Prototype for an autonomous hexapod robot!

March 24th, 2013
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One of the prototype bots for Polyangylene! This creature is a hexapod with six hips and six knees, able to navigate its environment by detecting obstacles through ultrasonic radar. For now, its walking functions are limited to forward and reverse, but I’ll be adding more interesting behaviors to Hex (hard not to give it a name)…including dancing and swarming.

“Everything is on hold while you are being centrifuged”

February 22nd, 2013
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I had to re-blog this post from Colossal. This is a mockumentary by German digital artist Till Nowak about impossible theme park rides built as centrifugal experiments to maximize human intelligence. The architectural renderings are simply mind-blowing – and treated with a hilarious retro 80s filter. I can imagine another life for these designs in some  immersive stereoscopic game.

I always have a soft spot in my heart for virtuosity that doesn’t take itself seriously. In the words of the disturbed narrator, “these machines provide total freedom, cutting you off from all connections to the world you live in: communication…responsibility…weight. Everything is on hold while you are being centrifuged.” Well said.

Delve deeper into this brilliant spoof!

Polyangylene’s new bot model…

February 22nd, 2013
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This is the new jellyfish and insect inspired design for the Polyangylene robots! They use a hexapod chassis base and an Arduino microcontroller. The glowy letters are shaped with el-wire, a beautiful, flexible material that gives you neon without the expensive glass-blowing part. The bots navigate their environment thanks to two ultrasonic sensors and communicate with participants through a microphone and flex sensors hidden in their feather/tentacle neck ruff. They communicate with each other through Xbee radio signals. These bots also have a fondness for synchronized dance moves…

Polyangylene update: assembling the sculpture of found objects…

December 5th, 2012
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Here are shots of the objects I have been gathering and painting white for the Polyangylene sculpture. Polyangylene, my dissertation project, is an interactive installation that consists of a sculpture of found objects onto which I project animations that transform these objects into colorful kinetic stages/props for mini-narratives that are also projected, as text, onto the sculpture. If you are interested in hearing more about Polyangylene, please explore the “bio+” section of the blog!

The origin of these objects is varied: found on the street, in my apartment, at swapmeets, dollar stores…

For some reason, I ended picking up a lot of old toys. Perhaps because toys connote triviality, ubiquity and ordinariness (key qualities in the objects I was looking for) while escaping the type of fixed meaning that functional objects tend to be pigeonholed with. Toys also tend to have pretty weird and interesting shapes. Phones, laptops, printers and monitors also found their way in because they have become, as much as cleaning brushes and cheap ornaments, the material backdrops of our lives. They also have screens – useful for creating this effect of a projection within a projection or story within story that I want to explore in the piece.

The Book of Luna: collaboration with Clea T. Waite on a technologically enchanted book.

October 23rd, 2012
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POLYANGYLENE | experience design

October 16th, 2012
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Here is the latest draft of the experience design/ concept for my dissertation project, Polyangylene – simultaneously a projection mapping sculpture, a robotic interface and an audiovisual book.

Projection Mapping: a gimmick that spells the future of urban space?

April 6th, 2012
research
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Projection mapping is an evolving artform that so far has been mostly an insider phenomenon within the VJing and electronic festival scene, in spite of roots in the  longstanding medium of theatrical design and the growing number of competitions and conferences that are dedicated to it (one the most prestigious being the annual Mapping Festival in Geneva). It is frequently paired with DJ acts or used as a promotional gimmick for slick ad campaigns. The medium achieves aesthetic effects, however, whose innovation and significance have not yet been adequately critically adressed. What is the future of projection mapping’s cultural impact? With its knack for transforming irregular surfaces into surreal architectures, it speaks to a new vision of urbanism and the city, as a polymorphous and playful space justified by its spectacular ambiance as much as by its functional value. If we imagine a daily life framed by these dynamic monumental sculptures, what different kinds of cognitive and emotional sensibilities will we see emerging?

Tony Oursler’s spooky Baroque at the 2011 PAC Milan exhibition

December 30th, 2011
research
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Tony Oursler is a contemporary example of the type of technologist-entertainers art historian Barbara Stafford calls “technomancers”, scientifically informed thaumaturges that use digital effects to produce heightened sensorial experiences that bring the visitor to the brink of the spiritually bizarre. A wonderland of spectral apparitions, Oursler’s work is where garden meets cutting edge projection trickery, using sculpture as an animated surface, thrusting dimensional color in the dark space of the gallery. Under the guise of avant garde multimedia, eminently contemporary, art, Oursler’s work most closely resembles the 18th century phantasmagoria shows of Jean-Gaspard Robertson, who awed post-Revolutionary Paris with his elaborate magic lantern technology, projecting the wispy ghosts of guillotined aristocrats onto mirrors and smoke in the ruins of a convent, showcased by a performance that incorporated newly discovered electrical effects and a “magical” ritual inspired by the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries. Oursler’s installations are less interactive, but demonstrate the same fascination with the spectral transformation and deformation of the human form: bubble heads with giant eyes and mouth, decapitated talking heads, heads wreathed in vapours, flickering lights.

