abstractmachine

• Workshop: Code Impressions
• Invited artists: Julien Gachadoat, Mark Webster / Free Art Bureau
• Enseignants: Jacques Hémery, Douglas Edric Stanley, Antoine Bollasina
• Location: École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Time + Dates: 9:00 – 18:00 / 14-17 February 2012
• Introductory meeting: 16:00, 13 February 2012 / Atelier Hypermédia
• Info: Code Impressions
• Bibliography

Starting Tuesday, Julien Gachadoat and Mark Webster will be in Aix-en-Provence working in the Atelier Hypermédia and the Atelier Sérigraphie for a workshop entitled « Code impressions ». Basically, we will be continuing our explorations of code + print in its various forms, this time via Seriography, by inviting two artists who have already organized similar workshops throughout France (cf. Algorithmes sérigraphiques).

Here is the official description of the workshop (en français):

objectif

Concevoir des affiches et des T-Shirts à partir de formes générés via des algorithmes. Explorer l’aspect génératif du code et comment à partir d’instructions simples on peut arriver à des formes complexes. Confronter les outils de production manuels avec les outils de production procédurales.

contenu

Les atéliers Sérigraphie et Hypermédia invitent cette année Julien Gachadoat et Mark Webster du Free Art Bureau afin d’explorer la confrontation de ces deux matériaux. L’occasion sera donnée de découvrir l’art de la programmation interactive, d’en comprendre les mécanismes grâce au logiciel Processing, environnement de création graphique dédié aux artistes et designers. Des données sonores, visuelles, gestuelles ou issues d’internet seront récupérées, analysées et traitées pour produire des visuels uniques qui, une fois exportés et retravaillés, seront imprimés sur un support textile par le biais de la sérigraphie.

méthode d’enseignement

Les deux premières journées seront consacrées à la découverte de la programmation graphique avec Processing. Elles seront animées par Julien Gachadoat pour aboutir à la création de graphismes prêts a être imprimés.

méthode d’évaluation

Exposition des travaux.

• Conference: Art & Recherche
• Location: École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Belleville
• Forum des écoles supérieures d’art : 15:00 – 19:00 / 8.2.2012
• Colloque internationale art et recherche : 9:00 – 19:00 / 9+10.2.2012
• English language link: Art & Research
• Organisers: ENSPAC + Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
• Program: Art & Recherche (français), Art Research, Symposium Art Research, Research Program Manifesto (english)

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at 15:00 in a short presentation at the Symposium on Art & Research, organized by the Ministry of Culture. My presentation, on the CityMedia project, is part of a series of round-table/lightning-round presentations that have been divided into different groups. Here is an outline of tomorrow’s presentations:

• Open House / Journée portes ouvertes: HEAD —Genève
• Master Design : Bâtiment de la Prairie, rue de Lyon 22
• Date+Time : 18.01.2012  /  13h30–19h00
• Brochure : HEAD Portes Ouvertes
• Photos by Raphaëlle Müller and Sandra Pointet, HEAD —Genève

This Wednesday, the Geneva University of Art and Design (Haute École d’Art et de Design —Genève) will be hosting an open house starting around 2pm. The two departments of the Master Design (Media Design & Space and Communication) will be showing some of our latest work. If you’re curious, come by and say hello.

Here are some highlights of the type of work we do over in the Media Design side of the program.

Geek Run, Maria Beltran, Emilie Tappolet, Raphaël Muñoz

Rep.licants.org, Matthieu Cherubini

Dog & Bone, Max Mollon

Reactive Walls, Workshop by Camille Scherrer & Sigma6

Édition expérimentale Digital + Paper: Workshop by Anette Lenz & Étienne Mineur

BodyDouble Workshop by Douglas Edric Stanley, HEAD —Genève, Mapping Festival + Lift Experience

Écran-Image-Objet, Workshop Mobilizing by Jean-Louis Boissier, Dominique Cunin

Still Life, Clovis Duran, Nicholas Rivet

Scolu, Leïla Jacquet

Ünterplay Workshop, Annelore Schneider & Douglas Edric Stanley

• Machine: twothousandtwelve
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Play!

• Software: TimeHue
• Design + development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Platforms: iOS (3.0+), Android, HTML5
• Development Platform: OpenFrameworks, Processing.js
• Available on the AppStore: TimeHue
• Video: TimeHue (vimeo)

TimeHue is a clock that represents time as a series of hue values ranging from 0° to 360° within in the HSL color space.

