11 January – 11 March.
Cadu (Carlos Eduardo Felix da Costa) has been invited to undertake a three-month residency as part of an International Fellowship supported by the Arts Council of England. Cadu is an artist based in Brazil and will undertake this residency for the first time in the UK. This is an opportunity for this artist to define new ideas and processes in his work, by collaborating quite specifically with i-DAT the artist intends to work with the Robotics Research department at Plymouth University. This situation is a unique opportunity for the artists to explore advanced technologies and collaborate with engineers and scientist.
The International Fellowships Programme enables artists from all art forms and at any stage of their career to engage with artists and arts organisations from other cultures and disciplines. Selected artists are offered fellowships primarily for practice-based research, experimentation and the development of new work in relation to the artistic ethos of international hosts and the cultural contexts of the countries in which they are based.
The Centenary Celbration of the Bere Alston – Gunnislake – Callington railway. Sunday 2 March 2008 saw the centenary of the Bere Alston – Gunnislake -Callington railway, 100 years of trains between Bere Alston and Gunnislake and the first train over its spectacular highlight, the Calstock Viaduct which links Devon & Cornwall across the Tamar.
This centenary was celebrated with a weekend packed full of events on the Tamar Valley Line trains, on Plymouth, Bere Alston, Calstock & Gunnislake stations and in the communities surrounding the railway.
As part of the centenary a website (www.station2station.co.uk) has been created to capture the stories, memories and images of the communities around and travelling on the Tamar Valley Line. The website celebrates the history and importance of this vital network link by recording and sharing these experiences.
The aim of the website was:
to create a lasting legacy for the Centenary
to create a dynamic archive for the community
to provide a focal point for discussion of the Bere Alston – Gunnislake railway
to link communities through stories, images and audio
to share memories across the immediate community and the rest of the world
to create a collaborative online environment for further projects
Station to Station is an ongoing cultural project operating at the intersection of the community, art, and life around the Tamar Valley Line. It set out to encourage dialogue and reflection on the history and importance of the railway as a means of establishing communication, exchange and travel, and will create an opportunity to celebrate and document a 100 years of rail travel.
The project was developed through a close partnership between the communities around the Tamar Valley Line and the following partners:
Bere Ferrers and Calstock Parish Councils, Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, Devon and Cornwall Rail Partnership, Tamar Valley AONB, University of Plymouth, i-DAT, and West Devon Borough Council. Further support and sponsorship was secured
from Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, First Great Western, Pyramid Production and Network Rail.
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.
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.
1.30: Sunday 24 February 2008. The Immersive Vision Theatre and i-DAT present the ‘Dome Fugue v1.0’. This is a specially commissioned sonic experience to celebrate the re-birth of the William Day Planetarium as a transdisciplinary instrument for the manifestation of material, immaterial and imaginary worlds. This pre-launch rendering of the ‘Dome Fugue v1.0’ will be performed in the Full Dome using its cutting edge spatialised sound system and accompanied by immersive generative visualisations. ‘Dome Fugue v1.0’ has been composited by i-DAT, researchers in the Nascent Art & Technology Research Group and The Immersive Vision Theatre ‘Domies’. The piece lasts 23 minutes 56.0409053 seconds, a scaled down sidereal period (a single rotation of the Earth relative to the stars). The Dome has seating for 35 people. The newly developed Immersive Vision Theatre was brought to life by the Experiential Learning CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) under the direction of Dr Ruth Weaver. The future management of the Dome lies with the Centre for Creative Design and Technology, a cross faculty (Arts & Technology) initiative and a transdisciplinary catalyst for innovation to influence the evolution of new creative design practices and strategies.
Dome Fugue v1.0 is part of ‘Voices III’ the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2008. Friday 22 – Sunday 24 February 2008. http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/event.htm
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. Stanza’s work crosses borders between artistic, technological and scientific sectors. Stanza creates participatory digital artworks that invite viewers to guide data flows or to simply observe self-generating compositions. His digital paintings shift through abstract and iconic patterns, which people can explore akin to virtual environments. He has won international praise and awards for his new media works that invite collaboration. Stanza is currently a recipient of an AHRC creative fellowship 2006-9 for a project called The Emergent City, researching sensors and the impact of live data in the architectural and urban environment and is based at Goldsmiths College University Of London. Stanza was also awarded a NESTA dreamtime fellowship in 2004. This prestigious award provided incoming investment, allowing experiments using new displays, sensors, and live data to make responsive spaces and interactive installations. 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.
