All posts by pfry

Events, Inspiration

Event: Creative Data Club

creativedataclubSomerset House, Strand, London
6pm-8pm Tuesday 13 May 2014

A place for anyone interested in using data in new and interesting ways, here’s a chance to hear from a few people about interesting data projects and chatting about data in the arts over a couple of beers.

For artists, data opens up a whole new way of interacting with everyday life. For cultural organisations the opportunities for how we build audiences and sustain ourselves are huge.

Lined up for a series of short presentations are:

And if you have an interesting project that you’d like to share, contact the organisers at marketing@soundandmusic.org

Events, Staff profiles and activity

Event: Sonic pattern and the textility of code

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

11am – 6pm Tuesday 13 May 2014
LimeWharf Cultural Innovation Hub & Artistic Laboratory, Vyner St, London E2 9DJ
Tickets £20 (£15 concessions) – buy here

How do patterned sound and threads allow us to sense the abstract and conceptualise the tactile?

A diverse panel talk about their work as weavers, knitters, live coders, dyadic mathematicians, generative musicians and digital makers. We will look for a rich view of technology as a meeting point of craft, culture and live experience.

The invited speakers will explore their own practice of making, process, language, material and output, providing a view of technology as a meeting point of craft, culture and live experience.

The discussion will be lead by Professor Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths), Bronac Ferran and David Toop. Practitioners include Alessandro Altavilla, Felicity Ford, Berit Greinke, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Alex McLean and Becky Stewart.

There will be audio-visual interludes through the day, including a screening of Ismini Samanidou and Scanner’s film Weave Waves and a short performance by Felicity Ford. The event will close with a live music performance from Leafcutter John, Matthew Yee-King and Alex McLean, exploring code, pattern and sound.

Curated by Karen Gaskill, Crafts Council. A collaboration between the Craft Council, ICSRiM (School of Music, University of Leeds), the Thursday Club (Goldsmiths), V&A Digital Futures and the Live Coding Research Network.

Made possible through funding and support by the Craft Council, Sound and Music, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Centre for Creative Collaboration.
These events are co-produced with Sound and Music as part of the 2014/15 Composer Curator programme.

Events, News

Event: International Conference on Computational Creativity

ljubGoldsmiths Department of Computing is taking a lead role in the 5th International Conference on Computational Creativity, 10-13 June 2014 in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Computational Creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative.

As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

Two papers that offer an overview of computational creativity

Events, News

Conference: Performance and new technologies

tapra-logoCall for Participation: 10th Annual TaPRA Conference, hosted by Royal Holloway, 3-5 September 2014, Royal Holloway, London.

Re-envisaging Performance and ‘New’ Technologies: Evolving contexts, Emerging Practices, Current Challenges, New Directions

Call deadline: 30 April 2014

The Performance and New Technologies Working Group invites contributors to reconsider performance and ‘new’ technologies by reflecting on current contexts, practices, and theories. The aim of the 2014 call is to examine how this area of practice and research has evolved, to appraise its current significance and envisage future directions. This investigation and self-reflection is framed by rapid, latter-day socio-technical developments such as social networking, internet of things, cloud computing, and augmented reality, and their transformative impact on the cultural landscapes of today.

Interplays between performance/theatre and technology date back to the origins of theatre history (Reilly 2013). Nevertheless, their recent negotiations and ‘entanglements’ (Salter 2010) are marked by an era where humanist notions of materiality, embodiment and alterity are being reconfigured giving rise to major socio-cultural shifts as well as ontologically novel performance paradigms (Giannachi 2004, Broadhurst 2011, Dixon 2007, Causey 2006, Chatzichristodoulou, Jefferies and Zerihan 2009, among others). These developments reshape the ways we make and experience theatre and performance and pose questions that problematise the particular research area, specifically:

What is new about ‘new’ technologies in theatre and performance? Which are the new performance practices, methodological approaches, and theoretical paradigms? How does the terrain of performance and technology cross over, inform, and challenge other areas of enquiry in theatre and performance studies? What is at stake for theatre and performance once it becomes repositioned as less of a “human-centered affair” (Salter, 2010: xxvii)? How does it engage with machines, objects, matter and ‘actors’ (Latour 1987) rather than ‘props’ subservient to human creativity? Finally, self-reflexively for the Working Group itself – does performance and ‘new’ technologies continue to constitute a distinct field of practice and research?

Proposals might consider the following issues, though these are not exclusive:

  • re-envisaging the field and remapping terrains: performance and technology, digital and networked performance, and intermedial performance practices
  • performance and (anti-)social networking
  • non-human theatre: machinic agency and affect
  • live algorithms: new interpretations of liveness in performance and theatre practice
  • geopolitical shifts: technologies of colonialism in the service of performance
  • connectivity, access, participation: the democratisation of performance
  • outsourcing labour and user engagement: the ethics of virtual and networked theatre and performance practice
  • expanding/limiting audience communities: digital and mixed-reality negotiations between the individual and the group, the user and the theatre crowd
  • the role of performance and theatre within Digital Humanities.

Proposals
Please send a 300 word proposal, a short biographical statement, and an outline of technical requirements by 30th April to both Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Eirini Nedelkopoulou.

Proposals may be directed into a range of presentational formats: traditional panels (with 20 minute papers); pre-circulated papers that form the basis for a short presentation and discussion; or, where appropriate, performance-based panels. While we welcome statements of preference, final decisions will be made by the working group convenors and will be indicated at the time of acceptance. We welcome alternative, practice-as-research or performative proposals that engage rigorously with the theme, but these must be achievable with limited resources and within a 20-30 minute time period.

