All posts by pfry

Publications

Publication: You Are Here – Art After the Internet

You Are Here book coverHere’s a book that might interest digital artists. You Are Here: Art After the Internet (Cornerhouse Books) critically explores both the effects and affects that the Internet has had on contemporary artistic practices.

Responding to an era that has increasingly chosen to dub itself as ‘post-internet’, this collective text traces a potted narrative exploring the relationship of the Internet to art practices from the early millennium to the present day.

The book positions itself as a provocation on the current state of cultural production, relying on first-person accounts from artists, writers and curators as the primary source material. The book raises urgent questions about how we negotiate the formal, aesthetic and conceptual relationship of art and its effects after the ubiquitous rise of the Internet.

272 pages / 70 colour illustrations
Expected Publication: 14 Apr 2014

Events, Inspiration

Designs of the Year 2014

DOTY-CATALOGUE-634The Design Museum’s Designs of the Year exhibition showcases the world’s best cutting-edge digital, architecture, fashion, furniture, graphic, product and transport design.

Digital innovations include:

  • a crowd-sourced search-and-rescue drone
  • a transport app which make the world’s most complicated cities easier to navigate
  • a mobile gaming app designed to be deployed over many centuries, so impossible to finish in your lifetime
  • a platform for people to strike up conversations with street furniture
  • a calendar made entirely of Lego that synchronises to your online calendar.
  • Dumb Ways to Die, a song, book, smartphone game and interactive outdoor posters designed to get young people to care about safety
  • the Oculus Rift, a ground-breaking virtual reality headset for immersive gaming (currently being adapted by Goldsmiths student Terence Broad)
  • a smartphone-based system for affordable and portable eye examinations
  • a smartphone spectrometer that can analyse pollutants
  • Touch Board, which can turn almost any surface or material into an interface.

This is a not-to-be-missed exhibition for anyone interested in design!
26 March 2014 – 25 August 2014

!! Use the code DEZ25 to get 25% off online tickets !!

Designs of the Year 2014 website

Students, Videos

Student profile: Ana Belén Alonso

Artist and Goldsmiths student Ana Belén Alonso describes a recent Computational Studio Arts project she’s been working on:

In this first term of MFA, my goal was to get to grips with the languages of programing JAVA and C++ by doing tutorials and viewing examples that had to do with my interest in knowing more about how humans interact with technology.

The idea of this project was to create a visual instrument. This instrument works using different eye expressions so you can play all the notes of a scale and also be able to change the scale and instrument.

I used the code ofxFaceTracker to extract the blink of the eyes. After this I connected a sound to the blink movement that is captured by a camera.

In this first gorilla-eyesstage of the project you can only see in the screen the two eyes with a graphic that shows how much you blink. But the idea is to create a very simple graphic visual interface that will be like an animal mask that just shows the user’s eyes.

Events

Talk: Intelligent narrative generation

mark-riedlYou are invited to Mark Riedl’s talk entitled Intelligent Narrative Generation: Creativity, Engagement, and Cognition.

Where: Room 322, New Academic Building (NAB)
When: 4pm Monday 31 March 2014

(And at 7pm, join Mark Bishop’s book launch event)

Abstract
Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience — we as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and educate. Indeed there is evidence to suggest that narrative is a fundamental means by which we organize, understand, and explain the world. In this talk, I present research on artificial intelligence approaches to the creation of novel narrative structures using a range of cognitively inspired techniques from planning to machine learning. I discuss how computational story generation capabilities facilitate the creation of engaging, interactive user experiences in virtual worlds, computer games, and training simulations. I conclude with an ongoing research effort toward generalized computational narrative intelligence in which a system learns from crowdsourced experiences.

Biography
Dr. Mark Riedl is an Assistant Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. Dr. Riedl’s research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and storytelling. The principle research question his lab addresses is: how can intelligent computational systems reason about and create engaging experiences for users of virtual worlds and computer games. Dr. Riedl explores this question in two ways. First, he seeks to understand how computational systems can represent, reason about, and create narratives and interactive stories. Second, he seeks to understand how computational systems can autonomously design computer games. Dr. Riedl earned a PhD degree in 2004 from North Carolina State University. From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Riedl was a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. Dr. Riedl joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, ONR, the U.S. Army, U.S. Health and Human Services, Disney, and Google. He is the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award and an NSF CAREER Award.

Events, Publications, Staff profiles and activity

Book launch: Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory

sensorimotorWhy does a circle look curved and not angular? And why does red not sound like a bell?

To answer these questions, Goldsmiths’ Professor of Cognitive Computing Mark Bishop has co-edited the new book Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory.

Over the course of 16 essays, the book takes examples from human-computer interaction, children’s play, virtual reality, robotics and linguistics to analyse the philosophical foundations of sensorimotor theory – and introduce a radically new approach in cognitive science.

Mark Bishop and his co-editor Andrew Martin will launch the book at Goldsmiths’ New Academic Building at 7pm Monday 31 March 2014. All are welcome – email m.bishop@gold.ac.uk to book a place.

Mark Bishop is Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths.

News, Students, Videos

Google/Barbican digital art site headlines Goldsmiths Creative Computing student

A Goldsmiths Creative Computing student is featured on the front page of DevArt, the new digital creativity website from Google and London’s Barbican Centre.

DevArt is part of a new digital art installation for Digital Revolution, the biggest and most comprehensive exploration of digital creativity ever to be staged in the UK. After running in London, the exhibition will then go on tour to cities around the world.

Year 2 student Terence Broad has developed a project that enables people to experience augmented reality by donning a virtual reality headset – the Oculus Rift. This uses two cameras to replicate the user’s normal vision (see video clips below) – and then allows others to distort and manipulate it.


Initial testing

Using the Google Hangouts API, people online can choose and link up sets of triggers and responses that control the perceptual experience for the user. Triggers can include motion detection, face detection, head movement, pitch, loudness and brightness. Responses can include image manipulation such as colour shifting, wobble and morphing effects, blurring, chromatic abberation and temporal layering (see video clips below).


The affect of Radiohead on visual perception. Low, medium & high audio frequencies control colour shifting, wobble, blurring and temporal layering.
The user experience: “This is awesome.”

Goldsmiths’ BSc in Creative Computing prepares students to take an active role in the creation of computational systems in arts, music, film, digital media, and other areas of the software industry that require creative individuals. About Creative Computing at Goldsmiths