i-DAT

Digital Art Masters graduate helps develop Android Wear

adelmootranto News , , , , , , , , ,
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

MEDIACITY 5: May 1-3 2015

henriettaknight Projects , , ,
MEDIACITY 5: May 1-3 2015

MEDIA CITY 5 International Conference and Exhibition 1-3 May 2015 Plymouth, UK
THE FIFTH MEDIACITY CONFERENCE REFLECTS ON A SOCIAL SMART CITY.
We invite contributions in the form of research papers, projects and case studies.

http://mediacity.i-dat.org/

The conference programme will focus on contributions that are high quality, reflective, thoughtful and challenging.
We anticipate contributions from academics, practitioners, activists close to disciplines such as media studies, architecture, urban studies, cultural and urban geography and sociology –using innovative ways and reflecting critically on processes, methods and impacts of public participation and technologies in urban realm, within their theoretical and practical research, teaching, or activism roles.


MEDIA CITY 5 is jointly organised by:
School of Architecture, Design & Environment  &  i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art and Technology)
Plymouth University
Plymouth, PL4 8AA, UK.

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

janeconway News , , ,
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

henriettaknight News , , , ,
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.”
 

Explorations in immersive vision take us round in (international) circles

henriettaknight News , , , , , , , ,
Explorations in immersive vision take us round in (international) circles

A futuristic festival that i-DAT helped to found, takes place at the National Space Centre this autumn.
Fulldome UK 2014 takes place on November 7 & 8 and offers 2 days of inspirational screenings, live VJ performances, radical debates and forward-thinking visions in sound and image.
The event takes place at the National Space Centre in Leicester and is open to the public. Tickets are available online here: www.fulldome.org.uk/tickets
Visitors can expect to see ‘fulldome art’ – an emergent artform using immersive environments and digital technologies to push the boundaries of artistic practice. International and UK fulldome film-makers, audio researchers and programmers will display their works at the event.
Fulldome works can be linear and non-linear, produced or generative, interactive and performative experiences projected onto the ‘full’ domed surface traditionally found in planetaria.
This makes for a highly immersive audience experience, challenging established models of cinema and gallery spaces.
Fulldome UK 2014 will host work by the following, and many more:

The festival – co-founded by i-DAT – is in its 4th year, and is run by a not-for-profit association that supports artists and researchers working within fulldome immersive environments including i-DAT’s Professor Mike Phillips, GaiaNova, The Computer Arts Society (CAS) and the National Space Centre (NSC) through NSC Creative.
“We’re defining the emergent artform of fulldome art with collaborations with the world’s leading performers, projection mapping experts and VJs. It’s super-cool”, said Mike.
i-DAT is awaiting news on Arts Council England funding for staging Fulldome UK 2014 in Leicester.
Previous festival action happened in August at Kendal Calling. Fulldome UK curated a cross-section of some of its best immersive audio-visual short fulldome films to support a playback of the ground breaking fulldome album The Search Engine by Ninja Tunes artist DJ Food – making its UK music festival premier. There were also lectures that flew festival-goers through the Universe and beyond the stars!
Back in June and July i-DAT hosted a week-long E/M/D/L fulldome prototyping workshop in Plymouth, inviting international participants to experiment with the platform.
The artistic research that took place during the workshop was in the areas of projection mapping, performance and interactivity “contributing to a redefinition of fulldome art,” said Mike Phillips.
i-DAT is the UK partner of E/M/D/L – The European Mobile Dome Lab for Artistic Research – an international collaboration awarded €400k by the EU Culture Programme.
E/M/D/L is a network for the exchange of artistic and technological expertise within the full-dome medium. The partnership connects four European and three Canadian institutions and cultural partners, all leaders in this field, sharing and expanding skills, methodologies, strategies and content.
The project began in February this year and by September 2015, there will have been eight residencies and public presentations in five countries, using a mobile domic architectural structure equipped with cutting-edge technologies.
E/M/D/L will climax with a series of performances at the world’s most sophisticated virtual theatre, the Satosphere in Montreal, Canada.
Partners in E/M/D/L include i-DAT, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, the Trans-Media Academy Hellerau/CYNETART Festival in Dresden, Germany, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, the Society for Arts and Technology and kondition pluriel in Montréal, Canada, and LANTISS (Laboratoire des Nouvelles Technologies de l’Image, du Son et de la Scène)/Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada.

i-DAT & IBM thinking smarter together

henriettaknight News , , , , , ,
i-DAT & IBM thinking smarter together

One of the biggest names in the digital realm was the guest of i-DAT and Plymouth University earlier this month for the Smarter Planet Lab event.
The event was open to Plymouth University staff, students, researchers and IBM staff with an interest in the Smart Agenda / Internet of Things.
The conference stimulated discussion and an exchange of ideas around specific themes including: art and audience, culture and heritage, digital cities / digital civic, environment and sustainability.

At the conference, IBM backed i-DAT’s research ethic. Said i-DAT Creative Director Birgitte Aga: “IBM backed up our approach. We’re about research and prototyping. We’re not about development – that’s for others to do. That’s what allows us to be at the frontier and to keep experimenting”.