To read the clock, start from the center and move outwards: the hue of the small circle represents hours, the middle continuous hue represents minutes and the surrounding outer hue represents seconds. The segmented color wheels are merely there for reference, broken into 12 color segments for hours and 60 color segments for minutes and seconds.

An iOS (iPhone, iPodTouch, iPad) version is now available on the iTunes AppStore (TimeHue). An Android edition of TimeHue will soon be available on the Android Marketplace.

A web-app compatible version can be viewed here: TimeHue.

TimeHue was designed and developed by Douglas Edric Stanley for the abstractmachine.net « discrete clocks » series. The iOS and Android editions were built with OpenFrameworks. The web-app edition was built with Processing.js.

http://timehue.com

TimeHue est une horloge qui affiche l’heure sous la forme de valeurs colormétriques entre 0° et 360° (cf. TSL).

 

• Book: Processing 互动编程艺术 [平装]
• Author : TAN Liang
• Date: 2011
• ISBN: 7121134632, 9787121134630

 

I was recently given a copy of this book on Processing by Liang TAN. This is great news as Liang was an invited instructor during the 2009-2010 academic year at the Atelier Hypermédia where he studied Processing (amongst other things) and participated in the Mur Communicant/CityMedia project. While I don’t (yet) read Chinese, I was able to more or less read the book by studying the code and gleaning information from various keywords ; it’s not an expert book, more of an overview of Processing and probably would be a decent introductory text for students starting out with the environment. At least it does get into Classes/objects near the end and has some nice sections about Arduino, libraries and so on.

  

This is a pleasant validation for our collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence School of Art with the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (广州美术学院). We are currently hosting our third invited instructor, Hong Rongman, who is also learning Processing as well as electronics and interfacing via Arduino and our own in-house Pinguino platform developed by Jean-Pierre Mandon.

  

• Podcast: Playable Character
• Episode: 004: Invaders!, History, and Chip Music Controversy
• Interviewees: Douglas Edric Stanley, Trevor Owens, Marty Kraham a.k.a. TV Death Squad
• host: Shane Hinton
• Download: playablecharacter_004
• iTunes link: Playable Character

I have no idea how he did it, but Shane Hinton took a typically rambling, 1+ hour interview, and compacted it down to about 10 minutes without losing any of the central arguments. I really wish I had his editing talents. And his choice for an opening rant is pretty funny :-)

In the interview I go back over the whole Invaders! controversy, give some pretentious-art-&#@*%’s perspective for gamerz debating the whole art/game issue, and then tie that in somehow with Antonin Fourneau‘s ENIAROF concept for a contemporary play festival. The transition might not be obvious, but it was in fact Eniarof that first recycled Invaders! and was the reason the piece actually got a second life. The Leipzig Games Convention version was in fact a very late iteration of the piece.

My interview is followed by an interesting essay by Trevor Owens from Play the Past about in-game terminals, and reconstructing (a) history from pseudo-documents in Fallout 3. I didn’t know Play the Past before, it looks like an interesting blog. For fairly obvious reasons, I ended up reading Rebooting Counterfactual History with JFK Reloaded and this interesting follow-up discussion which uncovers an irreverant necrophiliac comment buried in the WAD file of the game : A Revisionist History of JFK Reloaded (Decoded).

I was less impressed with the third story, but whatever. Apparently I missed a chiptune flame war. It would seem that my 8-bit subculture culture is incomplete.

• Software: Nyan Cat Therapy
• Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Platform: Mac OS X
• Development Platform: OpenFrameworks, OpenCV, ofxHaarFinder (face tracking)
• Download: Nyan Cat Therapy (Mac OS X)
• Source Code: NyanCatTherapy.zip
• Derivative Source Material: Non-Stop Nyan Cat

Inspired by the Ludovico Treatment for moral reform, Nyan Cat Therapy uses a camera-enabled Macintosh to fully couple the human gaze to the rainbow-riding Nyan Cat. In order to maximize the full effect, subjects are required to download, decompress and exectute the accompagnying application and position themselves face-forward before their computer. Upon detection of a sustained human gaze, the Nyan Cat Therapy software will activate the enigmatic cat.

For more scientific analysis of the Nyan Cat phenomenon and its various incarnations, please visit Know Your Meme‘s page on Nyan Cat/Pop Tart Cat developing meme.