Adapted from a call for participation on the TaPRA conference website

Events, Staff profiles and activity

Major exhibition for Goldsmiths’ Professor of Computer Art

mutator_11

In April-May 2014 a major exhibition in Brussels celebrates the work of William Latham, Professor of Computer Art at Goldsmiths.

His first major exhibition outside the UK in over twenty years, Mutator 1 + 2 : Evolutionary Art includes his early hand-drawn works, large computer generated Cibachrome prints, video art and his most recent interactive projected imagery that explores and embodies evolutionary processes, physical and virtual space. William will also execute some large scale hand drawings in the iMAL space in Brussels.

Biography

William Latham was one of the first UK artists in the 1980s to create computer art, and he rapidly gained an international reputation as a pioneer in the field. His work blends organic imagery and computer animation, using software modelled upon the processes of evolution. Starting with a simple shape, Latham introduces random ‘mutations’ of a form in order to generate increasingly complex three-dimensional creations that resemble fantastical, futuristic organisms.

lathamFrom 1987 to 1993 William became a research fellow at the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester UK and his Mutation work achieved world-wide recognition at SIGGRAPH. He co-authored the book Evolutionary Art and Computers and showed his organic artworks and films in major international touring exhibitions.

Based on his methodology for mutating and evolving forms, his Mutator software allows designers to ‘breed’ designs in the same way as Latham generates art, pulling us into the virtual laboratories of artificial life. The manipulation of the natural world by humans is a theme which runs though much of Latham’s work; in fact he likens himself to a gardener who breeds organic art by exploiting and amplifying mutations in order to create new, hybrid forms, a process he describes as “an evolution driven by aesthetics”.

From 1994 to 2003 William was CEO and founder of leading games developer Computer Artworks Ltd, which produced hit games including The THING (see clip below). During this time he also worked with UK rave bands producing organic graphics and videos.

From 2005 to 2006 William was Professor of Creative Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University and in 2007 he became Professor of Computer Art at Goldsmiths. At Goldsmiths he is working on research in collaboration with the Bioinformatics Department at Imperial College applying his evolutionary rule-based approach to the domain of protein folding, scientific visualization and gamification in collaboration with Goldsmiths’ Professor Frederic Leymarie.

This article was adapted from the Mutator 1 + 2 exhibition text.

News, Students

Goldsmiths students win Ukie games jam

trophyA team of Goldsmiths MSc Computer Games & Entertainment students have been awarded first prize at the Student Games Jam run by the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (Ukie).

The jam, which ran 15-16 April 2014, saw five teams from Ukie’s student membership competing against each other to create the best game possible in 39 hours.

The team’s winning game ‘Wisp’ will be an exclusive pitch on Square Enix’s Collective project and will receive a specially-made trophy for Goldsmiths. Each of the teams will also receive prizes from PlayStation First, and a published profile piece.

Leader of the Goldsmiths team James Gamlin said “I am ecstatic to be announced as the winners. The Ukie Student Game Jam has been an incredible experience. Me and the team (Tolga Zeren Kaçar, Madina Berkaliyeva, Chilun Liu and Arthur Wong) are so glad we took part. We loved developing Wisp, though at times we did think it was slightly too ambitious for a 39 hour jam, we did manage to get a lot done in the end. We can’t wait to participate again next year.”

ukie
Screenshot from ‘Wisp’

Judge Stuart Barnett, Senior Designer at SCEE said: “I was amazed at the quality of games created from the Ukie student game jam in just two days and it was a pleasure seeing how creative and talented the students taking part were. It’s a great indication of the health of the games industry in the UK if universities are producing such talented students and I look forward to seeing how they develop their ideas in the future given more time.”

Events, News

Undergraduate Innovation Awards

trophyUndergraduate students are invited to submit any computing project you completed during the academic year 2013-14, to compete for one of three Innovation Awards.

  • Best Creative Work (Art or Music)
  • Best Product Idea
  • Best Software

The Innovation Award is a cross-university challenge organised by Conrad Grant, President of Goldsmiths Student Union (2013-14).

The cash prizes will be awarded to successful exploitation of a unique idea from part of your studies at Goldsmiths this year. The shortlisting judges from the Department of Computing will be looking for technical creativity, emotional engagement and originality.

15-20 shortlisted candidates will present their projects at the undergraduate EXPO show at the Amersham Arms on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 June 2014. Judges from the computing industry will attend the show and award three prizes for best artwork/music, best product and best software.

Enter the competition

Please email p.fry@gold.ac.uk by 5pm Sunday 11 May 2014, giving:

  1. your name
  2. your programme (eg, BSc Creative Computing) and year (ie, first/second/third)
  3. a link to a website featuring a description of your project and a demo video.

The Goldsmiths logo must appear at the top of your website’s homepage. Your demo video must begin and end with around 4 seconds of the Goldsmiths titlecard.

Terms and conditions

  • You must be a first, second or third year undergraduate student in Goldsmiths’ Department of Computing.
  • The project you submit must be something you created this academic year as part of your academic studies. It could be your final project.
  • You must be available to put up, present and dismantle an exhibition stand featuring your work at the EXPO at 9am-5pm Tuesday 3 June and 12noon-11pm Wednesday 4 June 2014. Department staff can help you to plan and source equipment for your exhibition.
  • By entering the Innovation Awards, you give the Department of Computing the right to publicise your work online and in the media, using texts, images and video content from the website you submit.
  • The judges’ decisions are final.