We’re giving blog subscribers four free tickets to the Science Museum’s latest exhibition ROBOTS, which runs from February to September 2017
COMPETITION NOW CLOSED
ROBOTS takes you on an incredible journey spanning five centuries, illustrated with robotic artefacts from around the globe, from a 16th century mechanised monk to the very latest in robotic technology straight from the lab, and some of film’s most iconic robotic creations.
Focusing on why they exist rather than on how they work, this blockbuster exhibition explores the ways robots mirror humanity and the insights they offer into our ambitions, desires and position in a rapidly changing world.
We are especially excited about the exhibition, as it includes Robotic Skin by Dr Perla Maiolino, one of our research and teaching fellows. Tickets are £15 (£13 concessions) – or free to the four lucky winners!
COMPETITION NOW CLOSED
Closing date: 11pm Sunday 5 March 2017. We’ll pick four new subscribers at random, and email them on Monday 6 March 2017 with details of how to claim their free ticket.
What happens if you fill a pub with clever and lovely people then invite loads of amazing Goldsmiths scientists to entertain them?
Join us on Wednesday 15 March for a chaotic science cabaret in the Amersham Arms, featuring a line-up of Goldsmiths experts who will delve into the weird and wonderful side of computer science and psychology.
Expect laughs, serial killers, Brad Pitt, a high-tech smart glove, facts that sound totally made up but aren’t, and loads of terrible PowerPoints. Compered by comedian Steve Cross. The line-up:
Mark d’Inverno (Computing): Why machines can never be creative – the history and future of creativity
Hadeel Ayoub (Computing): Let’s have a talk… glove to glove
Sarah Wiseman (Computing): People are weird: Why we shouldn’t experiment on students
Caoimhe McAnena (Psychology): The psychology of the Croydon Cat Killer
Ashok Jansari (Psychology): What’s the difference between Brad Pitt and a Super-cop?
Robert Chapman (Psychology): Why science reporting isn’t funny
When: 6:30pm for 7pm start, Wednesday 15 March 2017 Where: Amersham Arms, 388 New Cross Road, SE14 6TY Tickets: £6 (£5 for Goldsmiths staff/students). Buy online
Part of British Science Week. All proceeds from ticket sales will go to CARA, the Centre for At-Risk Academics.
For the second year running, we’re inviting students from Goldsmiths and beyond to participate in a marathon computer game creation event.
Global Game Jam is an international event, taking place in dozens of locations around the world. Over 48 caffeine-fueled hours, participants will develop, programme, test and present a whole bunch of new games.
Starts: 4.30pm Friday 20 Jan 2017 Ends: 7pm Sunday 22 Jan 2017 Venue: Launch event at RHB 300, then moving to Hatcham St James (the church), New Cross SE14 6AD. Map Tickets: Free. Book online here
At the Goldsmiths event, students from first year to PhD will collaborate in teams, enrich their skills and build their professional portfolios to show off to potential employers. It’s not only for Computing students, but also those studying Design, Music, Creative Writing – or anything else. We welcome students from outside Goldsmiths, as well as members of the London games development community.
Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam. The weekend makes a global creative buzz in games development – be it programming, iterative design, narrative exploration or artistic expression. GGJ encourages people with all kinds of backgrounds to participate and contribute to this global spread of game development and creativity.
GGJ is not a competition: it’s known for helping foster new friendships, increase confidence and opportunities within the community. It is an intellectual challenge, where people are invited to explore new technology tools, try new roles and test their skills.
Everyone gathers on Friday late afternoon and watches a short video keynote with advice from leading game developers. The secret theme is announced (last year’s was “ritual”) and teams worldwide are then challenged to make games based on that theme, with games to be completed by Sunday afternoon.
Our participation in Global Game Jam marks Goldsmiths as a university that is central to the world of creative, innovative, international games development. The event is organised by Goldsmiths Computing and the student tech society Hacksmiths.
A festival of experimental sound, film and performance – co-curated by Goldsmiths and London College of Communication – takes place in Rotherhithe this December.
Guy Sherwin >> ‘Sound Cuts’ – 4 projector performance
Sherwin’s film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light, time and sound as fundamental to cinema. Sherwin was guest curator of ‘Film in Space’ an exhibition of expanded cinema at Camden Arts Centre. His films have screened at Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
Alice Kemp >> live art performance
Kemp works with dream-image-language and subtle trance states to create live-art performances and audio compositions. Her practice involves composition, public and private rituals, doll-making, drawing and painting. Her performances have been described as hypnotic, intense, unnerving, beautiful, dark and reflective, aggressive, confusing, meditative, pointless, brave, sensual, baffling, delicate, and absurd.
