#presentation notes

Our Intention:

We have 3 main goals with this Augmented Reality (AR) Project:

To promote and essentially advertise RMIT’s New Academic Street (NAS). Using walls and hoarding which surround work sites on campus to create an AR experience.

To foster a sense of community amongst students at RMIT through the use of play. Promoting networking and social interaction

To showcase up and coming technology to students in a way which they can participate in with fellow students.

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According to the Oxford Dictionary – the term Play is to “Engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose”

Though play is indeed recreational and enjoyable, (both draw cards for our project) in the case of our AR Application play will also serve an important purpose.

As RMIT students, often times we find that we come into uni for uni only, we come into campus for classes or to complete our assignments. It’s an in-and-out experience.

We propose that our AR experience will enable interaction between participants through a multiplayer game.

Socialisation is important as we are social beings, as is networking since all of us aim to progress from uni into a career; having connections is a valuable resource. This game will be a means by which networking across disciplines on the RMIT City Campus will become possible.

Our Audience:

As explained, our audience is specifically RMIT University Students; and even more specifically those who study on City Campus. These are those who are witnessing the NAS construction.

They will connect to the game via their RMIT student ID and password.

+ PERSONA

So far we have created one persona for this project, his name is Adam Lucky.

SEPARATION PERFECTED & COMMODITY AS SPECTACLE

TV spots and Monodramas

This is a great piece by Stan Douglas that addresses the spectacle beautifully. Note that these TV spots/monodramas were aired on public television (in 1992 Canada) in time slots allotted for commercials without any preface/warning/announcement for three weeks. The TV station received several calls asking what it was being sold to them [medienkunstnetz]. Debord asserts that the relationship between people is "mediated by images [4]" and "expresses...the total practice of one particular economic and social formation. [11]"

In many ways we see this in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where keeping up on friends and associates is entirely based on visual images/texts--allowing our eyes and sense of sight to take dominance over our other senses, especially the sense of touch. Debord remarks that sight is the most abstract and easily deceived sense [18]. In this way I think Debord is spot-on; we achieve perfect separation from others in that we have satisfactorily linked just enough of ourselves to each other that there is little motivation to reach for more.

At the same time, I disagree with Debord. Social media can be the perfect synapsis for very close encounters with other people in the flesh. Having an online space for people to share anything of their choosing to anyone and everyone has the potential for further interaction offline.

For some other works on TV, check this out.

UNITY AND DIVISION WITHIN APPEARANCES, THE PROLETARIAT AS SUBJECT AND REPRESENTATION, & TIME AND HISTORY

First, the celebrity.

Invitation to "The View Up Here"

This is a part of a friend's BFA show that touches on the idea of 59-60 of Debord's essay. This pseudocelebrity act will be played out in the gallery space where Cole sits on a self-constructed wooden throne that he asks fellow students to hold up and walk him around the space so he can admire his own artwork hung on the wall. What kinds of characteristics make some humans dazzle over others? Who decides that? Does the media accurately reflect what the populace think?

