Currently I am in Sao Paulo Brazil to attend the FILE electronic arts festival. The event is about interactive art in public spaces, game design and sonification, which exactly matches my interests. By now there is not much to say: everyone is busy in setting everything up, adjusting projectors and de bug last parts of the applications at the SESI theatre which is the main venue. The whole festival opens on monday with an award ceremony and opening night, where all the objects can be used and tested. On tuesday a lot of public art projects take place on Avenida Paulista, one of the main roads in Sao Paulo. The metro station transform to public gaming areas and the facades on the street will be digital augmented messageboards. If that wouldn´t be enough, a symposium is schedule for the whole week featuring lectures about physical gaming, sustainable media, sonifications and hybrid estates.It will be also live streamed via the festivals website!
In the hotel I allready met one of the artists from austria, Peter Votova from the TerminalBeach. Together with Erich Berger and brazilian orchestra he will perform as the “heartchamber orchestra” So there is a lot to see and do these days. I will keep you updated
Just a brief post on another worthy archive that i stumbled over the last days and still even need a month to check out everything…
The blog is about an upcoming exhibition at the MOMA in New York that features projects on interactive design. I´m allready super curious what they will further choose from their allready impressing list.
Please take yourself time to scroll through the projects, click at the hyperlinks and repost some ideas that are worth to be presented at the MOMA aswell.
Another proper filled archive comes from Micheal Shirley. My Future Me features a truck load of interesting and inspiring projects all related to interaction design and interactive media art. Enjoy
Here is a video with a more personal and ambient view on our trip to the MediaLab and New York. We still work on all the interview and demo footage so please still be patient with us. The video is quite long and tries to capture the athmosphere and mood of the conference and the journey. Enjoy.
There will be “Digital Processing” tutorial courses for designers, architects, construction engineers and young academics in these fields taking place in Berlin this year. The project is inititiated by the 3D Lab at the Technische Universität Berlin and the faculty of architecture at the University of the Arts Berlin. The people behind this offers are also involved in the 3D Modelling Symposium that is used to happen every year in Berlin. After the success of the last years, the symposium will be back again 2010 with a call for papers and several workshops and lectures.
What is most interesting on this offer, is the Module 5 on “Generative Design” using the Rhino4 Plugin Grasshopper. With this parametric scripting tools some new and “your-design-pushing” possibilities come up especially for Rhinomodellers and Non-coders. It´s definitely worth checking out, because on one hand it´s free and on the other hand it fills one of the most leaking gaps in Rhino: the missing of parametrics.
For everyone interested further in generative design and scripted shapes, the ARCH+ issue n°188 will provide a perfect overview on the topic.
Also the Modules 3 and 4 on rapid prototyping are recommended. The 3D Lab is well equipped with several object printers and a 3D scanning facility so there will be hands on experiences and professional guided courses.
When it comes to scripting plug ins, I also would like to share Scriptographer for Adobe Illustrator with you. Scriptographer is an open source development with a broad bunch of contributers pushing up new scripts for graphical and free use. The Plug in is easily installed and has incredible features in his current build, such as a live scripting environment using Java. But the most handy part is the rasterizing section, that enables you to make any vector grids out of bitmap graphics. OK, that doesn´t sound so stunning, but everyone who once tried to make one these dot matrixes on his or her own will really appreciate that function.
By working on a mediafacades project in the last days I tumbled over the pixelsumo blog by Chris o´Shea. He seems to has a similiar approach to our work on the blog and presents interesting and “worth talking about” projects in the field of interaction design, interface research and media art. His latest entry fits very well to our report of Chris Cerritos drawing bots. While a workshop at this years transmediale representatives of the Liverpool based FACT organisation showed us this amazing urban media screen installation.
It´s so wonderful how he involves and attracts the people in the streets. By quite simple means, he builts up an environment so strange and fascinating, that the people rest stunned in front of the screen. The awareness, that these huge mediascreens are more than just oversized advertisingtools, is transmitted by a playful and honourable way. Chris is linked to rAndom international one of the most inspiring and innovative british design studios. rAndom international has made the audience installation for the royal opera house in London.
You see, there is an obvious tendence to leave fixed pixel grid and move towards more playful and spatial designs. One before all advantages of these interfaces is the relation to the location. It seems to live in it´s own habitat and by reflecting the surrounding light building structure and of course the people. This makes it so unique and should be an aim to every interface design posted in public space. We will post a report from the TEI conference´s demo session with a wonderful spatial interface aswell. So… Chris o´Shea is all around.
Another project I really dig and think everyone should know is the cloud by TROIKA, tho other stunning british design studio. An impressive mediascreen, but not with a plan grid of illuminated pixels, but with a poly-warped morphed object with attached little motorized facettes that can turn in two states by a mechanical rotation. I saw it once live in the Design museum in London, where it was honoured as one of the best british designs in 2008. For everyone who knows the facettes at Hackescher Markt in Berlin, the phenomenon should be clear. For the others, a video:
But this wouldn´t be this blog, if there isn´t still something more wonderful to come. Chris, together with Joel Gethin Lewis and Andreas Müller founded a series of talks to interaction design. Ok this happenes in Berlin as well, such as the continious lectures at the T-Labs or the upgrade sessions. They called it “This happened” and have documented every talk (over 50!!) with also nearly all the slides of the presentation. They know how to do it. Check out the talks here. Referring to the last article on fashioning technologies, here´s one of these talks of Moritz Waldemeyer who was working with Hussein Chalayan on his kinetic dresses. Enjoy!!
