(Wow… I’m behind on the blogging thing.)
There was way too much to see since the conference/symposium/festival was so ambitious, with events happening at many different venues. After the fact I was sorry to have missed the Interactive Cinema series that was curated by Michael Lew among others.
Of that small slice of projects I encountered, here’s what stood out:
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The SRL show was great. See my SRL show review.
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Karaoke Ice was one of my favourites. Reminded me of a Burning Man art car with higher production values and a slightly more cohesive vision (of robot squirrels and ice pops).
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Playas: Homeland Mirage which uses a game engine to recreate the town of Playas, New Mexico which was bought by the Department of Homeland Security and turned into a training camp.
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Four movie screens with corresponding chairs tracking heartbeats (sorry, forget the actual name). I liked the idea of showing a narrative from several perspectives in a non-linear way. I still have no idea how the heartbeats influenced the movies, but the way the screens were set up so you couldn’t see all at once was great.
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Winner of the “best mapping” award goes to Gorbet Design for their P2P lightboard installation. Basically there is a marquee with 125 lights and a corresponding panel across the street with 125 ordinary light switches. Each switch is mapped directly to the corresponding light. People got it intuitively and the fun came from writing different words or making different designs. In the South Hall there were several projects where to me the mapping between the input or interaction and the output could have been stronger. In general I think simpler is better — have the depth in your piece come from interaction using simple controls/gestures.
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Skatesonic by Cobi Van Tonder augmented skateboards with microphones and sensors to create different sounds. The installation was really impressive, with some ramps and a little half-pipe. The sounds I liked best were the ones that were the uneffected microphone sound from the skateboards. Cobi had an impressive Max/MSP patch driving the whole thing. I was tempted to try it out, but I prefer my boardsports in the water (which is much softer than the ground, given suitably low velocities).
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Digital Kakejiku was a fantastic set of projections on City Hall. They took up the entire space, inside and out, and were really beautiful. The patterns changed slowly enough that if you stared and tried to see them change, you could barely perceive it. But after looking away for a few minutes you would look back and have the whole scene transformed. People sat there for tens of minutes at a time and it created an interesting social space when otherwise it would have been empty of people. My favourite moment was when the roving laptop band (about 5 people with shopping carts, battery, video projector and inflatable screen) started setting up and the (presumably) Japanese duo inside City Hall looked out with a kind of “huh?” expression and started conferring with each other. Once the laptop/vj band was set up and rocking out, they went down, had a peek over the shoulders of the band (who, like many laptop performers, seemed completely oblivious to the outside world) then just smiled, hung out, and walked away.
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