All posts by pfry

Events, News, Students

Event: V&A Digital Design Weekend

1.placeholder_1On Saturday 20 and Sun 21 September 2014, the V&A is hosting a weekend of events celebrating contemporary digital art and design. 

The weekend will include interactive installations, robotics, tinkering and inventive electronics, workshops, family activities, demonstrations and more. Part of London Design Festival, the weekend’s events include:

  • wind-reactive ink
  • a database on drones
  • a sound installation created by ‘reading’ financial reports
  • the International Space Orchestra
  • hands-on biological experimentation and set building
  • workshops on fixing your laptop, mobile or kettle
  • visualisations of the earth’s magnetic and gravitational forces
  • a computational necklace with heartbeat data.

Exhibitors include Goldsmiths Computing alumni Fabio Lattanzi Antinori and lecturer James Bridle. An evening film screening of Kubrick & Spielberg’s A.I. Artifical Intelligence will be introduced by Goldsmiths’ Professor Mark Bishop.

Events, Staff profiles and activity, Videos

Event: Prof Mark Bishop introduces ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AIFrom Westworld to Wal-E, Hollywood’s fascination with robots has created films that ask serious questions about human identity, technology and responsibility.

On Saturday 20 September 2014, Goldsmiths’ Professor Mark Bishop, a world authority on artificial intelligence, introduces a screening of A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE at the V&A Museum. This sci-fi, created by Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Spielberg, tells the story of a prototype robot child named David (Sixth Sense’s Haley Joel Osment) who is programmed to ‘love’.

Examining the film’s exploration of cognitive computing design, Professor Bishop traces the film’s genesis in Kubrick’s earlier 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, and discusses its relation to current A.I. technology and philosophy.

This event, part of London Design Festival at the V&A, was programmed by Goldsmiths Computing’s Phoenix Fry, and is one of four film events that explore how design alters our perception of reality.

Where: Victoria & Albert Museum Lecture Theatre
When: 7pm – 10pm Saturday 20 September 2014
Tickets: Buy online £10 (£7 concessions) – buy online

Staff profiles and activity, Students, Throwback Thursday, Women in Computing

Throwback Thursday: British Museum Motion Capture Workshop

britishmuseum

This week’s Throwback Thursday post revisits an EAVI project from 2011.

In March 2011, Andrea Kleinsmith, Will Robinson, Parag Mital, Bruno Zamborlin and  Marco Gillies from Goldsmiths’ Embodied Audio-Visual Interaction research group ran a series of workshops for the British Museum Samsung Digital Discovery Research centre.

These workshops allowed 13-18 year olds to explore characters and artefacts from the museums collection by performing in the Goldsmiths’ motion capture suite. The participants movements were mapped on to images of characters from the museum collection.

More images on the British Museum’s Flickr site

  • Andrea Kleinsmith is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida
Students, Throwback Thursday, Videos

Throwback Thursday: xTNZ

This week’s Throwback Thursday post revisits a 2009 project by PhD student Rui Filipe Antunes, PhD Student.

xTNZ is focused on the exploration of the possibilities of using artificial life in the context of art. The aim was the development of an ecosystem based on a real-time three-dimensional PC based system sustaining a “living” virtual environment.

The entities populating this virtual world have been designed to be active and responsive. They behave and interact with each other, they reproduce according to eventual interactions and they change their own properties (such as visual appearance or dimensions). An unpredictable visual representation of the world will emerge, shapes will evolve in time according to the creatures interaction.

All creatures textures and sounds are initially from human origin (such as bones or muscles tissue images as the creatures skin or kissing or chewing sounds as the creatures screams)

Rui Filipe Antunes has undertaken a significant number of curatorial projects and exhibitions, including the Festival of Digital Arts at Watermans (2012) and a solo exhibition at London’s Tin Shed Gallery (2013).

Students, Throwback Thursday, Videos

Throwback Thursday: Rock Gathering on Mars

Every Thursday, we are going to showcase a staff and student research from the past few years. This week we revisit a project described by Marco Klingmann (Msc Cognitive Computing) in 2009.

This is a simulation of agents doing “rock gathering on mars”. The agents have to find and collect rocks in a bounded environment and carry them to the mother-ship. The environment consists in collectable rocks (samples) and immovable obstacles. Each agent can only carry one rock at the time. Samples are clustered in certain spots.

rocks

The agents do not know the location of obstacles and samples in advance.‌The simulation scenario and agent behaviour rules were adapted from Steels, L. (1991). “Cooperation between distributed agents through self-organisation”.

The agents are based on subsumption architecture (cf. Brooks, R.1986. “A robust layered control system for a mobile robot”.)

Marco Klingmann is now an interaction designer and app developer working in Switzerland. Follow him on Twitter

Events, Inspiration, Students

TEST SIGNAL: MFA Computational Arts Show 2014

Sixteen artists from 10 countries explore the boundaries and overlaps between the virtual and physical worlds in a new exhibition from students on Goldsmiths’ MA and MFA in Computational Arts.

Bringing together cross-disciplinary practices of live performance, installation, audiovisual work, biosensors, robotics and tangible storytelling, this exhibition showcases the bleeding edge of computational artwork as it examines our relationship with the digital.

The group brings together a broad range of fine art practices from sculpture, painting, music, printmaking and fine art photography to installation and film, and combines them with the emergent field of computational arts.

Private view: 6-9pm Thursday 11 September 2014. Event details
Open to public: 10am-6pm Friday 12 and Saturday 13 September 2014
Location: Hotel Elephant Gallery, 18 Newington Causeway, Borough, SE1 6DR

Explore some of the artists’ work

swirl

nothing

26_roadcollage

caressed

1.RICHARD-LOCKETT