Simon Katan >> ‘Conditional Love’ – participatory networked device performance
Katan is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. His work incorporates hidden mechanisms, emergent behaviour, paradox, self-reference, inconsistency, abstract humour, absurdity and wonder. He is a researcher and lecturer at Goldsmiths’ Embodied Audio Visual Interactions group.
Heather Ross >> Domestic Dawn Chorus
Ross is concerned with how human experience is mediated, by exploring the tensions between reality and representation. How do the technologies of reproduction and representation affect the way we understand the world through our senses? Dealing with themes of alienation, melancholy, remoteness, disembodiment and longing, her work conjoins realities and fictions, to convey ambiguous environments, spaces and forms.
Claire Undy & Bill Leslie >> Video work
Claire Undy is an artist and curator, working largely with performance, video and time-based media. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2016, and co-founded the curatorial project Skelf. Bill Leslie is a visual artist whose work draws on Modern abstract sculpture, 1950s B-movies, as well as Russian Constructivism and modern architecture. Concerned with the relationship of sculpture and the photographic image, his works develop through transformations of scale, context and media.
Sunday 11 December
Lee Patterson >> Amplified devices and processes
Working across various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack and installation, Patterson attempts to understand his surroundings through different ways of listening. Characterised by revealing subliminal and barely audible sound materials within commonplace things, his unorthodox approach to generating sound has led to collaborations with a host of international artists and musicians.
Áine O’Dwyer >> DJ set with field recordings
With a background combining Irish traditional music and contemporary performance, Áine O’Dwyer creates multi-layered, experiential work that begs questions of historicism and the social proximities of the everyday, as well as the presumed nature of records themselves. For this DJ set, she will play her collection of field recordings, drawing on her knowledge of the acoustics of the Brunel Tunnel from her two year residency there.
Howlround >> Live tape manipulation on 3 reel-to-reel machines, tape loops stretching across the space…
Howlround create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread.
Wajid Yaseen & Anthony Elliot >> Oscillators, Extended vocal performance, drawn circuits
Anthony & Wajid’s ‘Crossing Lines’ recently opened the Tempting Failure festival. An improvised vocal and sound-drawing performance, it involved Wajid Yaseen’s experiments in extended vocal techniques with Anthony Elliott’s sculpture-sound-printing rheostat to explore a balance between all-gate square wave generators that allow on-off vocal input. A contrast in frequency and sound texture generated by the two performers and two systems was suspended between the systematic and the unplanned.
This November promises to be a month full of events – most of which are free (or cheap) and open to everyone. Here’s what’s coming up…
6.30pm Thursday 3 November Goldsmiths Showoff: Strange days
Comedy and cabaret in the pub featuring a line-up of Goldsmiths experts including Kate Devlin on the algorithms of online dating, Sylvia Pan on virtual humans, Sarah Wiseman on the quantified self, and Dee Harding on so-called experts.
4pm Wednesday 9 November Lecture: Linguistic and perceptual colour categories
Christoph Witzle (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) discusses his work investigating how linguistic colour categories may be related to colour perception.
4pm Wednesday 16 November Lecture: Cultural Computing: Looking for Japan
Renowned media artist Naoko Tosa discusses the role of information technology in enabling new understandings of a multicultural world.
4pm Thu 17 Nov NEW! Lecture: The Hearing Body
Talk on using of sound to change people´s experiences of their body and the surrounding space, as well as its impact on emotion and behaviour.
6.30pm Thursday 17 November NEW! Talk and performance: Unreal-time improv and actual-timeline composition
Composer and improviser Panos Ghikas discusses his research developing a live performance interface for navigation through audio-timelines with the purpose of re-sequencing audio gestures.
Friday 18 – Sunday 20 November NEW! I am human: precarious journeys
Featuring interactive design by Goldsmiths Computing and music by Brian Eno, Sue Clayton’s multimedia installation traces the journeys of refugees as they navigate the perils of the sea, the national border and the camp.
Sat 19 – Sun 20 November AdventureX: Narrative Games Convention
Now in its sixth year, AdventureX is a free event bringing together developers & gamers with a passion for interactive storytelling. Encompassing everything from retro pixel-hunts to rich, branching narratives, AdventureX is celebration of creativity, indie development and geek culture.