Rotating billboard transformed into merry-go-round in Situationistic take over of public space

December 13th, 2011
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Kolotoč / Merry-Go-Round documentation 2011 from sgnlr on Vimeo.

via Laughing Squid : “Czech pranksters converted a massive rotating billboard into a three person merry-go-round (video). The prank was filmed by Vladimir Turner, and bravely undertaken by Vojtech Fröhlich, Ondrej Mlady, and Jan Simanek (making-of video).”

Mr.Cartoon’s sexy L.Apocalypse gives aesthetic meaning to the sugar high

November 19th, 2011
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Mr. Cartoon’s delicious “Ice-Cream Truck” installation at the Los Angeles MOCA “Art in the Streets” exhibit is a paean to L.A. lowrider culture and the city’s  cult of hedonism and entertainment. This exultant spectacle is proudly entrenched in the anti-pristine context of LA.’s mythically degraded urbanism. Mr. Cartoon’s revamped, tricked-out symbology is intoxicating: clown-faced, trench-coated policemen, the billowing, whirling orange smog that evokes ice-cream soda foam, the lowriding cadillacs morphing into dripping banana splits with pin-up bunny-face girls lounging in the back seats, and, most syrupy-caustic of all, the “illegal alien”, a sombrero-ed, mustachoed little green man on a popsicle stick. The truck is decked out with colorful video on lowrider culture and shown in a shallow pool of candy. Rarely has the city’s (or pop culture’s, for that matter) heady cocktail of subculture, politics, and flashy style found such viscerally pleasurable and yet mordant expression in Mr.Cartoon’s graffiti poem of sex, pollution, sugar and violence.

The Water Cube or where all that is solid melts into luminous bubbles

November 17th, 2011
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Beijing’s Aquatic Center constructed for the 2008 Olympics, aptly nicknamed the “Water Cube”, is a neo-Baroque folly whose skin consists of inflatable PVC bubbles wired with LEDs. As this video attests, the Water Cube emerges from the cityscape as a glowing, perpetually morphing mirage, casually radiating wonder amidst the more ordinary architecture of streetlights, trees, and apartment buildings. It is a hybrid entity that is both media and urban object – a 3 dimensional LED wall transformed into a building, or a gigantic inflatable light art installation put to public use. The Water Cube also participates in a neon aesthetic that has transformed the nighttime urban landscape from Vegas to Burning Man, to Wong Kar Wai’s movies, returning us to the industrial fascination for artificial lighting, recalling the phantasmagoria of the Electricity Pavillion at the 1900 World Fair. To what future avatar of the city does the Water Cube point to? The city as a topography of dimensional live, reactive, interactive wallpaper? An erasure of shape, the evaporation of mass into glittering, diaphanous texture? What is life in the Water Cube – a dream, a journey into hallucinatory spaces, a fairy tale, a series of sensorial electrocutions, a diversion, a hypnotic well?

Chris Milk’s “Rome – 3 Dreams in Black”: collaborative poesis

November 10th, 2011
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Built with WebGL and HTML 5, this interactive animation allows users to create their own 3D objects and landscapes – which the system refers to as “dreams” – to add to the world of the animation. The player/viewer/modeler can also explore different poetic realms in the wake of exploding pixelated flowering animals. Part virtual painting, part modeling software, part music video, and part hallucinatory Second Life experience, Rome, much like Mindcraft, problematizes interactivity, fusing work, play, and poetry in a single experience.

Rome – 3 Dreams of Black from Chris Milk on Vimeo.

The video sculpture of Florian Licht

October 6th, 2011
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In the vein of (immobile) light and space artists from earlier decades such as Dan Flavin or Robert Irwin, Licht makes sculpture from light and shadow. One can imagine an interactive variant where the play of bright, dim and dark is crowd-sourced by an online community, or algorithmically indexed to sensor information measuring the trajectories or body data of the visitors. Or offering a counterpoint to the natural time outside. In any case, presenting new expressive possibilities for data visualization.

fla flav from Florian Licht on Vimeo.