Inspiré du Traitement Ludovico, Le logiciel de Traitement Nyan Cat utilise un ordinateur doté d’une camera vidéo afin de mieux fusioner le regard humain et les forces énigmatiques du chat-arc-en-ciel, le Nyan Cat. Pour maximiser l’effet, les sujets doivent télécharger le logiciel, le décompresser et l’executer, puis se positionner devant leur écran. Au moment de la détection d’un regard humain continu, le logiciel activera le Nyan Cat.

• Project: CityMedia
• Exhibition: Mapping Festival 2011
• Location: Batiment d’art contemporain Genève (Map)
• Installation: BAC, 11:00-19:30, 19-30 May 2011
• Conference: From HAL to Kinect: Live Visuals and Body Tracking, BAC, 16:00-19:00, 25 May 2011
• Workshop: Body Double: Kinect Hacking, BAC, 10:00-17:00, 26 May 2011
• CityMedia Production: Pierre-Emmanuel Reviron, Seconde Nature
• Development: Atelier Hypermédia, École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Artistic direction + system design/development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• System development: Guillaume Stagnaro
• Additional development: Stéphane Cousot, Tomek Jarolim, Pierre Rossel (Media Design —HEAD), Julien Gachadoat (2Roqs), Memo Akten
• Structure + Scenography: Elizabeth Guyon, Digital Deluxe
• Project consultants: Fing
• User study: Zinc/Friche + Telecom Paris Tech (CoDesign Lab & Media Studies)
• Application Development: École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence, Media Design —HEAD
• Application Design: Jane Antoniotti (ESAA), Joël Belouet (ESAA), Maria Beltran (Media Design —HEAD), Carine Bigot (Media Design), Cédric Brunel (Media Design), Alexandre Burdin-François (Media Design), Matthieu Cherubini (Media Design), Pascal Chirol, Julien Gachadoat, Lizzie Houellebec (ESAA), Hyejin Kim (ESAA), Tomek Jarolim, Leïla Jacquet (Media Design), Nicolas Levacher (Media Design), Baptiste Milesi (Media Design), Maxime Mollon (Media Design), Raphaël Muñoz (Media Design), Cristina Dos Santos (Media Design), Stéfan Piat, Cassandre Poirier-Simon (Media Design), Ellwood-Léo Spafford (Media Design), Douglas Edric Stanley, Emilie Tappolet (Media Design)

Citymedia Project & Body Double Workshop – Mapping Festival Profile from mappingfestival on Vimeo.

FILMED AT MAPPING FESTIVAL – GENEVA – MAY 2011
www.mappingfestival.com

The CityMedia system is an open platform for the exploration of public screens and new forms of collective interaction. It uses multi-touch sensors, 3*d body tracking, webcams and internet connectivity to connect people, data, media and objects. CityMedia systems can connect to other CityMedia systems, with the first two exhibited simultaneously in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille during the month of April 2011. Tthe CityMedia Project can currently be experienced at the Bâtiment d’art contemporain as part of the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Switzerland until the end of May 2011.

Over the past year, we have been building and experimenting various applications at the Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence and at the Master Media Design —HEAD Genève. We were also joined in the prototyping phase by students and teachers from the Studio Lentigo, ESBA Marseille, the École spéciale d’architecture Paris, and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratives, Paris. Over forty students have built about twice as many prototypes in 10 different sessions dedicated to designing, prototyping and developing uses for and with the system.

There are currently about 25 applications presented in the system, with eventually more to come at the end of a workshop dedicated to Kinect hacking this Thursday, May 26, 2011, also at the BAC. This workshop sold out very quickly, and unfortunately we do not have any more room for extra participants. So please people, stop begging, it’s heartbreaking. You are welcome to come at the end of the workshop though, and watch as will attempt to add any working applications developped during the workshop into the system.

While the project was developed principally at the Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence, our students in the Media Design Master at the HEAD did a considerable amount of work in the design and development of the various applications and contributed as well to the design of some important platform components; as a consequence we wanted to show the result of this work in Geneva. Given that there was already this interresting festival dedicated to real-time visualization, and given the amount of body tracking and various other techniques of real-time image manipulation we use in our system, the venue seemed appropriate.

Finally, I will be giving a talk Wednesday afternoon at 16:30 at the auditorium of the BAC, along with Jean-Baptiste Labrune and VJ Fader, moderated by Nicolas Nova. For my part, I’ll be exploring some of the artistic and speculative predecessors to Microsoft’s latest Kinect device, and will finish with the artistic work, research, and collaborations that allowed us to quickly get up to speed with these new devices.

