Readers of window.org.nz will have noticed a large hiatus in posting. We're undergoing a transition as we phase out an On Site and Online curator (myself) and bring on a new team. We'll be conducting interviews on Monday to narrow the list down. Thanks to all who applied.
For those interested, I'll be focusing more on a couple projects. The Ribbon is a band consisting of myself and Campbell Birch, with keyboards, guitar, vocals, laptop, and various instruments, hovering somewhere in the grey space between dance and pop. Werkhaus, my interactive work for clients like HP, Coke, Karen Walker, and Toyota always keeps me busy. And finally we've just launched a new portfolio site for my wife, Werkhaus partner in crime and illustrator Kimberlee Munn.
Babel Swarm, an interactive installation in Second Life has generated a lot of interest recently. A collaboration between Christopher Dodds, Adam Nash, and Justin Clemens, the work occupies a site in the metaverse, as well as being incorporated into a show at the Lismore Gallery in Australia. From the blog....
"Babelswarm is a real-time, interactive, audiovisual artwork built in Second Life. The installation is based on the story of The Tower of Babel – a mythical tale of humanity's desire to reach the heavens. Babelswarm is contained within an entire SIM with visitor chat captured and fed into a meta-babeller. This babeller spills words from the sky and into an amphitheater (performance space). The words shatter on their decent and, once settled, begin to swarm in random directions seeking out other letters that held the same numerical position in the word they were born with. If they find a partner they bond and help create the tower's structure. Eventually each letter will sleep, but can be re-awoken or destroyed by touch."
As well as recycling code as a way to teach programming, Steph Thirion recently finished Cascade on Wheels, a data vis project attempting to translate abstract traffic stats into a more meaningful, compelling interactive. Beautifully realised in Processing, Cascade extrudes upwards, creating something akin to a spatial bar graph over Madrid - the higher the wall, the more traffic on that street. Responsive and navigable, the user is able to pan, zoom, and explore this new environment of data easily. The problem is, Cascade stops there, failing to make any statement about how, for instance, the 100,000 vehicles per day on El Prado street impacts residents, the environment, and the urban fabric.
Thirion (and the rest of the team) seemed to realise this, and came up with a second vis based on the same data, Traffix Mixer. A sound toy, where "emotion was given prominence over direct readability", Mixer does provide a nice complement to the more strictly infographic Cascade. But unfortunately, the innovative, slick interface compromises the power of the work. " Ah, i forgot how pleasant it sounds... nice to hear it again.", is one comment on the video blog. The sound of a speeding car coming up behind you - as any pedestrian or cyclist can attest- is always unnerving and ominous. Mixers sound, while aggressive, is too abstracted from its subject matter, sounding more like a track from a laptop/glitch artist.
Traffic expands like a virus. The amount of vehicles will always expand to the amount of roadway available. Its effects are also viral and ever expanding. In a landmark study in 1981, Dr. Donald Appleyard demonstrated a direct correlation between the number of friends people have on a street, and the amount of cars travelling on a given street. Even more interestingly, when asked to define their "home area", residents on Appleyard's "Low Traffic" road circled the whole street: their house, the front yards, the footpaths, and even their friends houses. With growing traffic comes growing impact, and a growing retreat. Children on the street stop playing. Adults on the footpath stop conversations. Hanging out in front yards ceases, decks stop being used, and finally in extreme situations, the front room of the house is unused, permeated with traffic noise, horns, and pollution. Traffic Mixer and Cascade on Wheels, while stunningly executed, fail to convey the impact of their subject - either quantitatively or qualitatively.
Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn have just sent word about the latest update to their free-roaming online multiplayer project, The Endless Forest. Packaged as a screensaver, the work comes to life when your computer starts to sleep, recasting you as a stag in a dreamy, meditative forest setting, complete with ruins, ponds, and seasonal changes.
Without boundaries, goals, or levels, the interactive shifts the focus away from objectives and onto the stunning environment, which the team have obviously focused on. Light filters through pines, close objects obscure the player momentarily in a cinematic nod, and your avatar leaps across streams and into lavender glades.
In a strong move based on their interactive narrative backgrounds, the team have disabled any form of text or language communication. Avatars are 'named' with a randomly generated symbol. Communication with other stags takes the form of emotive actions - a bow, a cower, a prance. Language barriers are gone. So is specific communication ("walk to this location","how are you?"). But what Harvey and Samyn realised is that simple interactives require simple communication. Stags play "follow the leader", action their meaning through, or post general notices on a forum ("If I see you and don't respond, I'm sorry, my computer is playing up...").
With such a open-ended base, the team have released updates for special times and seasons. "Endless Halloween" turned stags into a midnight black for a certain time, and enabled costumes like blood red antlers or a Mexican inspired "deer of the dead" motif. The latest event/update combination involves the gods visiting the forest next Tuesday, February 5th at 5pm for a Mardi Gras flower spree.
Of course, EF isn't without it's problems. When I logged on at 10am NZT, there was exactly one avatar in the forest. Me. Exploring the lush environment is interesting for a while, but where EF ultimately wins or loses is it's user base - midnight gatherings of stags, magic spells cast by others, and new emotive gestures added regularly are for naught without others online. A few glitches crop up. It's easy to ruin the Csikszentmihalyi-like flow of galloping through the forest by hitting a tree, or break the realism by using a walk animation when your avatar should be running. But these hardly detract from an interactive which succeeds in pushing the boundaries of what a 'game' is, what 'communication' means, and how time and users can evolve a game world.