“2.30at3.05″ by Florian Licht from Florian Licht on Vimeo.

Fishbowl architecture for the club experience

August 24th, 2011
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via trendunter.com

The SOUND club in Phuket, Thailand, features architecture that brings a literal meaning to the term immersive. With nothing but round angles, pod-like seating arrangements, curvy corridors and dreamy, shiny, deep blue surfaces, the club recreates a surreal aquarium atmosphere. One can only imagine the synesthetic possibilities if a DJ were to play minimal dubstep, ambient, or deep house. Club architecture is one of many sites of themed entertainment / art environments where the affective potentialities of space are being experimented with and explored. The hybrid nature of clubs as venues for both social and artistic enjoyment – the two functions brought together in a sensual, hedonistic spirit that transforms both the experience of the art and the experience of others – makes them fascinating grounds for architectural experimentation, bringing us back to a Vidler-like (The Architectural Uncanny) notion of architecture as the design of different kinds of in-habiting, of being in space.

Projection on scrims set design for Rise of Planet of the Apes viral video!

May 21st, 2011
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Me posing in front of the set I designed for a viral video to promote Fox’s “Rise of Planet of the Apes”, coming out in August, directed by fellow USC Cinema student Thenmozhi Soundararajan. I created some scientific animations and projected them on three layers of scrims, to produce a 3D effect without the stereo. The whole thing is supposed to represent a TED talk from the future. The melty shape to the left is a brain. Awesomely, the fabric we used – voile – added a shimmery grain to what is otherwise an ordinary digital-looking 3D model…

Gravity Cubes: eerie new Unity game in stereo with Interactive Media collaborators

April 28th, 2011
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CTIN 492: Stereoscopic 3D Game Design from Peter Brinson on Vimeo.

take out your anaglyph glasses to view this in its full stereoscopic glory!

I did the art and sound for the game Gravity Cubes, with Matt Morris and Jason Mathias. Ours is the eerie world of semi-transparent cubes in which the gravity switches on the player every 30s. The game was realized in Unity and is the result of experimenting with what constitutes a compelling 3D space – it turns out transparency and reflections are particularly evocative in stereo, as the viewer receives a rich impression of the multiple layers of objects positioned at different depths.

New Track : Blue Sky

April 24th, 2011
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It started with making the soundtrack for a 3D game. And now I have it edited to a bird video I found on youtube…

Will be projecting 3D animation on a tower at Rhythm and Visions, a live cinema event featuring audiovisual collective D-Fuse

April 21st, 2011
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I will be projecting Nano Flow on the tower of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts building, a stereoscopic 3D animation visualizing a flow of nanobots as hybrids between machines, jewels and single cell organisms. The event will also feature audiovisual collective D-Fuse, artists, VJs and DJs Scott Pagano, Brian King, Trifonic, Brian LeBarton and MB Gordy.

iMAP and I to present at ISEA Istanbul 2011 on the “Madness of Methods” panel

April 15th, 2011
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I will be presenting alongside my iMAP colleagues and Anne Balsamo at ISEA Istanbul 2011, for our collective panel “Madness of Methods”, which represents iMAP’s unique scholarly and design methodologies. My own presentation is about the notion of “toy cities” and the emergence of contemporary entertainment worlds and themed spaces, using case studies from the theme park industry, the festival world, and my own work.

Chair, Anne Balsamo, Professor of Interactive Media, University of Southern California

PANEL ABSTRACT

Common among the creative fields–the arts, science, technology and design–is a commitment to the production of new knowledge based on original research.  Research is the praxis of systematic critical reflection that focuses on compelling domain-defined questions.  The “question of method” is often used to distinguish art and design from science and technology: where the latter are defined by reified methodological paradigms, and the former by the repudiation of such paradigms.  In practice we know this to be a false opposition: artists and designers systematically engage the empirical in many ways in their creative work; scientists and technologists creatively improvise to form rational accounts of their technical projects.   The participants on this panel are each engaged in developing innovative methods that demonstrates the notion of art practice as transformative research.  For some of them this takes the form of performance and real-time video mixing, for others it is the creation of locative media experiences that probe cultural dispositions and habits.   Key areas to be discussed include:  the tensions between empirical, interpretive and critical research techniques in the performance and production of art practice; the contribution of psychoanalysis and cognitive science to arts research; multimedia techniques for the creation of real-time knowledge production; making research visible to transdisciplinary (academic) audiences; and communicating arts practice research in dynamic vernaculars. This panel will describe, explore, and demonstrate a range of new methods of emerging arts research.

