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.
‘Contours’ is an immersive artwork where a series of tapestries responds to the presence of an interacting audience, by triggering soundscapes when they are touched.
Where: Centre for Creative Collaborations, 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG
When: 6pm – 8pm, Thursday 29 May 2014 – FREE
The sound composition is generated in real time through a custom code software and it changes in relation to a constant feed of data relating to the weather of Vienna. The abstract geometric decoration that connects the tapestries’ individual sensors to form giant ones is inspired by Wiener Werkstätte designs from the MAK Collection.
This constantly modulated data-driven soundscape is composed in real time and is reminiscent of a medical research environment; it serves as an acoustic feedback loop that alludes to the relationship between science and the body. They include sound modulation algorithms that are mainly creating realtime granulation and pitch shifting of samples prerecorded from tools usually employed to measure human body such as CT and PET scans, EKG plus various oscillators.
The artwork was commissioned by the MAK Museum of Applied Arts and Contemporary Art in Vienna, as part of ‘Scientific Skin’, which features interactive experiments combining the human body and the latest scientific discoveries. The MAK invited the London based creative laboratory Bare Conductive to team up with Fabio L. Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska in order to develop a large-scale metaphor for the idea of breathing life into a textile skin.
A collaboration between Bare Conductive, Fabio Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska.
Screenprint, capacitive sensing, interactive tapestries, generative soundscape, custom code.
Goldsmiths Creative Computation website contains material for students on Goldsmiths’ undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Computational Arts, Music Computing, Digital Arts Computing and Games Programming.
It supports and encourages technology-led creative activity for students enrolled on these programmes, and has been live since 2008.
There’s a search box for the adventurous.
Random pages:
Goldsmiths Data Science lecturer Katayoun Farrahi has published a new paper in PLOS ONE, an international scientific journal on primary research.
The paper, entitled Epidemic Contact Tracing via Communication Traces, propose a model of tracing physical interaction (and contagion) between people by using their mobile phone communication traces. The paper’s abstract explains:
“Traditional contact tracing relies on knowledge of the interpersonal network of physical interactions, where contagious outbreaks propagate. However, due to privacy constraints and noisy data assimilation, this network is generally difficult to reconstruct accurately. Communication traces obtained by mobile phones are known to be good proxies for the physical interaction network, and they may provide a valuable tool for contact tracing. Motivated by this assumption, we propose a model for contact tracing, where an infection is spreading in the physical interpersonal network, which can never be fully recovered; and contact tracing is occurring in a communication network which acts as a proxy for the first.
“We apply this dual model to a dataset covering 72 students over a 9 month period, for which both the physical interactions as well as the mobile communication traces are known. Our results suggest that a wide range of contact tracing strategies may significantly reduce the final size of the epidemic, by mainly affecting its peak of incidence. However, we find that for low overlap between the face-to-face and communication interaction network, contact tracing is only efficient at the beginning of the outbreak, due to rapidly increasing costs as the epidemic evolves.
Katayoun Farrahi“Overall, contact tracing via mobile phone communication traces may be a viable option to arrest contagious outbreaks.”
About the Authors
Katayoun Farrahi – Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London
Rémi Emonet – Department of Machine Learning, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, Saint-Etienne
Manuel Cebrian – Massachusetts Institute of Technology / University of California
Registration is now open for an interdisciplinary symposium on Depth in Digital Media, taking place at the University of Warwick on Friday 30 May 2014.
The symposium explores the ways in which depth imagery is constructed and consumed in contemporary digital practices, and the ways in which we might interpret it. Most digital platforms’ content is consumed through flat screens and yet many of their aesthetics seem anxious to convey the illusion of depth. This curious and ubiquitous paradox is visible, for example, in digital cinema’s most recent spate of 3-D films and the institutional dimensionality of videogames’ fictional environments through which the player wanders. In computing, also, user interfaces and head-up displays demonstrate a renegotiated relationship to the image that is dependent on deep spaces made immediately accessible for spectators and users.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lisa Purse (University of Reading, author of Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema and Contemporary Action Cinema)
This symposium will investigate the different media that characterise contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural and political implications of their digital depth. How is this illusion of depth constructed, and to what ends? The symposium will investigate avenues through which academia might read and interpret both these images and the changing mediascape of which they are a part. It will also ask what these digital constructions of depth demonstrate about the changing culture that they help to construct.
Places are limited so please register as soon as possible
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
This four-day course will cover key topics in the new GCSE and A-level computing curriculum. It will give participants the knowledge and methods to unlock the creativity within computing students and inspire them to become programmers. The course leads to the award of a Goldsmiths Teachers’ Centre Certificate of Attendance.
From the very start of the course you will explore techniques that encourage the production of games and other graphical and interactive apps in a secondary school computing classroom. Participants will explore strategies that encourage their students to create highly compelling, interactive graphics and audio programs from the first lesson.
By the end of the course, participants will:
DATES
NB. If you are unable to make these dates, we plan to re-run the course in the summer. Email teacherscentre@gold.ac.uk to register your interest.
BOOK YOUR PLACE by Friday 9 May 2014
This course costs £750. A blended approach of 100 hours of learning time combines face-to-face teaching, self-study and presentations of professional learning.
Please complete the booking form and email to teacherscentre@gold.ac.uk. Any questions, please call 0207 919 7326.
A blog by Goldsmiths Physical Computing lecturer Brock Craft has won him ‘featured writer’ status on Amazon’s tech bookstore.
His blog Arduino and education – sizing up the landscape introduces the tiny computer that has been widely adopted in science, engineering, technology and mathematics education in high schools, as a way of teaching computational thinking skills.
Brock Craft is a specialist in Technology Enhanced Learning. He was a Partner at the design firm TinkerLondon, where he introduced the Arduino into the UK along with its creator, Massimo Banzi.