Category Archives: Inspiration

Video: On the Future of Computers and Creativity

In this video, Jon McCormack and Goldsmiths’ Mark d’Inverno introduce and reflect on current research questions regarding computers and creativity.

“Creativity is an enigmatic yet widely discussed phenomena,” they explain. “With the now widespread adoption of computers and information technologies, the nature of
creativity and how we think about it has changed significantly.

“We argue for a shift in thinking about computers from tools to creative agents and collaborative partners. We present 21 questions we think are crucial to understanding this new relationship and begin to offer answers, or pathways to answers for a selective subset.”

The paper was presented at AISB14 at Goldsmiths in April 2014. Download a PDF copy of the paper

YOU / ME / IT computational creativity exhibition

At the beginning of June, Blog.DoC travelled to Ljubljana, Slovenia to help put together the exhibition YOU / ME / IT.

The exhibition on computational creativity, curated by Goldsmiths PhD student Ian Gouldstone, was part of the  International Conference on Computational Creativity 2014 and looked at the ways in which human artists and machines can collaborate. For those who missed it, we recreate the exhibition here…

Félicien Goguey & Benjamin Bartholet, France

Tanja Vujinovic, Slovenia

Ed Key & David Kanaga, UK & USA

Robert Seidel, Germany

Nicolai Troshinsky, Spain

Gibson / Martelli, UK

Exhibition: Digital Revolution @ Barbican

We’re really excited about the Barbican Centre’s Digital Revolution exhibition of art, design, film, music and videogames, which opens on Thursday 3 July 2014.

It promises to be the most comprehensive presentation of digital creativity ever to be staged in the UK – investigating dynamic developments in the areas of creative coding and DIY culture and the exciting creative possibilities offered by augmented reality, artificial intelligence, wearable technologies and 3-D printing.

The exhibition includes new commissions from artists Umbrellium, Universal Everything, will.i.am and Yuri Suzuki – plus our friends Gibson/Martelli, who brought showed their augmented reality piece MAN A at our You/Me/It exhibition in June 2014.

Computing students win Goldsmiths Innovation Awards

InnovationAwardWinners
Winners (L-R) Pedro Kirk, Terence Broad and Dan Clarke

Three undergraduate Computing students were awarded Goldsmiths Innovation Awards worth £200 each at the department’s end-of-year show on 4 June 2014.

The three prizes, supplied by Goldsmiths Student Union, were awarded by a panel of industry judges featuring audio technology consultant Martin Roth, Justin Spooner (Unthinkable Consulting), Ashley Elsdon (Palm Sounds) and Student Union President Conrad Grant.

stroke-musicBest Product
Stroke music project
Pedro Kirk
This project investigates the role of music in stroke rehabilitation with a focus on trialling some traditional forms of physical intervention on new devices using a variety of haptic systems. “I’ve built three prototypes to trial these ideas and I’m using the preliminary feedback from 25 stroke survivors to assess their interest in music as a motivator for performing standard repetitive tasks.”
mediatedperceptionBest Creative Work
Mediated perceptions
Terence Broad
Two webcams are attached to the front of an Oculus Rift headset. By feeding the images onto the VR screen the user gets a replica of their normal vision, which can then be distorted and manipulated the ‘reality’. “I’ve been experimenting with using it as a synaesthesia simulator – using music to trigger visual effects like colour shifting, wobble, blurring and temporal layering. But you can also trigger perceptual distortions using head movement, changes in brightness, or the detection of motion and faces.”
evolution-simBest Software
Evolution Sim
Dan Clarke
A simplified representation of evolution. Each lifeform has a unique DNA string composed of 242 numbers between 0-9. These values are reflected mainly through their appearance and movement. There is also an impact on behaviours such as flocking and desire to attack others.When the creatures mate, they exchange DNA and the two children produced are a mixture of their parents (with a chance of mutation). Through their ability to survive, the strongest life-forms should increase in numbers.

 

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Event: Meet the Diasynchronoscope

Join Goldsmiths geniuses Dr Carol MacGillivray and Bruno Mathez, who discuss and demonstrate their work with an experimental medium that creates an immersive experience of animation unmediated by screen or camera.

When: 6-8pm Thursday 3 July 2014
Where: Centre for Creative Collaboration, 14 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG Map

Carol and Bruno – working collectively as TROPE – met at Goldsmiths in 2011. They invented the Diasynchronoscope, and have since produced a number of exploratory artworks by animating concrete objects through selective attention using projection mapping. They work from a studio based in South-East London.

Artist and researcher Carol MacGillivray comes from a background of animation and film editing and spent 20 years working across documentary‚ drama‚ music videos‚ and commercials. She taught film at the Royal College of Art and became a senior lecturer in animation at the University of West London. An increased interest in combining theoretical research and practice led Carol to undertake a PhD by practice in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths. Her PhD thesis Choreographing Time: Developing a system of Screen-less Animation researched the grammar of the Diasynchronoscope as a new medium.

Bruno Mathez is a French audiovisual artist, video producer, teacher and researcher based in London. His practice is dedicated to cross-medium experimentation with an emphasis on audiovisual techniques. Bruno has created visuals for music concerts‚ operas‚ dance and theatre shows, exhibited his installation Photophonics in the UK and toured internationally with interactive audiovisual group The Sancho Plan including a residency at the Ars Electronica Center. He’s teaching film-making for the Composing for Moving Images MA at City University London. He also undertook a MA in Computational Studio Arts in 2012 at Goldsmiths‚ university of London‚ where he explored the themes of visual music in space and interactive video sculptures.

Submit your video game to the Radius exhibition

radiusRadius Festival is a new video games exhibition in central London. It’s presented directly by developers, and designed to inspire people to engage, learn and interact with each other in a vibrant surrounding.

Thursday 19 – Saturday 21 June 2014

Radius is for everyone: for people who love games, who are curious about the industry and who want to know more about developers and trends.

Developers – submit your game
If you have a game that could be presented at Radius, you are welcome to submit your game for consideration. The deadline for submissions is 2 June 2014. Read more and complete the games submission form.


Video: An influence machine for artistic style

What would The Beatles’ Yesterday sound like if the lyrics had been written by the Beach Boys? Or by Bob Dylan or Madonna?

This lovely new video describes a computational creativity project that models and combines artistic style, for the purpose of helping creative humans achieve a state of flow.

‘Yesterday’ on a 1980 digital watch