Built to communicate the Centre for Sustainable Futures (CSF) CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) agenda and sustainable information about life at the University of Plymouth the ‘Green Screen’ has been installed. This large scale LED matrix fill the top 3 floors of the windows of Atrium A of Portland Square. This full colour screen will display information and graphics that describe ecological and social data collated from a day in the life of the University campus. Waterfalls of water will be seen cascading down the building changing in size according to how many taps were turned on and how many toilets were flushed in a day. Fire will leap up the building describing how much energy was used to heat buildings, and forests of trees will be seen to fall depending upon how much paper was used. The system will be publicly interactive through mobile phones and will be able to show a wide variety of movies, messages and graphics.
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.
Sonic Arts Network and i-DAT present Expo Plymouth 2007.
Expo is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound art scene in the UK and beyond and the largest free festival of its kind in Britain. Each Year the festival travels to a different town.
In June 2007 the Sonic Arts Network came together with i-DAT and creative partnerships to produce Expo Plymouth. The event, packed with installations, happenings, workshops and gigs permeated venues throughout the city for four days. This film documents some of the highlights from the weekend.
The Expo festival is a free and fun annual event. It is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound art scene in the UK and beyond. Like a sonic circus the festival travels across the UK and this year we make landfall in Plymouth. Join us for a packed weekend of installations, sonic ferry tours, performances, exhibitions, film-screenings, happenings, a large-scale sonic picnic, workshops and gigs. Expo presents something for everyone at sites all across Plymouth. You’ll hear new and amazing things, enjoy places and spaces in new ways and be part of a truly unique event.
[Most of this material is recovered from the Expo2007 DVD]
Images from Sonic Arts Network:
Expo Venues:
Cooperage:
The White Rabbit:
The Hub:
Royal William Yard:
Lido:
And various sites around Plymouth…
Sonic Arts Networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Arts_Network
Expo 2007 Plymouth DVD
Tracks from the Expo 2007 Plymouth DVD
Track 1:
Evan Parker & Behaviour (extract) 8’08”
Track 2:
Vatican X-Ray Department Corporate Blond Fluffer 5’06”
Track 3:
Portable (extract) 5’23”
Track 4:
Sileni (extract) 7’18”
Track 5:
Tom Bugs & Hilary Jeffery: Tromboscillator (extract) 4’41”
Expo Youth @ Expo Plymouth 2007
2007 introduced a new stream of Expo programming where in a diverse range of Plymouth’s young people muscled in on the 2007 Plymouth Expo programme. Supported by Creative Partnerships their work added a virulent avant-local twist to out proceedings. Their work was presented at the main festival sites alongside the work of professional artists.
Expo Youth work commissioned for Expo Plymouth featured:
School of Fish: Ebait – am interactive multimedia installation featuring sub-bass reactive animated fish
5X: Digital Hotdogs – a roving hotdog cart with a twist!
The Sunmaids: Operation Raisins – Conceptual art inspired teens presented an interactive sound sculpture that dispensed both healthy foodsnacks and Casio-raisincore.
Fudge: Sweet Dreams – An interactive sound environment of space hoppers and giant inflatables
Darwin’s Walk – A large kinetic metal sculpture incorporating Soundbeam technology
Arch-OS interpretation by Justin Roberts performed at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival VOICES II. ‘Columbia Livia’, part of a two-site installation, ‘Salva me’, commissioned by Bath Festivals Trust as part of a Year of the Artist Residency, and shown at the 2001 Bath International Music Festival, was ‘reversioned’ for a new installation through Arch-OS (www.arch-os.com, an ‘Operating System’ for contemporary architectures). The Columbia Livia + Arch-OS version references ‘flocking’, a computer modelling technique coined by Craig Reynolds (1987) for the coordinated motion of groups of particles or ‘boids’. The visualisation of these algorithms mimics the flocking of birds and demonstrates principles of self-organization and the emergence of behaviours. The ebb and flow of people activated an acoustic ‘flock’ of birds (boids) that spun and wheeled around the void of the atria. ‘Columbia Livia’ deployed the sonic architectures enabled by the Arch-OS 56 speaker – 3 D sound system. http://www.arch-os.com/
Cooperage:
The White Rabbit:
The Hub:
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