Category Archives: Inspiration

Inspiration, Students, Videos

Recent computer games created by Goldsmiths students

To celebrate the beginning of spring, we present six games recently made by our first and second year BSc Games Programming students.

Led by Jeremy Gow, our BSc Games Programming degree prepares students for a career programming in the games industry, in sectors including mobile games, casual games, social media games, and AAA console game development.

Sandrunner

sandrunner

Harlon Staple-Campbell, Yuvesh Tulsiani, Jack Wang and Karen Yeung (Introduction to Digital Media)

Sandrunner is an addictive 8-bit side-scroller for Android in the style of Flappy Bird. Press to jump and collect the coins, but avoid the fuzzy pink balls! The team focused on a simple concept and playtested it until they got the right balance of fun and frustration. Made in Processing. Download Sandrunner from the Android Play store.

Scribble Defence

Carlos De Oliveira do Amaral Leitão, Michael King, Rodrigo Endo, William Meaton and Yuvesh Tulsiani (Introduction to Game Development)

Scribble Defence is a tower defence game for Android. Protect the cookie jar from wave after wave of monsters by positioning your turrets carefully around the maze. A fantastic art style and the game itself is really well balanced. Made in Unity. Download Scribble Defence from the Android Play store.

Speedy Cat

Damian Hon and Liam Robinson (Introduction to Game Development)

In Speedy Cat you control our eponymous hero as he flies through the sky picking up snacks and avoiding meteors and bad apples. All with a soundtrack of pumping dance music. An insane concept, but fun! Made in Unity.

20 Years Later

Andrew Tao, Christian Tanap, Daniel Stokoe, James Mackessy and Jeffrey Gillespie (Software Projects)

20 years ago you were a student at Goldsmiths… but you return to find the campus has been overrun with mindless zombies! 20 Years Later is survival horror game where you find yourself trapped in the depths of the Richard Hoggart Building. Can you escape? Made with Unity.

Monster Rush

Andrea Fiorucci, Calvin Fuss, Brian Rocha Confessor and Yuvesh Tulsiani (Game Development Group Project)

Monster Rush is a fast-paced shooter where you take on hordes of colourful monsters. Still under development. Made in Unity.

The Midnight Man

Damian Hon, Dmitrij Potapcik, Fabio Peres Filho and Liam Robinson (Software Projects)

The Midnight Man a survival horror game where the player is defenceless against a malevolent entity, but safe as long as their candle is lit! They must solve puzzles and gather clues while the candle burns down. Made in Unity, using Maya, Blender and Audacity.

Inspiration, Students, Videos, Women in Computing

Goldsmiths PhD presents EEG-amplifying dress in Osaka

ThinkerBelle_EEG_Dress

PhD student Rain Ashford recently travelled to Osaka, Japan to exhibit and present her ThinkerBelle EEG Amplifying Dress. In this blogpost she describes her experience.

In September 2015, I was very excited to exhibit and present my paper on part of my PhD practice, the ThinkerBelle EEG Amplifying Dress, at the annual design exhibition of the 19th International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

The symposium (part of the 2015 ACM joint international conference of ISWC and Ubicomp) is devoted to discussing and sharing pioneering research, knowledge and issues in wearable technologies. It attracts international attendees including academics, manufacturers, fashion and textile designers, users, and related professionals working with wearables. The conference includes workshops, a gadget show, various gatherings and great opportunities to meet peers researching and working in the field, as well as research presentations.

About the ThinkerBelle EEG Amplifying Dress

I created the dress in response to a subsection of feedback data from field trials and focus groups investigating the functionality, aesthetics and user experience of wearables and in particular wearer and observer feedback on conducted in the course of my research on Goldsmiths’ Art & Computational Technology PhD programme.

The user experience case for creating the dress was to facilitate engagement in social situations in which a wearer finds themselves in a noisy or crowded area, where it is not easy to hear others, communicate and where forms of non-verbal communication may prove useful.

ThinkerBelle_OsakaI constructed the dress using a satin fabric and fibre optic filament which is woven into organza. Using a NeuroSky MindWave Mobile EEG headset, data in the form of two separate streams, ‘attention’ and meditation’, are sent via Bluetooth to the dress, which amplifies and visualises the data via the fibre optic filament.

Attention data is shown as red light, and meditation signal data as green light. The dress is constructed so the two streams of data light overlap and interweave. The fibre optic filament is repositionable allowing the wearer to make their own lighting arrangements and dress design. The red and green light fades in an out as the levels of attention and meditation data of wearer heighten or decline, allowing observers to make their own interpretations of the data. The choice is left up to the wearer whether they want to divulge information regarding the physiological source of the data being visualised.