Second, the General American accent. "Like modern society itself, the spectacle is at once united and divided. In both, unity is grounded in a split. [54]" The media provided a quick leveling of the accent of this country. It's also called the "newscaster accent" because almost any news broadcaster you watch on TV will be speaking like this, because, "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere. [Tsentseresky]" When it permeates the home, not only does culture emerge--why is the South Carolina accent regarded as stupid? or the what does a Black accent mean?--but cultural divisions.

~~~from here on out I ran out of time and will just have to put the core ideas here.

Third, writing history.

http://darci.cs.byu.edu/DARCI/

SPECTACULAR TIME

Kramer falling asleep during a make-out session in The Friar's Club episode of Seinfield.

ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING

Cul-de-sac: Suburban Dream or Dead End?, on NPR

NEGATION AND CONSUMPTION IN THE CULTURAL SPHERE

Andrea Robbins and Max Brecher's Bavarian by Law

IDEOLOGY IN MATERIAL FORM

Hello. My name is Lewis Sykes

I’m an artist, curator, producer and researcher working in the field of interactive, sonic media art. 

This presentation is a whirlwind tour through the past 10 years of my multi-stranded practice.

Through it I’m going to try and share something of my motivation, the theory that informs my practice, my artistic, curatorial and research agendas - and I’m going to do this by showing you examples of artwork that I consider noteworthy, artwork that I’ve curated or commissioned and artwork that I’ve ben involved in making myself as part of a collaborative team.

I shall be your pilot on this trip. DO NOT BE ALARMED.

As I go I’ll introduce a number of ‘Golden Rules’ I’ve distilled from my study and practice and now apply in my work - for example:

Lewis's Golden Rule # 1

Technology abuse is frequently more interesting than technology use.

I’m Director of the sound, music, arts and technology agency Cybersonica - initiated in 2002, based at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Science Museum’s Dana Centre, host of ‘Late at’ events at Tate Britain (2006) and V&A (2008) and currently working with Manchester Art Gallery on Make It Yourself.

As a freelance producer I’ve worked for the likes of Martyn Ware, Co-founder of Heaven 17 and The Human League organising his national touring programme exploring innovation in convergent art, the Future Of Sound.

I’m one half of Monomatic  - a creative partnership with composer, performer, software architect, programmer and sound designer Nick Rothwell. I’ve been involved in some form of creative collaboration since my early teens - almost without break.

I’ve just started a practice as research PhD project at MIRIAD, MMU - The Augmented Tonoscope (all will be explained later)...

My involvement with New Media Art started in 1999 when I began a part-time MA Hypermedia Studies at  the (now defunkt) Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster.

Prior to that I’d been a semi-professional musician running a small independent record label - Zip Dog Records - ’til it went bankrupt in ’98 and the co-Directors interpersonal relationships kinda imploded.

Being a musician influences my creative outlook. I’ve a modicum of innate talent and years of practice in sound and music - and the bleeding edge technology used to create, produce, commodify and perform it.

Through the ‘History of Convergence’ theory module of my MA taught by Dr Richard Barbrook I was introduced to and wrote an essay about Jaques Attali’s 1977 essay Noise: The Political Economy of Music. “Attali raises many provocative questions through 'Noise'. Of particular interest are his notions of music as prophetic - a herald of times to come - and his assertion that we are moving into a new epoch of music - the so-called ‘Age of Composition’”. 

Dr. Richard Barbrook is the author of Pluto Press's Spring 2007 release Imaginary Futures and has also written a number of highly influential essays on the clash between commerce and cooperation within the Internet, including 'The Hi-Tech Gift Economy', 'Cyber-communism', 'The Regulation of Liberty' and, with Andy Cameron, 'The Californian Ideology'.

Likewise my MA practice lecturer, Andy Cameron - Andy Cameron | transmediale, influenced my ideas about interactivity - encouraging playfulness, simplicity, humour and above all agency - “action or intervention, esp. such as to produce a particular effect”.

Andy Cameron is the Head of the Interactive Department at Fabrica, the Benetton research centre on communication in Treviso, Italy. Each year Fabrica invites young artists, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, interaction designers from all over the world to collaborate and “uncover the future” He created the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster and co-founded Romandson Interactive and Antirom, a studio that investigates the nature of interactivity - how it operates as a language, what forms and figurations of rhetoric it makes available, and what novel structures of spectatorship it offers. Besides creating interactive installations around the world for museums, art galleries and public spaces, Andy Cameron teaches interactive art and design at the IUAV in Venice and speaks regularly on the impact of interactive technologies on design, marketing and the fine arts.In 2008 he was a jury member for the Interactive Arts prize at Ars Electronica and in 2009 he was guest curator of the Share Festival for Interactive Art in Turin. Andy lives and works in London and Treviso.

