Over the past year I have been working for Seconde Nature designing a public multi-touch platform via my Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence. It’s a fairly ambitious project and involves many partners and most importantly, a whole bunch of students and researchers from five different schools/departments exploring interactivity from the perspectives of art, design, architecture or some combination therein. While I’ve been tooling away at the project in some form or another over the past 12 months, the production team was officially formed at the beginning of 2010 and still has about 6 months to go before completing the project with an exhibition planned for early 2011 in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. In other words, we’re only at the half-way point and anything you see here should be considered highly work-in-progress, and purely experimental/speculative in nature.
That said, we have amassed enough material from the exploratory/workshop phase of the project to create the following document which can be considered a collection of ideas that we found interesting enough to record and group into this 20-minute demo reel. There were actually far more ideas explored than those you will see in this reel but they were unfortunately either lacking decent documentation or were simply too preliminary/unpolished. That said, many if not all of these ideas will need to be completely reworked during the production phase of the project. Only a few will be retained and most of those will be redesigned in collaboration with our content partners.
All of the projects were built within one of the four workshops, with each workshop lasting either 1 or 2 weeks. In total, this reel represents the accumulation of about 6 weeks of direct prototyping.
Playable consoles/games: Atari 2600 – Pacman, Atari 2600 – Missile Command, CBS Colecovision – Donkey Kong, MB Vectrex – Minestorm, MSX – Nemesis, Atari 520 ST – Arkanoid, Amiga 500 – Lemings, Nintendo NES – Super mario bros, SEGA Master System – Alex Kidd, SEGA Megadrive – Sonic, Nintendo Super Nintendo – Super Mario Kart, SNK NeoGeo – Metal Slug, Atari Jaguar – Rayman, SEGA Saturn – SEGA Rally Championship, Sony PlayStation – Tekken, Nintendo N64 – GoldenEye 007, SEGA Dreamcast – REZ, Sony PlayStation2 – Okami, Microsoft XBOX – Top Spin, Nintendo GameCube – Star Wars Rogue Leader, Nintendo Game Boy – Tetris
I was invited a few months back by the very respectible Poptronics to participate in this exhibition which, now that I’ve taken the time to explore the website a little, actually looks pretty interesting. For the « interviews » section of the exhibition, I was asked to revisit the ugly Invaders! brouhaha, as well as to opine on the age-old debate yawn! on the relationship between art + gaming. I am also in pretty cool company; folks like Nicolas Nova, Invader, Isabelle Arvers, Frédérick Raynal, etc.
I’m particularly interested in the scenography of the exhibit which attempts a mise en scène of the both the public and private act of old skool gaming. Video games have over the years often been constructed as a very private act — not all that different from the act of reading –, while at the same time utilizing explicitly shared media such as the family television set as its transmission device. Even in the context of collective gameplay the ultra-tricked-out PC often encloses the gamer through various devices, in an attempt to surround the gamer within their specific perspective of the game world/gameplay. The Gameboy of course created the ultimate template for this enclosure and will further cement this relationship via the 3ds. And yet simultaneously, this configuration has very much been called into question, thanks to phenomena such as Guitar Hero/Rock Band or Nintendo’s own Wii.
The question therefore become, how to expose such a configuration; how to exhibit the game as both image-sound media object and human-computer apparatus. This is not only a question of gameplay, although there is of course that aspect as well: we cannot very well pretend to exhibit the video game as cultural artifact without in some way exposing its various forms gameplay from within the immersive shell. But it is also the notion of another form of shared configuration, specifically of the human-computer embrace that takes place when we sit down and pick up the joystick in its invitation to play. There is an interesting spectacle in that embrace, or at least when considered as a phenomenon in and of itself.
There are also a few other curiosity pieces, such as Sega’s stereo-laserdisc « Time Traveller » which I was actually able to play a few weeks ago at California Extreme 2010. It’s a strange pseudo « Hollogram » device, which plays more or less like laserdisc classics such as Dragon’s Lair. The cheez-y gameplay sucks, but of course you knew that already. Nevertheless it sure feels like an under-explored technology that I wouldn’t be surprised to see recycled in some modified form over the next few years.
I’m about to get on a plane (yearly Silicon Valley trip home) with our dog, Duke and we had to place « Live Animal » and « Up » stickers on his cage. Since I didn’t have any, I whipped these up, using that oh-so-2008 / Hopey-changey sans-serif, Gotham and printed them out onto pre-cut inkjet sticker paper (hence the odd positioning of items).
If you use this pdf for your own travel needs, know that it’s officially Friendly-Ware®™, i.e. « be friendly » (send a picture, say thanks, give ‘er a woof, et caetera).