Angela Main, an interactive installation artist, will discuss her new work for Auckland Museum, "Metazoa", on Wed, February 20th, at 7pm. According to the release, the work explores the evolutionary tree of life, and Main will "position this in relation to her experience of electronic art museums in Europe and recent contemporary art events." For Metazoa, she collaborated with HITlabNZ, the promising but problematic augmented reality (AR) technology we've blogged on in the past (Pushing and Pulling the Interface). This specific installation looks interesting however, and I'll be there on the night to give a full review for Window:Scene. Entry is $10, or $5 for members.
For those put off by the gun-wielding heroes and photorealistic environments of videogames, this Saturday is your chance to create your own. Douglas Bagnall, who has previously shown works like A Film-Making Robot at Window, is exhibiting his latest project at Te-Tuhi, which transforms crayon drawings into game worlds via some clever coding.
Bagnall's Video Game Machine is part of a host of recent interactives which mix physical reality like shadows and drawings with screen-based additions. Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters tracks users, adding spikes to their arms, medusa tendrils to hair, and the ability to throw flames and projectiles.
MIT's sketch engine takes simple physics diagrams drawn on a whiteboard and digitises them, translating crude down arrows into gravity, force, and inertia. The demo is dry, the graphics dull. The potential is not.
Flash-based physics toy Line-Rider became a smash success over the last year as users took its simple mechanic of drawing lines for a sled to an art form. Massive levels like the one shown below, or others with up to 22,000 lines are entered into competitions in communities like I Ride the Lines. Little Big Planet, an Xbox 360 title poised for release, hopes to capitalise on the same idea by letting users create and post levels. Players assemble game worlds from a variety of objects which are translated into game worlds with deep physics applied.
With any set of rules and scripts, from Bagnalls 'robots' to interactive narrative such as Façade and simple 'toys' like Line Rider, the fascination lies in 'gaming the system' - finding the edge cases, glitches, and grey areas. The algorithm behind Film Making Robot favoured oversaturated images, creating a very selective memory of images sourced from Wellingtons bus routes. Only hours after Façade was released, players were already trying to break it, ignoring any goals like reuniting the protagonists and instead posting scripts featuring serial killers in an effort to defeat the natural language scripting. The top rated movies on LineRider comps are not huge hills or triple backflips, they're 'microquirk tracks', hardcore users who can place a dot in a specific location, confusing the game code and causing havoc with gravity.
Te Tuhi Video Game Machine Douglas Bagnall 17th November 2007 – 10th February 2008
Update: James McCarthy also performed using a site-specific wall work comprised of high-tension wires. He repeated the performance on Tuesday with some members of experimental music organisation Vitamin-S. Thanks to James for the pic.
Video artist Bill Viola, together with a team from the University of Southern California's Interactive Division, have just released "Night Journey", an interactive game "based on the universal story of an individual mystic’s journey towards enlightenment". The game plays out like a protagonist wandering through a filmic wasteland, interactivity limited to moving in any direction, or simply to "reflect". The latter seems to trigger video snippets from Viola's earlier work. Aesthetically the game strays away from the pastel colours and hard polygon edges dominant in the genre, opting instead for a dreamy, blurred black and white approach which allows video treated in the same way to be incorporated seamlessly.
Art videogames, or videogames as art, is a concept that is slowly growing. New Zealand born artist Julian Oliver established Select Parks in 1998, an attempt to provide a hub for the grey space between the two mediums. The site features categories like art, political and social games, with some innovative standouts. Float around a garden as pollen in the zen-like Pollen Sonata, gather clouds together in Cloud, or play Oliver's own mindbending take on the FPS genre, Second Person Shooter.
A shriek goes up from the crowd of kids. It's a sweltering mid-summer day in downtown Chicago, but this group isn't feeling it. The moment they've been anticipating has arrived. A giant face projected on the column in front of them begins morphing, from sly smile to a puckered blowing expression. Then the surprise - a column of water bursts from the giants mouth, sending a spray cascading over the group.
The Crown Fountain - two large columns and the ultra-shallow pool between them, are the creation of Jaume Plensa, one of the many commissioned public pieces of Millenium Park. Inside they're actually very dry, with a core housing electronics for projection, timing, and a steel framework strengthening the thousands of clear glass bricks. Jaume chose a cross section of people from 1000 Chicagoans, then filmed a set facial sequence - smiling, serious, then blowing. The footage is slowed down drastically and cycles through people after the dramatic fountain blow - composed of mostly air to minimise impact.
Closer to home, the most similar work is Kentaro Yamadas portrait series, shown at Window in 2006. Kentaro filmed a selection of friends with a range of facial expressions. Compared to Crown Fountain, the portraits are much more interactive. When visitors blow into a connected microphone, the normally stone-faced portrait shifts - laughs, looks askew, or simply changes. Interactive - but uncontrollable. The work frustrates any planned user manipulation of the system by the simple input device (mic volume) and the responses which don't quite match up. The resulting control/uncontrol tension provides an edge and interest which the spectacular but passive Crown Fountain really lacks.
Sam Morrison's Whisper-ma-Phones are enclosed sound devices attached to a number of streetlights within Aucklands CBD. These devices operate in rhythm with the streetlights, waking up and going to sleep in unison. During the hours of activity (night time!) the Whiper-ma-Phones are responsive to those that approach, each having it's own unique voice and story to tell. Will do a full review when I check out the Kitchener Street version tonight...
Update: Found one of the phones last night, outside of Parsons on Wellesley Street. Speaking into an orange plastic tube triggers the barrel above, lighting it up and starting the noise-producing mechanics. One of the most interesting features is that - even without the triggered input - the length and acoustics of the plastic tube produce an almost electronic humming tone, distorted and undulating.