Read Rain Ashford’s paper on the ThinkerBelle EEG Amplifying Dress

The design exhibition invited submissions of new and original examples of wearable technology and textile research. I exhibited my ThinkerBelle dress alongside the other selected submissions of garments, accessories, textiles and devices. The exhibition was divided into the categories of Functional, Aesthetic and Fibre Arts and the jury panel consisted of renowned designers and academics including:

  • writer, artist, designer and technologist Maggie Orth
  • founder of Misfit Wearables Sonny X. Vu
  • lecturer, fashion and costume designer Dr. Tricia Flanagan
  • founding Co-Director of CoLab, co-director of the Textile and Design Laboratory, and an associate researcher at the Knowledge Engineering & Discovery Research Institute, Dr. Frances Joseph.

I also participated in two workshops. The first, Wear and Tear: Constructing Wearable Technology for The Real World, was organised by colleagues at Georgia Tech Wearable Computing Centre and was a really useful and enjoyable day of reportage on building devices and systems. Georgia Tech’s Professor Thad Starner gave a keynote on wearable technology and was followed by various speakers who discussed challenges during the process of building their devices.

In the second workshop, Broadening Participation, I presented a poster on my PhD research on responsive and emotive wearables. The event was aimed at increasing “the involvement of women, all students from developing countries, as well as underrepresented minorities, including persons with disabilities, in the field of ubiquitous and wearable computing”. The day included keynote speakers and a careers panel in which speakers discussed issues, such as, career paths employment and work-life balance.

I am very grateful to the Goldsmiths Postgrad Research Committee for the bursary that enabled my travel to the conference. It was fantastic to exhibit and discuss the dress with a new audience in Japan and I enjoyed immensely seeing new examples of wearable technology and developments in the field, plus meeting local students and academics from Japan, as well as from China, Singapore, USA, Canada and Europe.

Inspiration, News, Students, Women in Computing

Goldsmiths students win Guardian’s Multimedia Journalist of the Year awards

Kara Fox wins the best student multimedia journalist
Kara Fox wins the best student multimedia journalist (Pic: The Guardian)

Two MA Digital Journalism alumni have taken first prize and runner-up prize for Multimedia Journalist of the Year in The Guardian’s Student Media Awards 2015.

Kara Fox was awarded the top prize for her video profiles of campaigners for legal medicinal cannabis, while runner-up David Blood was awarded for his multimedia report on the hackers, activists and visionaries reimagining the internet.

The MA/MSc Digital Journalism is co-delivered by the Computing and Media departments at Goldsmiths.

Events, Inspiration, Videos

Wed 25 Nov: Kyle McDonald artist talk

On Wednesday 25 November, seminal computational artist Kyle McDonald is at Goldsmiths talking about working with code as medium and theme.

The event is free, courtesy of the creative streams in the Goldsmiths Department of Computing. All welcome – no need to book.

Where: Lecture Theatre, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths. Map
When: 6pm-7pm Wednesday 25 November 2015

Kyle McDonald is an artist who works in the open with code. He is a contributor to arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks, and spends a significant amount of time building tools that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways.

His work is very process-oriented, and he has made a habit of sharing ideas and projects in public before they’re completed. He enjoys creatively subverting networked communication and computation, exploring glitch and embedded biases, and extending these concepts to reversal of everything from personal identity to work habits.

Kyle has been a member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, adjunct professor at ITP, and has been a resident at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon, as well as YCAM in Japan. His work is commissioned by and shown at exhibitions and festivals around the world, including Ars Electronica, Sonar/OFFF, Eyebeam, Anyang Public Art Project, Cinekid, CLICK Festival, NODE Festival, FITC, and many others. He frequently leads workshops exploring computer vision and interaction.

Where: Lecture Theatre, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths
When: 6pm-7pm Wednesday 25 November 2015

Find out more about our Creative Computing degrees >>

Careers, Inspiration, Students

Student profile: Robin Hunter, BSc Creative Computing

Robin

 

Third year BSc Creative Computing student Robin Hunter talks to Blog.Doc about electronic music software, and why Goldsmiths has been the perfect environment for his development.

“Some of the best electronic music in the world was made on Playstations.”