And here are some shameless pictures of Duke, because, well, he’s adorable and has officially teary-eye-stared my protective cynical sheen to oblivion.
Construire des usages et oeuvres innovants sur un support multi-touch urbain, le « Mur communicant ».
Contenu
Le mur communicant est un dispositif collectif d'exploration et de découverte. Il s'agit d'un grand écran interactif. Grace à son système de capture « multi-touch » on peut littéralement toucher l'image et en modifier ainsi son contenu. Le mur récolte des informations depuis de multiples sources (téléphone, Internet, capture vidéo, borne de saisie, etc) et les re-transforme en des visualisations tactiles. De cette façon le mur n'est pas hermétique ; au contraire il s'agit d'un carrefour d'informations, d'une carte temps-réel qui simplifie et rend tangible certaines informations et relations complexes (locales/globales) qui seraient trop difficiles à représenter sur l'espace réduit d'un ordinateur personnel ou d'un ordinateur de poche (smartphone). C'est un mur/écran urbain, qui crée des relations informationnelles adaptées à l'échelle du corps humain et qui relie des corps à leurs territoires.
Pendant l'année scolaire 2009-2010, trois workshops sont proposés autour de trois thèmes : mobilité (décembre), toucher (février), communication (mars). Des étudiants, chercheurs et artistes multimédia expérimenteront pendant cette période sur les contenus de ce nouveau type de support. A la suite des expérimentations, le mur sera construit dans sa forme définitive (été), avec des contenus adaptés (novembre), terminant avec une exposition (février/mars 2011) aux bibliothèques Méjanes (Aix-en-Provence) et Alcazar (Marseille). Divers suites du projet MP2013, divers festivals, etc. sont également envisagées, mais ne seront décidés qu'à la fin de la première année de développement du projet.
Partenaires du projet : Région PACA (financement) ; Seconde Nature (production) ; Atelier Hypermédia / École Supérieure d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence (rélisation) ; ZINC / La Friche (étude) ; Ville 2.0 / FING (expertise conseil) ; villes d'Aix-en-Provence et de Marseille (soutien) ; Studio Lentigo / École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Marseille (expérimentation) ; École Spéciale d'Architecture, Paris (expérimentation) ; École National Supérieure des Arts Décoratives, Paris (expérimentation) ; Media Design / Haute École d'Art et de Design Genève (expérimentation).
Ce programme démontre comment faire passer la souris à la partie opposée de l'écran, afin de pouvoir utiliser des trackball ou des souris hackés comme des roues qui peuvent tourner infiniment dans un sens ou dans un autre. Pour illustrer ce principe, nous utilisons la forme d'un paramkebi.
The Mode:Demo exhibit went live today as a part of the Lift Conference Geneva 2010. The exhibit was curated by Jean-Louis Boissier as something more or less like a parallel presentation to that of the official Lift conference who’s theme is « Connected People ». All works in the exhibit are here presented as « demonstrable works », i.e. works that can be demonstrated (in the literal sense) by their creators and yet more importantly works that contain within their internal logic a principle of demonstrability.
The exhibition was curated as a part of the first year of the Media Design Master at HEAD — Genève and the scenography of the exhibit was designed by the students of the Space and Communication Master. Some works come from projects and workshops created directly within Media Design, but others come from partner institutions (such as ENSAD Lab or Design Interactions RCA) — works from their students, their professors or both. And finally, some work was simply work we found interesting.
The scenography of the exhibit is quite interesting, and I’ll try to blog some photos later if/when I can find the time to take some pictures or steal some from someone else. Also, the demonstrations themselves are being recorded via recording stations that accompany each work. Those as well will eventually go on-line as part of the archival work that Media Design students are recording in real-time of the exhibit as it reveals itself.
Here are some images of the presented works along with links to each project. Please note that all of these images are from (and therefore owned by) the artists/designers themselves:
Etienne Mineur (with Bertrand Duplat) Les éditions volumiques
Auger-Loizeau - Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots
Matthieu Cherubini - The Pursuit of Happiness
Leïla Jacquet - Scolu
Clovis Duran / Nicolas Rivet - Still Life
Nicolas Field - Think Thrice v.3
Juliette Sallin - Touch_Me
Dominique Cunin / Mayumi Okura / Arthur Violy / Cédric Brunel / Matthieu Cherubini / Clovis Duran / Max Mollon - Mobilizing
Kenichi Okada / Chris Woebken - Animal Superpowers
Aaron Koblin / Daniel Massey - Bicycle Built For Two Thousand
Antonin Fourneau - RR
Sascha Pohflepp / Karsten Schmidt - Social Collider
For the Milan Furniture Fair 2010 Head – Geneva proposed a series of media-design realisations and objects which reinterpreted the theme of the home aquarium, along with a presentation of work from the Jewelry and Fashion departments of the HEAD.