Creating Toy Cities: the experience design of transmedia objects
Lauren Fenton

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
Media convergence in the form of transmedia storytelling franchises that distribute content across multiple platforms is a growing field of inquiry in media studies. A perspective of interdisciplinary design enables us to also investigate the emerging convergence of user experience across different media. This paper traces a common logic of experience design that informs the hybrid transmedia objects that are theme parks, digital games, public art pieces, and museums. This is the logic of the toy city, the community of attractions that operates at the juncture of the material and the digital, the spectacular and the interactive, to create a signature experience for the user that defies medium specific modes of feeling, knowing, and creating. Case studies highlight the ways in which these media phenomena operate on three levels, as affective objects, as technological devices, and as imaginative worlds.

Indexical Immateriality: Photography and Cinema inside the Machine
Rosemary Comella

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
Grounded in a longstanding interest in the photographic, my artistic research is partly based around the idea of the indexicality of the photographic document as a trace of the real and a record of the past. My work attempts to probe the question of whether photographic indexicality functions differently when experienced within a mutable digital environment than in a fixed analog one. In this paper, I will present an analysis of several interactive new media projects that I have been instrumental in developing. These are works of computer interface design that feature both photographic and cinematic imagery in ways that represent space, place and time in specific cultural contexts. This analysis will draw on theoretical writings about the indexical in cinema, photography, new media and language by such writers as Roland Barthes, Mary Ann Doane and Rosalind Krauss.

Forschertrieb, The Instinct for Research: Toward a Queer Psychoanalysis and a Psychoanalytical Queer Theory.
Diego Costa

AFFILIATION

University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

ABSTRACT

Exploring the ways in which the digital works as an interface for queer sexuality (in fantasy and in practice) this paper argues for a Queer Theory return to psychoanalysis, and its tradition of theory-based practice and practice-based theory. The construction of the human body – its drives, its affects, its markings, its illnesses – have all been questions taken up by Queer Theory as it has had, from the beginning, the lived body as its main object of study. Yet Queer Theory’s rise to academic prominence has also coincided with an intense re-configuration of this human body and how it deals with its objects of desire through the increasing embedding of digital technology in the everyday. Taking up barebacking (unprotected sex among strangers) as an emblematic contemporary “problem” of and for queerness, the paper investigates the ways in which psychoanalytic theories of early childhood development help us understand what is at play between the new media subject and his new media object.

Double Shadow: Digital Representation and Authorial Identity
Jeanne Jo

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
As we spend time exploring the Internet, what digital remains do we unintentionally leave behind? Based on this information alone, how would a stranger construct the story of an individual’s history? Like an archeologist might collect data and examine physical remains to create a plausible human history, what might be derived from the examination of digital remains? Double Shadow is a conceptual film project that seeks an answer to these questions. The work takes the form of short biographical film based on “factual” information gleaned from the Internet.

Making Trouble: redesigning the rituals of civic life
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
Harold Garfinkel, father of ethnomethodology, once described his methodological “preference to start with the familiar scenes and ask what can be done to make trouble.” My work applies this sensibility to the design of public rituals. I will present research from several collaborative vox pop experiments and situate this work as “making trouble” for the assumptions that traditional journalism creates when it uses social media to curate the public back to itself. Culminating with a call to arms, I argue that the designers and funders of new civic platforms should embrace the opportunity to redesign our public rituals from the ground up.

You Hold the Camera Now:  An Action Research Case Study of Pre-kindergarten Transmedia Narrative Design.
Gabriel Peters-Lazaro

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
This paper presents findings from a pilot research project called the Junior Audio-Video Club.  Conducted at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy,the project introduced media production skills along with concepts of recombinant and transmedia storytelling to two groups of four- and five-year old preschool students over the course of a 16-week curriculum.  Through an account of our experimental pedagogical approaches, and through an examination of student-produced media artifacts, this paper aims to identify key insights and challenges to the pursuit of early childhood media arts education, and to explore ways in which art practice as a research methodology can inform practical approaches to collaborative curriculum design, facilitation of pre-linear creative expression, and promotion of media literacy skills as an integrated component of early childhood literacy education.

Media-Making Madness: #Revolution, Media, and the Arab World
Laila Shereen Sakr

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
This presentation will examine in what ways might social media in the Arab world be unique – both in terms of how the society is operating, tightly woven; and in terms of media’s history in the Arab world, born in print form as an apparatus of the state since the Ottoman Empire? Using spatially designed information visualizations along with other representations, this presenter will demonstrate live media mixing as a research methodology whereby one can capture temporal specific conjunctures such that others can witness them. The purpose of doing so is to capture the special something that makes Twitter (and other social media sites) so feared that a government would shut down Internet to an entire nation during civil uprising and protest.