P.S. There are some good pictures of the exhibit over at Pasta&Vinegar: From Hal to Kinect: live visuals, music and body tracking technologies – Mapping Festival Geneva

After doing some work on the City Media project in Marseille I wandered upstairs into Isabelle Arvers‘ Game Heros / Pixellissme exhibit. There I found a lonely Amstrad with Locomotive Basic waiting for someone to design something. I never knew the Amstrad, but I was quickly able to build this little thingy (30 minutes tops), with the only constraint being that the code had to fit on one screen. It’s not the most elegant code, for example I couldn’t figure out how to bitmask, hence all the OR commands.

I’m amazed at how robust the Amstrad was, some 25 years later. Since BASIC is installed in the ROM, you just have to turn it on and away you go, with the given extra of recording onto a cassette player which ironically probably stores its’ data longer than my CD-Roms I can’t read anymore. Apparently the Amstrad has some easy to access PEEK and POKE for getting sound and graphics going, but I didn’t have the time to fiddle around with it. I’ll have to get myself one and see what I can do with it. The PAPER and PEN commands are easy to learn with a totally cool list of the color table written right there on the device. What does that say about a machine that has the color codes screened directly onto the case?

Archéopterix was there maintaining the exhibit and was worried this little improvisation would dissapear, but actually that’s the whole fun of it. Just code it old-skool : type it back in and press RUN

• Conférence : « Vers une esthétique ludique »
• Conférencier : Douglas Edric Stanley
• Date & heure : 10h45-12h00, mardi le 14 décembre 2010
• Lieu: Amphithéâtre, L’école supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence, map
• Live stream : SelfWorld
• dans le cadre du Festival Gamerz’06
• update l’enregistrement de la conférence se trouve ici : Gamerz 06 Conférences

Les organisateurs du Festival Gamerz’06 m’ont rajouté à la dernière minute (!?) dans la liste des conférences qui auront lieu cette semaine à L’école supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence. Je parlerai juste après l’introduction du festival. Je reviendrai, entre autres, sur les rapports entre jeux vidéo et la création artistique, et plus spécifiquement sur les différents ambiguïtés qui rapproche et éloigne ces deux champs. Je prendrai aussi un moment pour revenir sur le mini-scandale autour de mon installation Invaders! au Leipzig Games Convention.

Voici la liste des autres conférenciers de la semaine: Semaine thématique #2 – Gamerz où on trouvera des gens comme Electronic Shadow, Margherita Balzerani, Benjamin Cadon, …

Si vous ne pouvez pas venir demain, ni cette semaine, vous pouvez suivre les conférences via streaming sur SelfWorld qui ouvrira son flux du festival à partir de 10h.

• Installation: Traks
• Concept+Developement: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Platform: iPad
• Development platform: OpenFrameworks
• Exhibition: Gamerz 06 (site uses Flash)
• Dates: 3-16 December, 2010
• Time: 14:00 – 19:00
• Venue: Seconde Nature
• Location: 27 B Rue 11 Novembre, 13090 Aix-en-Provence, France

Traks is a combinatorial sound toy. Mixing model railroads and 1960′s minimalist composition, Traks allows players to build up circular networks of bifurcating rails that branch out into both simple and complex combinations of musical possibility. By placing notes, “tranes”, and semaphores into this ludic rail yard, a modular melody emerges, otherwise known as algorithmic music.

Traks will be exhibited at the Festival Gamerz as a playable prototype for iPad.

Traks est un jeu d’écriture musicale combinatoire. S’inspirant à la fois du modélisme ferroviaire et de la composition minimaliste des années 60, Traks propose un espace de construction ludique où le joueur compose des réseaux de pistes bifurquantes qui forment au final un enchevêtrement simple mais complexe de potentiel musicale. En plaçant ensuite des notes, des trains et des sémaphores, une modulation mélodique émerge, que l’on peut qualifier plus généralement de musique algorithmique.

Traks sera présenté au festival Gamerz sous la forme d’un prototype jouable sur iPad.

Update (22/11/2010). This exhibit has just been extended for another 6 months, due to it’s popularity.