3pm Thursday 22 November NEW! Innovation Lecture Series: Kate Russell (BBC Click)
Kate Russell writes about technology, gaming and the Internet reports for BBC technology programme Click. Her book Working the Cloud is aims to help businesses better use the Internet.
4pm Wednesday 23 November Characterising human imagination through art and science
Sheldon Brown (Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination) shows artworks that aim to engage components of cognition that make up “the imagination”.
4pm Wednesday 30 November Lecture: Attention and cross-cultural differences
Eirini Mavritsaki (Birmingham City Uni) discusses her use of computational models to observe differences in visual attention in East Asian and European American cultures.
4pm Wednesday 8 December Lecture: Composer, Performer, Listener
Jason Freeman (Georgia Tech) explores real-time music notation, live coding, laptop ensembles, mobile technology, and open-form scores.
Friday 17 – Saturday 18 December Sex Tech Hack NEW!
A 24-hour hackathon exploring sex tech hardware, interfaces and apps, working on the themes of intimacy, companionship and sexuality.
Monday 19 – Tuesday 20 December Conference: Love & Sex with Robots
In this 2-day conference, academics and industry professionals discuss their work on intelligent sex tech, teledildonics, ethics, gender and sex robots.
In this guest blogpost, first year Creative Computing undergraduate Kevin Lewis introduces his contribution to Hacktoberfest.
Hi there! My name’s Kevin Lewis – I’m a BSc Creative Computing student and vice president of Hacksmiths, Goldsmiths’ Tech Society. I’m also a technical events organiser and I’m currently running an event that I hope you’ll be interested in: Hacktoberfest Ldn.
Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of Open Source Software. Your challenge as a developer is to support OSS by submitting four pull requests during October. In return, you get a sweet limited edition t-shirt and the warm fuzzy feelings of doing good.
My event is Hacktoberfest Ldn, a guided entry to Hacktoberfest. You will learn what Open Source is, how to use git, and how to contribute to the community and the projects they write. Even if you think you’re not technical enough, no contribution is too small – bug fixes and documentation updates are valid ways of participating.
When: 6pm-9pm Monday 24 October 2016 Where: Newspeak House,133 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 7DG
We’ll have representatives from Digital Ocean and GitHub Education at the event, and a whole bunch of amazing and friendly developers. The space itself is a hub for socio-political technologists, who run many events throughout the year, many of them free. If you’re on the fence – come for the people and the free food.
Thanks, Kevin. If you’re a Goldsmiths Computing student and would like to write a blogpost here, please email p.fry@gold.ac.uk, or message us on Twitter.
The International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots – two days of talks and workshops exploring the human relationship with artificial partners – will be held at Goldsmiths, University of London from 19-20 December 2016.
Within the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Human-Robot Interaction, we have recently seen a strong upsurge of interest in the more personal aspects of human relationships with developing technology.
A growing interest in the subject is apparent among the general public, as evidenced by an increase in coverage in the print media, TV documentaries and feature films, but also within the academic community.
In September 2015 a short article titled ‘In Defence of Sex Robots’ by Goldsmiths computing lecturer Dr Kate Devlin was published by The Conversation and has gone on to reach more than half a million readers in several languages. It is one of the website’s all-time most popular essays.
Dr Devlin is organising the conference at Goldsmiths to bring together a community of academics, industry professionals and anyone else interested in sex robots, to present and discuss innovative new work and research.
Sessions are planned on humanoid robots, robot emotions and personalities, teledildonics, intelligent electronic sex hardware, entertainment robots and much more. Presentations will take a range of approaches, from the psychological to the sociological and philosophical.
Dr Devlin argues that gender stereotypes and sexual objectification have long been prevalent themes in existing research and popular representations of sex and robots, and this is a narrative that must be challenged.
“Our research aims to carve a new narrative, moving away from sex robots purely defined as machines used as sex objects, as substitutes for human partners, made by men, for men,” she explains.
A machine is a blank slate – it is what we make of it. Why should a sex robot be binary? What about the potential for therapy? It’s time for new approaches to artificial sexuality.
“Cutting edge research in technology and ethics is vital if we want to reframe ideas about the human-tech relationship.”
The conference will be chaired by Dr Kate Devlin, Professor Adrian Cheok (City, University of London) and Dr David Levy (Intelligent Toys Ltd). A full line-up of speakers will be confirmed in October.
Presentations will take a range of approaches, from the psychological to the sociological and philosophical.