Robin Hunter is explaining to me the background of his latest project. “If you look at what Simon Reynolds calls the Hardcore Continuum – the music that started with acid house in the late 80s, hardcore rave and then later grime and dubstep – this was all made using cheapo electronics and software.”

“But the problem now is that we have industry-standard music production software likeLogic and Ableton. They’re so complex and feature-heavy, it’s like buying a Ferrari just for driving to the shops. If you’re an aspiring musician you have to pay so much for these really powerful systems, but unless you have formal training in how to use it, you’ll barely use all the features. So I’m interested in creating a software that’s much simpler but achieves pretty much the same results.”

Robin’s latest project, OCEAN, has just won the ‘best product’ prize at Generation, Goldsmiths Computing’s undergraduate show. It’s an online music production platform that allows people to work on the same track at the same time, in the same way that Google Docs works.

“The friends I make music with, they live all over London, so it’s not always convenient to meet up. But at the moment it’s a real hassle if you want to use the internet to collaborate on tracks. You have to send these massive files to each other on Dropbox and it takes forever. But with OCEAN, it’s all happening live. I can be working on a track and my friends are listening to it and adding to it at exactly the same time. And it’s really simple and intuitive to use.”

Robin grew up in Chester and did Media, Business and ICT at ‘A’ level. He was really into making music, and studied Music Technology for a year but got disillusioned. “I was making music that was really experimental. I don’t think my teachers understood what I was doing, really. And I looked into studying Creative Sound Design at the Academy of Contemporary Music, but I realised that that would be a one-way ticket to not getting a job.”

“I was also really interested in Media – about how the internet has changed things so much. I thought that’s what I’d probably study at university. But I got interested in the internet pioneers, people like Jack Dorsey, and I realised I didn’t want to just write about these people. I wanted to be one of them.”

“I found Goldsmiths and saw their video about computing courses, which said that Goldsmiths doesn’t teach you computer science by forcing you to create fake accounting systems for imaginary businesses (like most computing courses do), but gives you the freedom to create the things that you are really interested in. So I knew this was the place for me.”

“I saw that James Blake and Blur had been to Goldsmiths, and because so much of the music I love was coming out of London, I really wanted to be here. New Cross isn’t the most beautiful place in the world, but it’s got everything you need for being a student, and it’s really easy to get into central London and Shoreditch.”

So what next? Over the summer, Robin will be a Technology Design for Fjord https://www.fjordnet.com Fjord contacted Robin after seeing his work on the DoC website and offered him an 8 week intern placement focusing on web development, consultancy and design.

His 2nd year project, DATA GLOBE, was picked to exhibit at last year‘s undergraduate show. It has been the poster images for Generation for the last two years. His tutor, Mick Grierson, was impressed with his work and recommended him to colleagues at Goldsmiths’ Interaction Research Studio. “They got me working on the top floor of the Ben Pimlott Building for one day a week during term time, and then for two months over the summer, and they gave me a great salary. Hopefully working with EAVI this summer will be just as rewarding.”

And after summer? “I love Goldsmiths. I really want to stay, so I’m going to try to get on a Master’s course. I’m also looking at how to take OCEAN to market. I think it’s got real potential, in the same way that Instagram takes the core of what Photoshop does, but makes it instant and really simple to use.”

 

Inspiration, News, Students, Women in Computing

Computational Arts student wins funded residency at Cafe Oto

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Goldsmiths postgraduate student Mari Ohno has recently been chosen for a  funded residency at Cafe Oto organised by Sound and Music.

The Embedded programme places composers into extended relationships with leading national arts organisations. Aimed at talented composers and creative artists at an early stage in their career, Embedded is a bespoke programme, providing practical hands-on experience and a range of significant creative opportunities.

Mari, a sound artist, composer and sound designer, will spend 18 months in residence at Café Oto, developing creative ideas and practice, as well as producing live events and collaborations.

Bio Effector  A membrane suspended in a gallery is vibrated like a drum by the sound of visitors’ bloodstreams, which are detected and modulated in real time.

A graduate from the MA in Creativity in Music and Sound at Tokyo University of the Arts, Marie creates sound installations and electroacoustic compositions that explore various dimensions of human perception.

Her works have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo Wonder Site, FILE (Brazil) and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. She has been selected for prestigious competitions including Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo Sonic Art Award, the International Composition Competition and Workshop Adelaide (Australia). In addition, her works have also been selected for participation in international conferences and art festivals including NIME, ISSTC (Ireland), Invisible Places (Portugal), WOCMAT (Taiwan).