Lewis’s Golden Rule #2

Humour = Maturity

So what do I mean by interactive, sonic media art?

Discover Sonic Arts

In some respects, it's easier to say what sonic art is NOT rather than what it IS. There is surprisingly little overlap between music technology as it is conventionally understood and sonic art. Although sonic art uses many of the same technical tools, it uses them in a different way and to different ends. There is no one comprehensive definition of sonic art : it can encompass a wide range of areas, some of which it may share with music technology although it often ventures into computer programming or fine art. It is at least as likely that one would experience the products of sonic art in an art gallery as in the context of a performance.

Interactive art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interactive art is a form of installation-based art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose...

Works of this kind... frequently feature computers and sensors to respond to motion, heat, meteorological changes or other types of input their maker... has programmed in order to elicit responses based on participant action.

Interactive art is a genre of art in which the viewers participate in some way by providing an input in order to determine the outcome. Unlike traditional art forms wherein the interaction of the spectator is merely a mental event, interactivity allows for various types of navigation, assembly, and/or contribution to an artwork, which goes far beyond purely psychological activity.[2] Interactivity as a medium produces meaning.[3] In interactive artworks, both the audience and the machine work together in dialogue in order to produce a completely unique artwork for each audience to observe.

Though some of the earliest examples of interactive art have been dated back to the 1920s, most digital art didn’t make its official entry into the world of art until the late 1990s.[1] Since this debut, countless museums and venues have been increasingly accommodating digital and interactive art into their productions...

Interactive art can be distinguished from Generative art in that it constitutes a dialogue between the artwork and the participant; specifically, the participant has agency, or the ability, even in an unintentional manner, to act upon the artwork and is furthermore invited to do so within the context of the piece, i.e. the work affords the interaction. More often, we can consider that the work takes its visitor into account... By contrast, Generative Art, which may be interactive, but not responsive per se, tends to be a monologue - the artwork may change or evolve in the presence of the viewer, but the viewer may not be invited to engage in the reaction but merely enjoy it.

Human–computer interaction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. It is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design and several other fields of study. Interaction between users and computers occurs at the user interface (or simply interface), which includes both software and hardware; for example, characters or objects displayed by software on a personal computer's monitor, input received from users via hardware peripherals such as keyboards and mice, and other user interactions with large-scale computerized systems such as aircraft and power plants.

Lewis’s Model of Interactivity...

 x-axis - (data type) - input

Incidental - Authored

y-axis -  (data processing) - output

Mediated  - Direct

Where do these examples lie?

A  traditional musical instrument - piano, violin

windchime

Beatbox - Andy Huntington Interaction & Sound » Beatbox

Daniel Hirschmann's Projects : Tuned Stairs

bakteria.org - INF.EKt.aDo ( x ) bakteria.org

SquidSoup - Driftnet - http://www.squidsoup.org/driftnet/

Variable 4 - Variable 4 transforms these weather patterns into a living musical composition with the same unpredictability as the elements themselves. Using meteorological sensors connected to a custom software environment developed by the artists, the wild weather conditions of the Kent coastland act as composer, navigating through a map of 24 specifically written movements.

cyclone - Robert Henke

There could be a third z-axis which locates the data temporally e.g. real-time or pre-recorded?

e.g. music box

Lewis’s Golden Rule # 3

Strive for technological transparency

it doesn’t matter how sophisticated the ‘plumbing’ is - keep it out of sight... unless the plumbing itself is beautiful i.e. http://www.smoothware.com/danny/weavemirrormov.html

Cybersonica commissions

A(~10min) video about the May 2006 sonic art exhibition in Phonica Records, Soho, London

Three commissioned works I particularly like...

2006 - Troika - Schizoporotica - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dLmIn1Rl7I In Schizoporotica, Troika uniquely reinvent the music box over a century after its conception. Users are invited to tear their tickets and, by feeding them into the machine, create their own shredded melody.

2007 - Michael Markert's kII 2.1 for Cybersonica and Kinetica Museum - Soundwaves - a phonetic voice theremin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rpaO-enQzc

2007 - tapTap - a percussive knock-box installation/the modular rhythm construction toy by Andy Huntington

Personal work

Groovatron - MA Practice module

The Sancho Plan

Processing... discome & Light Wave Virtual

Monomatic - PEAL