Neural Mediation: Instrument of Perception as Spectacle, Narrative, & Method
Amanda Tasse

AFFILIATION
University of Southern California, iMAP Media Arts + Practice, PhD Student

PAPER ABSTRACT
Drawing upon theoretical works in cognitive science, affect theory, and speculative fiction, I will analyze contemporary and historic representations of neural instrumentation throughout a variety of media formats, including a personal interactive animation project.  I will contextualize these representations of perceptual inquiry across interdisciplinary frameworks, highlighting suggested fantasies associated with each form.  I will show how uses of body-based sensors present the corporeal and cognitive systems as narrative spectacle.  As perceptual tools and methods are appropriated from the sciences, new arenas of hybrid design research practice are established.

Henry Jenkins blogs about GeoSurface Map’s win at the Annenberg Innovation Lab Conference!

April 11th, 2011
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from www.henryjenkins.org

April 4, 2011

Check Out Student Work from Annenberg Innovation Lab Conference

Last Friday, I had the pride and joy of participating in the first conference organized by the Annenberg Innovation Lab. The Lab is a new research initiative launched over the past year, with the goal of becoming an incubator for new media practices and platforms, a space where important conversations can occur between academics and industry leaders which may help shape the future of communications.

The mastermind behind the project is Jonathan Taplin, a saavy industry veteran, who has tapped his considerable network to bring some major stakeholders to the table. He’s been working with two amazing women — Erin Reilly, who is also the Research Director for my own Project New Media Literacies, is the Creative Director and Anne Balsamo, a veteran of Xerox Parc, serves as The Director of Learning. I am proud to be working with the lab on several new initiatives which I will be talking about here more in the future, including a new platform to support our work in fostering New Media Literacies and a new eBook project which will expand the resources available to Comic Studies scholars.

They’ve pulled in many other key researchers from across USC, providing a context which supports the move from theory to applied practice. The real special sauce at the lab is going to be the ability to mix social and cultural insights with technological experimentation and innovation in a space where humanists and social scientists can work hand in hand with engineers and business people.

Between them, Taplin, Reilly, and Balsamo hit the deck running, pulling off the near impossible, in getting the center ready to share some research results only eight months after it was originally conceived.

The conference’s highlights include a conversation between Balsamo and the two authors of the important new book, A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown; a presentation by the musician T. Bone Burnett showing how degraded the current state of sound is within the music industry and announcing a significant new research initiative to help repair the damage of the past decade of failed digital practices; a discussion of the value of play in fostering an innovative environment whether in schools or the workplace; and some great exchanges with key thinkers and doers within the computer and entertainment industries.

But, for me, by far, the highlight was seeing the work being done by USC students as part of what the Lab calls CRUNCH sessions. Altogether, more than 60 students from 8 different schools worked over the past two terms to develop prototypes, including demonstration videos, for new projects which covered a broad range of different models of media, from innovative approaches to eBooks to new gaming controllers, from civic media to new kinds of visualization tools. The most amazing thing was done by the student teams fueled entirely from their own passions: the Lab provided them with a space, with brainstorming and training sessions, and with technical consultants, but they were neither paid nor offered academic credit for the considerable labor they put into the process. Most of the teams were interdisciplinary, and one of the key values of the Lab was to help match up students from across the University to work together towards common goals.

I was pleased to see how many of the students involved were people I’d been seeing in my classes and it was great to witness what they could create when turned loose on their own projects outside any academic structures. It was especially pleased to see that these projects were informed by a deep understanding of the value of storytelling and entertainment and a grasp of the actual needs of communities of users who have been underserved by the first waves of digital development.

What follows here are the five winners of the CRUNCH competition, each representing a very different model of what media innovation might look like.

NimbleTrek \ Natalia Bogolasky and David Radcliff

WeLobby \ Leonard Hyman

WeLobby from Dave McDougall on Vimeo.

Combiform \ Andy Uehara and Edmond Yee an

New Quill \ Michael Morgan

Interactive Geosurface Map — Lauren Fenton

And for good measure, here are three more projects which I thought were too cool not to include:

Love in the Time of Genocide \ Thenmozhi Soundararajan

The Mother Road eBook \ Erin Reilly

Reading the News on the Wall \ Jennifer Taylor