Category Archives: Throwback Thursday

Students, Throwback Thursday, Videos

Throwback Thursday: iMC Rap Maker

Back in 2009, BSc Creative Computing Student Eric Brotto released his final year project as on the iPhone app store. The app uses real time audio analysis and manipulation technology on a mobile phone to create a rap soundtrack from a users voice.

From the app store site: “Now you can be a rapper! iMC Rap Maker you talking and then transforms it into a rap song. Syncing your voice to the beat and even adding DJ scratches to your vocal means you get a Hip Hop hit produced by you. You can then share your creation with your friends via Facebook and SoundCloud. Download your iMC today!”

Eric Brotto is now mentor-in-residence at Startup Reykjavik Accelerator Programme, co-founder of Creative Bytes Worldwide, and content creator for DECODED.

Students, Throwback Thursday, Women in Computing

Throwback Thursday: South: A Psychometric Text Adventure

‌eleanor_bannerThis week we revisit PhD student Eleanor Dare’s 2009 doctoral thesis. South: A Psychometric Text Adventure, is an artist’s book and a set of software programs designed to explore and establish new relationships between readers and narrative.

“This work may be described as emanating from traditions of interactive narrative that are not considered part of the main-stream of literature, such as self-help books, star sign and dream interpretations, and populist psychometrics. These forms could also be described as tailor-made or interest matching texts, in which the sense of the text having an intimate understanding and insight into its readers is essential.

“The South egg is an interim object, halfway between a book and a computer. The South software generates subject-specific material that can be loaded into it. The egg can then be taken to a specific location (the South Bank) and its instructions followed. The formation of dynamic relationships between readers and texts has been one of the central goals of my practice; as such, a large amount of my theoretical research has focused upon ideas relating to subjectivity and by extension to issues of epistemology and agency.

“While these theories have been central to my philosophical understanding of the field, I have also had to invent strategies that are effective in real-world situations and in relation to the real world materials and conditions of my practice. As a result South is built around a series of autonomous agents who perform analytical and interpretive tasks.

“My commitment to a reflexive practice emphasises the exploration of the proxy and in many ways subjective role these agents play on my behalf. Consequently the agents are both structural tools and unorthodox protagonists within this work. The limitations inherent in these agents, and the asymmetries of understanding between them and human readers, are framed as creative resources. This is not to define my materials as limiting or determining of my outcomes (or indeed to reduce the outcome of my practice to a particular set of skills in relation to those materials) but to describe a form of knowledge generation that is not easily separable from the contingency and materiality of my practice.”

Dr Eleanor Dare is now Author MSc Web Technologies at the University of Derby.
Eleanor’s blog

Students, Throwback Thursday, Videos

Throwback Thursday: Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus

This week we journey back to 2011 to look at a multimedia installation on Sylvie Plath by Arts & Computational Technology PhD Chris Girard.

Lady/Applicant: The Lazarus is an experiment in new media poetics that strategically re-imagines the authorial identity of renowned confessional poet Sylvia Plath.

slowtorise

By presenting collaged audio and video recordings of audio and places associated with her poetry, the project radically questions the power traditionally associated with the author.

Plath continues to be cast as a depressed wife and mother; the imperatives of this role still weighing heavy upon the production of her biography and the reception of her work.

The collaging of audio and video clips reembodies Plath as an omnipresent ghost and shifts meaning away from an exclusive association with the tragically depressed, the pathologized Plath.

Chris Girard is now an experimental collage poet based in Los Angeles whose work explores embodiment and identity. Visit Chris’ website

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