Peep Show, Fishes and Other Objects of Desire (photo Sandra Pointet)
Scolu - Transfering fish from one iPhone to another
Démonstration du projet Scolu
From the Media Design side of the equation, I was joined by Étienne Mineur, Daniel Sciboz and Daniel Pinkas for the artistic direction, with production assistance from Maxime Schoeni, and technical direction from Théo Reichel and Pierre Rossel. We received additional development assistance from David Hodgetts, and heaps of help from the Wood and Metal departments of the HEAD.
Abysses - Public
Unfortunately I didn’t have the best camera available, so here is a fairly grainy video of the installations:
And here are some lovelier illustrations of the installations, taken by Sandra Pointet:
Versus (photo Sandra Pointet)
« Versus »
Aquarium designed by Nicolas Perrottet, Florence Darragon
Interior Architecture/Space Design department
FreakFish (photo Sandra Pointet)
« FreakFish »
Aquarium designed by Anna Graf, Vincent De Florio, Julia Dahmen, Juliette Roduit
Interior Architecture/Space Design department
Habitarium (photo Sandra Pointet)
« Habitarium »
Aquarium designed by Laura Ventura, Giancarlo Mino
Interior Architecture/Space Design department
Abysses (photo Sandra Pointet)
« Abysses »
Ambiant responsive aquarium Aquarium designed by
Fabio Colucci, Maxime Baillard (Interior Architecture department)
with Alexandre Burdin-François, Elwood-Léo Spafford and Max Mollon (Media Design Master programme)
You can also follow the sub-sections of each project for more information on the technical, conceptual, and design process of each project: Abysses, Scolu, Still Life.
PCB - Etching
Abysses - cablage
Scolu - Debugging session
Scolu - Debugging session
If you are in Geneva in the next week or so (5-7 May 2010), you will be able to see two of these projects, Still Life and Scolu, as they will be exhibited at Mode:Demo, an exhibition curated by Jean-Louis Boissier and the Media Design department for the upcoming Lift Conference 2010 « Connected People ».
Peep Show flyer (photo Sandra Pointet)
Also — and I’ll blog again about this in a few days — we’re searching for the next round of students looking to innovate in the field of Media Design. If you’re interested you’ll have to act quick; the application deadline is May 14th. For more information: http://head.hesge.ch/made/media-design/2010/03/26/admission-2010/
P.S. This should be the first of several cross-posts between the abstractmachine blog and the Media Design master which has been taking up so much of my time recently. I hope this also somewhat explains the long silence which has caused me many a Twitter Qwittering over the past two months. Ho hum. Unfortunately, some of us are just too damn busy to blog.
Voici un exemple vite-fait d'un globe avec des satellites autour. Cet exemple se base sur l'exemple Cop15 mais rajoute les positions des satellites via le site Celestrak en utilisant le principe des Two Line Element Sets. Cet exemple Processing a été créé pour illustrer un concept exploré lors du projet Mining The ElectroMagnetic Spectrum par Alejandro Duque et les étudiants en 2ème année (Morgane Guiard & Nicolas Durand).
Dans le cadre du projet iFish, on travaille sur EyePhone, un logiciel de détection des iPhone/iPodTouch.
Cette application cherche actuellement des iPhones et iPodTouch sur une surface de type Reactable et envoie des informations au format TUIO à des clients. Ces informations sont: l’identifiant de l’objet (no.1, no.2, no.3, no.4, …), la position de l’objet (x=0.23, y=.91), et l’orientation (angle=0.0f > 360.0f).
Pour l’instant, l’application est mega-super-alpha-incomplet. Par exemple, les commandes TUIO sont envoyés sous forme de cursor et non pas d’object, comme il faudrait. Il manque aussi la reconnaissance de la forme qui empêchera, par exemple, qu’une main de la même aire d’un iPhone soit confondu avec un vrai iPhone.
Il s’agit d’une adaptation du logiciel de détection des doigts pour le projet Mur communicant, actullement en développement à Aix-en-Provence. Guillaume Stagnaro a dévéloppé une partie du code, avec beaucoup de code de la communauté OpenFrameworks dont les provenances sont annoncés dans le code.
Voici un apperçu de l’application en fonctionnement :
EyePhone tracking software screenshot
Voici une vidéo de l’application en fonctionnement :
workshop DataFlow : 7 au 11 juin 2010
Myron Krueger, "Videoplace", vidéo (