We hosted the developers of the future

michaelkissick News , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
We hosted the developers of the future

In August we hosted the search for the country’s best young coders, overseeing Young Rewired State’s Festival of Code.
A thousand young people stayed, slept and hacked in Plymouth University’s Roland Levinsky Building for the 48-hour code-fest, which climaxed in a code showcase judged by leading technical minds.
“We had some awesome judges and a thousand kids,” said i-DAT’s Creative Director Birgitte Aga. “The work they did and the quality of what they pitched was exceptional”.
Teams of young coders from all over the country worked on apps in the following categories: a brilliant idea that should exist; best example of coding; community-minded apps for coding a better country; best design and best in show. The event came to a climax in Plymouth Pavilions.
Best in Show was an app called YouDraw – a crowd-sourced video animation platform allowing anybody (creator or otherwise) to submit a video for animating by the community. Anyone who wishes will be given a random frame to draw and over time, a video will gain more and more drawn-over frames resulting in a completed YouDraw project: a fresh, new, hand-crafted animation based on any fan-favourite music video.
Best Design winner was Tourify, which creates a custom guidebook just for the user – the perfect app for travellers.
Best Use of Code winner was Let’s Combine, an app for the web, iOS, Android and Androidwear which allows the user to choose a specific location and then see different datasets available at that location, combined to show interesting or funny results.
Code a Better Country winner was an app called CityRadar for users to photograph and report problems to the correct council.
Winner of the Should Exist category was Miles Per Pound which calculates how far your car can travel with a single pound, just by entering your car’s number plate.
Judges and guests at the event included Israeli musician Yoni Bloch, famed for his interactive music video work, Kerensa Jennings, the BBC’s Head of Strategic Delivery and award-winning programme-maker, broadcaster and communications consultant Tetteh Kofi, Australian entrepreneur, venture capital investor, diplomat, author and speaker Bill Liao, Katrina Roberts, acting Vice President, GNICS Technologies at American Express, and Sathya Smith, head of partner solutions at Google.
Special guest was political wordsmith George The Poet, one of the hottest names in spoken word.
In the run-up to the final weekend, i-DAT hosted a coding centre where young people worked with data and mentors to research ideas with social impact. Other coding centres were hosted throughout the UK, but i-DAT hosted the first international coding conference with young people aged from seven to 18 from the US, Germany and the UK.
Computacenter with Plymouth University arranged robust internet connections that allowed for heavy bandwidth usage throughout the event with no downtime – another first in the event’s history.
“i-DAT and Plymouth University proved that we can be the coding centre for the app developers of the future,” said i-DAT’s Operations Director Dawn Melville.
 

How we’re measuring audience sentiment for a new app

janeconway News , , , , , ,
How we’re measuring audience sentiment for a new app

ARTORY: http://www.artory.co.uk/

We’re measuring the mood of arts audiences in a ground-breaking piece of technology to be launched later this year that has really got the feel-good factor.

Earlier this summer, the Qualia system we helped to develop powered the official app for the Flux Festival in Liverpool. Now we’re working on an iteration that will benefit our city (although we can’t reveal too many details just yet).

We’re working in partnership on a project that will measure the feelings of audiences who’ve witnessed art and culture events.
The pilot mobile phone app also includes an incentive engine that encourages audience members to leave feedback, benefiting arts organisations with real-time analytics and mood-accurate feedback, whilst audience members receive points towards offers in participating venues.
Common arts evaluation techniques suffer by being disconnected and after the event, relying on enthusiastic audience members who usually have to fill in a post-show form.

Our system ‘captures the rapture’.

Qualia harvests dynamic data through a live dialogue with audience members, proposes a more meaningful qualitative evaluation, capturing the emotional experience of the arts and visually displaying how audiences are feeling.
Arts organisations will be able to see how their audiences are feeling and discover how they are engaging with the piece or the exhibition in real-time.
We think that by measuring audience moods and sentiment, we get a more accurate response – and that the results of our emotional evaluation could influence arts creation, programming, curation and funding in the future.

Like most i-DAT technologies, the Qualia system (developed in tandem with Cheltenham Festivals and the University of Warwick) is open source, allowing organisations to freely install and modify the code under the GNU GPL license. Qualia has been made available to the cultural sector through the GitHub hosting service and will be continued to developed and tailored in response to the community’s needs. It was first launched at the Cheltenham Science Festival.

Said i-DAT’s Creative Director Birgitte Aga: “This is only the beginning of manifesting and sharing emotional experience of audiences through the cloud, not only with funders, producers and curators, but also with audiences, in a real-time evolving dialogue.”

Birgitte says asking the audience might provide information that could be tough to hear for artists and organisations. “Can we, producers and curators of the arts, deal with the level of reality this reveals? Can we warmly embrace the emotions of the crowds which will lie somewhere in the cloud?”

We projected into a Round Room

janeconway News , , , , , , , , , , ,
We projected into a Round Room

July’s Port Eliot Festival saw us taking over an appropriate part of the stately home: The Round Room.
We projection-mapped imagery accompanying a performance called Celestial there during this now-famous literary festival.
The performance featured songs and music by Paul K Joyce, poems by Johnnie Douglas-Pennant and fulldome projections by our own Luke Christison.
The Round Room is as it sounds: a circular room painted with an arresting mural by Plymouth painter Robert Lenkiewicz. So it was ideal for our fulldome projection.