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

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!!

Another wearable project combining sound and textile computing comes by Holly Schmidt and Dana Ramler from the Emily Carr University in Vancouver. The project is about capturing the mood of the wearer and displaying it with ambient sounds. The Interface is a vest to be worn over your all day cloth and integrates a polar rate heartbeat monitor designed by Danjuliodesigns with elements avaiable via sparkfun. By detecting the rate an somehow according sound will be played by a little speaker sewn in the collar right next to the ear. Depending on your mood, the sound varies. The more active you are, the sound increases in intensity as well. Though this sounds logically on first sight, a lot of questions occur. Why do the sound has to react in the same way i feel. Can´t it be more like a remedy, so if i feel down it pushes me up? How does the interface has to look like for these decision processes when the only material is fabric cloth. Some of these questions get answered in the interview video we shot during the demo session.

On this point I have to link to some projects of Hussein Chalayan. Chalayan is working on the edge of fashion and technology since a long time and had an impressing exhibition at the London Design Museum while last years TEI conference. His work is pushing the boarders of wearables while in the same time being into fashion through and through. This is the way it should be: trying to be cutting edge when it comes to technology and maximum fashion on the other hand. The projects I seen on wearables beside his work put the technological aspects too much in the foreground. They should support the fashion, but not be it´s reason.

As a lot of you allready know there is the twitter feed right to this article. It´s the official TEI°10 Twitter activity, but as you know as well, there is something drooling under the world wide bed. So check the twittering by using the #teiconf hashtag. I´d like to embed this stream here too, but somehow this does not work out well, so you have to take the long way.

There also have been other blogging activities next to ours. Check Jon Kolko´s very nice and detailed article at the Frog Design blog. Another blog reporting from the conference comes from Allison Abel. Check it out at groovemechanic.com.

Back to the work of Sarah Kettley. She linked the garments to a cellist and micro controller. The cellist is playing a harmony or musical piece with his electronic instrument as he is used to. The conductive garments are woven into a flexible hose worn around the elbow. By stretching the arm while playing the cellist has the opportunity to either delay or distort the sound he is playing (of course the instrument must be linked with the computer as well). The wished effect has to be set before. As much the fabric gets stretched the voltage running through the fibres changes. This change can be read and transferred into a digital command. Though I like this project very much I think it´s just a first step in a right direction. The combination of sound and movement is tricky and easy at the same time. People find it interesting because they do not understand the link between actuator and result. Sound allows a much more blurr than for example kinetic output that is more direct and undoubtable. But hey: it´s just an exploration! Now let Sarah do the talking:

Right now the panel discussion is over and everyone is waiting for the closing keynote by Vik Muniz. The panel, consisting of John Frazer, Natalie Kuldell, Tavares Strachan and  Vik Muniz was interesting in case of the ways of thinking that unites and devides artists and scientists. How do artists think, act and see the world? And how it is with the scientist? Collaborations come up between the two. How do problems occur? How do they get solved? Is there a “common” sense of true, false, beautiful? How do beasty B and beasty A get together?

These and other questions are discussed in the panel. For everyone who wants to have the TEI°10 flavour for “to go” or maybe been too dizzy after three days of amazing conference action, can download the audio take of the discussion and re-listen it while travelling home.

So now you can see how it looks from a confernce attendees point of view. to get the vice versa impression this picture might help you.