• Exhibit: Museo Games
• Location: Musée des Arts et métiers, Paris
• Map: 60 Rue Réaumur 75003 Paris
• Curators: Pierre Giner, Stéphane Natkin, Loïc Petitgirard
• Scenography: Traffik
• Editorial content: Annick Rivoire
• Date+Time: 22 June 2010 – 13 March 2011; 10h-18h; Closed on Mondays
• Interviews:
  • Game History: Nicolas Nova, Philippe Dubois, Stéphane Natkin
  • Game Industry: Sophie Pène, Peter Molyneux, David Cage, Hideo Kojima, Philippe Ulrich
  • Game Culture: Isabelle Arvers, Olivier Séguret, Douglas Edric Stanley, Invader
  • Game Users: Frédérick Raynal, Milad Doueihi, Laurent Trémel, Gonzalo Frasca
• Conférences:
  • Jeudi 17 juin 2010 de 18h30 à 20h; « Serious games : apprendre grâce aux jeux vidéo ? » – Julian Alvarez, Valérie Boudier, Jean Menu, Stéphane Natkin
  • Jeudi 2 septembre 2010 de 18h30 à 20h; « Histoire des jeux vidéo » – Daniel Ichbiah et Florent Gorges
  • Jeudi 30 septembre 2010 de 18h30 à 20h; « Les jeux vidéo jouent de nos émotions » – Stéphane Natkin, David Cage, Eric Viennot
  • Jeudi 28 octobre 2010 de 18h30 à 20h; « Et l’homme créa son double virtuel » – Catherine Pelachaud, Annie Gentes
• 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.

• Speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Seminar: Art I : Installations interactives
• Time+Date: 14:30-20:30, 13 November 2001
• Location: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal
• Department: Research Center for Science and Technology in Art, Escola das Artes
• Host: Carlos Caires

Just a quick note to announce that I’ll be conducting a seminar this afternoon at the Portuguese Catholic University. I’ll be showing work and discussing our research at the Media Design department in Geneva and the Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence. More specifically, we’ll be discussing the current mutation of art/media in the wake of the massive introduction of algorithmic machines, and role these machines play in transforming aesthetic forms.

• Livre : Processing
• Plate-forme : Floss Manuals
• Auteurs : Adama Dembele, Julien Gachadoat, Elisa Godoy de Castro Guerra, Adam Hyde, Alexandre Quessy, Horia Cosmin Samoïla, Douglas Edric Stanley, Lionel Tardy
• Organisation: Christian Ambaud, l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie
• Présentation publique : Mains d’oeuvres, 11 septembre 2010, 15h-17 (entrée libre/free!)

We’re just at the halfway-point, writing a collective manual on Processing using the expertise of Adam Hyde and his Booksprint technique. This book is being written directly in French (no translations) so I’ll switch over now into that part of my psyche.

Actuellement nous sommes à mi-chemin sur notre manuel collectif sur Processing, écrit à huit mains en cinq jours, en utilisant la technique du Booksprint sur la plate-forme Floss Manuals. Ce livre est écrit directement en français. Il ne s’agit pas d’une traduction.

Le livre a été financé par l’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie et l’équipe est composé de quelques français, un québécois, un suisse, un malien, un roumain et un hybride étrange (français ? américain ?) que je ne saurais pas décrire ;-)

Si vous voulez suivre l’évolution de nos travaux, vous pouvez nous rejoindre dans l’écriture ou au moins la correction via l’interface d’écriture. La base est là, quasiment tous les chapitres aussi, mais plein de détails restent. Il nous reste deux jours.

Sinon, venez nous voir à Mains d’oeuvres ce samedi après-midi et nous vous montrerons ce que nous avons réussi à pondre.

Si vous n’avez pas compris, les Floss Manuals sont des livres open-sources dont vous pouvez vous servir directement en ligne, sinon que vous pouvez imprimer, sinon commander sous forme de livre physique. Il existe même un lecteur iPad, on est donc officiellement chic.

• Project: Mur Communicant
• Workshops: DataFlow (7-11.6.2010), Communication (23.3-2.4.2010), Toucher (8-19.2.2010), Mobilité (1-5.12.2009)
• Partners: Seconde Nature + FING + PACA Labs + ZINC + Digital Deluxe + villes d’Aix-en-Provence et de Marseille
• Participants: Atelier Hypermédia ESAA + Studio Lentigo ENSBAM + École Spéciale d’Architecture + École National Supérieure des Arts Décoratives + Media Design HEAD
• Technical Collaboration: Guillaume Stagnaro, Elizabeth Guyon, Stéphane Cousot, Pascal Chirol, Julien Gachadoat, Memo Akten
• Development Platforms: OpenFrameworks, Processing, PureData, OpenCV, OpenSoundControl, TUIO, launchd

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.

