materiality and life. It includes an extensive overview of the history of nanoart from the work of Umberto Boccioni to the present day. The author looks specifically at art inspired by nanotechnological research made possible by the scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope in the 1980s, as well as the development of other instruments of nanotechnological experimentation to offer a sustained consideration of this fascinating artistic approach.

Paul Thomas

J.Craigie Lecture Theatre, Roland Levinsky Building, Plymouth University.
Wednesday 16^th October, 17.30-18.30pm.
Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art.
Presentation and UK Book Launch by Dr Paul Thomas.
Paul Thomas will be presenting his work and resent publication exploring Nano Art.
Examining art that intersects with science and seeks to make visible what cannot ordinarily be seen with the naked eye, Nanoart provides insight into new understandings of materiality and life. It includes an extensive overview of the history of nanoart from the work of Umberto Boccioni to the present day. The author looks specifically at art inspired by nanotechnological research made possible by the scanning tunneling microscope and atomic force microscope in the 1980s, as well as the development of other instruments of nanotechnological experimentation to offer a sustained consideration of this fascinating artistic approach.
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4971/

Dr Paul Thomas Head of Painting at COFA (University of New South Wales), Sydney. Thomas is the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP). Paul Thomas has been working in the area of electronic arts since 1981 when he co-founded the group Media-Space, which was part of the first global link up with artists connected to ARTEX. His practice lead research is in collaboration with the Nanochemistry Research Institute at Curtin University and the SymbioticA Lab at the University of Western Australia. He is currently collaborating on a public art commission for the Curtin Mineral and Chemistry Research Precinct in collaboration with Woods Bagot Architects. He recently completed his PhD researching the reconfiguration of space.
htttp://www.visiblespace.com

Plymouth University this week finds itself at the centre of a hacking campaign with vital Government data being accessed and opened up for hundreds of watching eyes right across the UK.  Hackers in the UK’s Ocean City are swiftly searching through the data and identifying clever new ways of thinking and working which could change the way the Government operates in the future.

Panic over however.  The first sentence of this release is completely true but the five people at the centre of this ‘scandal’ are aged just 16-18 and they are happily hacking away with the enthusiastic coaching and mentoring of Plymouth University’s acclaimed i-DAT department and team.
http://things2do.ws/index.html

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23YRS2013&src=hash

The sharp, youthful programmers are part of the innovative Young Rewired State 2013 team and are joined right across the UK by others in 50 cities and towns.  Young Rewired State is a network of software developers and designers aged 18 and under with a clear focus to its find and foster the young children and teenagers who are driven to teaching themselves how to code, how to programme the world around them. The overall aim is to create a worldwide, independent, mentored network of young programmers supported and supporting through peer-to-peer learning. Ultimately solving real-world challenges.

This entire week specifically aims to make powerful, important public data available to imaginative young developers – such as those working away in Plymouth University. At the end of that, the developers should have improved their skills while showing government and the older programming community some fresh new ideas sourced from their own time on laptops, most likely in their bedrooms.  All of the Plymouth-based young people will then make their way to join their hacking and programming colleagues at The Custard Factory in Birmingham this weekend where they will get access to globally renowned speakers and spend the weekend sharing their optimum work and learning from everyone else around them.  Last year the Plymouth contingent was shortlisted for the ultimate winning award, and it is hoped that this year’s crack team will go all the way.
In the South West, Young Rewired State has hooked-up with i-DAT, Plymouth University’s catalyst lab for playful experimentation with data, and the i-DAT team is leading the local coders in their exciting week and resultant learning and work.  i-DAT at Plymouth University is a National Portfolio Organisation of Arts Council England.

Plymouth University is no stranger to innovation in this sector however.  For the past 20 years the Digital Arts & Technology (DAT) course within Plymouth University has been producing global leaders in the field and a number of pioneering digital and media companies have been fostered within the university walls as a result.

i-DAT Director of Operations, B Aga, says, “We’re all about encouraging these local young people to ‘hack’ and code and to showcase their own, mostly self-taught, skills whilst experimenting and learning alongside their clever peers.  The coding and programming sectors are obviously huge growth sectors yet very little of this vital teaching is being done in schools.  We want to find these coders of the future now and start integrating them into the opportunities that we have here at Plymouth University and with i-DAT.”

B continues, “This type of swift and clever programming changes and evolves from day-to-day as new technology moves and develops and its natural that these young people are right ahead of the curve and often creating the curve.  Young Rewired State takes all this energy and sharp thinking and puts it in one room with open source Government data.  We’re amazed by what this Plymouth crew has come up with so far and we can’t wait to see what morphs out in the next few days.”

Chris Hunt, a graduate of the DAT course at Plymouth University and now a member of the team at i-DAT is leading this year’s team on the ground.  Chris says, “Every year I’ve mentored and hosted Plymouth’s Young Rewired State, I never cease to be amazed by the breadth of talent on show at their age. These guys have the drive to keep building and exploring. It gives me faith in the future of the technology industry in the South West.”

Patch-Scape Workshop for the DLA Conference 2013 6-8 June Bernberg, Germany.

The Patch-Scape workshop offers a challenging but playful opportunity for participants to generate spatial, social and environmental data derived from the landscape and manage it’s transposition into a series of representational modes using digital technology. Using the Patch-Scape Digital Switchboard, the workshop explores the potential to transpose different data sets into a different 2D and 3D forms.
http://www.kolleg.loel.hs-anhalt.de/landschaftsinformatik/dla-conference.html
Nadia Amoroso, DataAppeal, Andrew Hudson-Smith, University College London, Mike Phillips, Plymouth University, Chris Speed, University of Edinburgh & Katharine Willis, Plymouth University.

https://i-dat.org/patch-scape/

Arch-OS went live on Twitter on 07/05/2013 at: https://twitter.com/Arch_OS

The Portland Square installation of Arch-OS shared its thoughts in status updates:

Tweets by Arch_OS

“Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.”
W. C. Fields

http://qualia.org.uk/
i-DAT is collaborating with Cheltenham Festivals and the University of Warwick(with a little help from Facebook) on the NESTA Digital R&D funded Qualia Project. Qualia Smile will be running from the 1-6 May 2013.
‘Qualia Smile’ is a playful smile counter that encourages the audience to participate in measuring the collective happiness of the Jazz Festival. Qualia Smile gamifies the collection of qualitative data, generating a benevolent feedback loop – smile and the festival smiles with you. The harvested smiles generate an aggregated visualisation of the mood of the festival – that Jazz feeling.
Qualia Smile incorporates image analysis techniques found in most common cameras and phones. These open software libraries are used to create a playful and participatory measure of happiness at the Jazz Festival. If this were a Blues Festival, would we have to turn the camera upside down?
Qualia Smile works within one meter of the display screen and requires direct participation. The system only records instances of smiles and not individual faces. The smile harvesting takes place in real time and is layered over the live video. Just like a mirror, the screen clearly shows who is looking at it and encourages the viewer to pull appropriate faces (commonly called ‘smiles’). The dynamic data graphics visualise that Jazz feeling.
Qualia Smile is the first manifestation of the Qualia Project. Funded by NESTA, Qualia will be a real-time system to capture and display how audiences feel. Qualia extends contemporary audience evaluation processes by incorporating techniques to harvest, analyse and visualise more emotive/qualitative data. This unique trans-disciplinary collaboration aims to enhance engagement and enable arts organisations to reflexively programme cultural events, thereby enhancing their economic, cultural and social impact.