Quick post to link up to the Gamerz 05 video that just went live and where you’ll find a few seconds of my bitPong installation. I also shot my own video of the piece, in which I take advantage of this little known device called a tripod, but since I still haven’t had the time to edit it I shouldn’t complain. When I finally find the time to link up the gazillion things I’m working on right now, you’ll hopefully understand why the silent treatment. Until then, here’s the video, with some of that all-around-sloppy-soup that we have come to know as Jankenpopp:

• Machine: twothousandten
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Play!

• Workshop: Mobilité
• Location: Atelier Hypérmedia + Atelier 3D + Méta Atelier, l’École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Dates: 30 November – 1 December 2009
• Organizers: Ricardo Garcia, Douglas Edric Stanley, Jean-Paul Thibeau
• Conference: Thierry Marcou + Fing, « Villes 2.0 », 30 November 2009
• Development assistance: Memo Akten, Gonzague Defos de Rau, Grégoire Lauvin

Today we began our week-long « Mobility » workshop at the Aix-en-Provence Art School. We kicked off the session this afternoon with a conference from Thierry Marcou, director of the Villes 2.0 project at Fing who gave a general overview of the major issues facing the city as it evolves in the current networked era, as well as techno-social experiments, services and creations illustrating these tendencies.

Then, starting tomorrow, we’ll be working in two groups exploring the question of Mobility from an artistic point of view, using either the iPhone/iPodTouch platform via OpenFrameworks, a specifially-designed GPS platformed designed by the Atelier 3D, or some combination of both.

While Memo Akten couldn’t be here this week (cf. Decode), he nevertheless was able to come two weeks ago to the Atelier Hypermédia and help me (actually, the other way around) write a MapKit addon for the ofxiPhone project. This is a pretty cool little addition which allows you to run the standard Apple+Google MapKit library from within OpenFrameworks, and (magically) without breaking either. This addon is already sitting in the current svn/git of ofxiphone if you’re geek enough, otherwise it should be available within the next few weeks when the OpenFrameworks download is updated.

• Installation: bitPong
• Concept + Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Platform: Hypertable | iPhone | iPad
• Development Platforms: Processing, Wiring
• Location: Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence (map)
• Festival: Gamerz.05
• Dates: 26 november – 4 december 2009
• Times: 10h – 13h / 14h – 17h

I have finally found a venue to show a decent working version of bitPong, a piece I created some time ago when I was still working on the close relationship with phsyical implementations of data and their aesthetic consequences.

The idea is simple: a two-player game, based on the uber-referenced Pong, here played with 8-bit controllers. When we say « 8-bit controller », we mean literally 8-bit, i.e. 8 buttons, each representing 1-bit of data. Collected together, this byte represents a 256 value variable which is used to control a visual paddle representation within the game. To aid players in the conversion of 1-bit discrete switches into their collective base-two 8-bit value, each button has been labelled: 2^n, i.e. two to the power of zero, two to the power of one, two to the power of two, and so on. This is otherwise known to mere mortals as the values 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128. To move your paddle, you must add each of these values together in order to position it somewhere between position 0 and position 255.

For those who know little about how the computer works internally, this is how the computer moves from the well-known binary 0 | 1 value, to complex values such as the letters you are reading right now: by associating a different value to each bit (the 1 values of « *0 1 0 1 0 1* » get converted to « *0+2+0+4+0+8+0+32* », otherwise known as the value *42*) the computer can use a physically limited scheme (0 or 1, on or off, yes or no, true or false) in order to represent a far greater sum of possibilities (here a number from 0 to 255). bitPong plays off of this configuration and brings its dynamics to the surface of the playing field. In order to take control of your paddle, you will have to quickly master binary encoding.

In this Victor Vasarely inspired version of bitPong, hexagons populate the playing field and create an added diversion. Therefore, bitPong has now turned into something like a two-player bitBreakout. I was actually inspired by the following sign which is posted on the wall just next to my installation, indicating the escape routes out of the museum.

I have to admit, even considering the current legal battle of the Fondation, and the related embezzlement of it’s holdings by its president / family members, all leading to the current dilapidated state of this curious monument, it’s still a pretty cool place to show work.

bigPong est un jeu pour deux joueurs, basé sur le célèbre jeu de Pong. Les controlleurs du jeu sont des controlleurs 8-bit, compris dans le sens littéral du terme : 8 boutons, chacun contrôlant une donnée binaire. Prises ensemble, les 8 boutons représentent un octet qui représente 256 valeurs.