Category Archives: Videos

Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity, Videos

‘5 Robots named Paul’

From 4-8th September Patrick Tresset will be exhibiting his project ‘5 Robots named Paul’ at ARS electronica 2014 festival in Austria.

Patrick Tresset a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths uses what he calls “clumsy robotics” to create autonomous cybernetic entities that are playful projections of the artist.

In ‘5 Robots named Paul’, a scene reminiscent of a drawing class has been created, with robots attached to old school desks which are equipped with biros and paper. A seated volunteer is sketched by the robots through the ‘eyes’ of their obsolete digital cameras and webcams. The robot’s depictions look untidy, mimicking the movements of a human hand creating sketches which are pinned to the wall throughout the duration of the exhibition.

The project has been built upon research findings from computer vision, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing.

Patrick-Tresset-Sketches-by-Paul-2011

 

BSc Creative Computing, News, Students, Videos

Goldsmiths Computing graduate in the Guardian

Ben Glover

Ben Glover – a recent graduate from BSc Creative Computing (2014) has been featured in the Guardian’s Culture Professionals Network.

During his time at Goldsmiths he developed a project to discover ways of using experimental software and hardware to generate interactive visualisations that are controlled by body movements. Dancers and choreographers were able to use this technology during the development and performance of a dance piece.

Working in collaboration with a dance student, ‘Interactive Technology in Dance’ was built using motion sensing gaming device, Microsoft Kinect, and open source C++ toolkit, OpenFrameworks. The software built by OpenFrameworks produced mathematically-generated images that could be controlled by body movements and gestures using the depth camera technology behind Kinect. The images in turn could be projected onto a screen for multiple uses in a studio or stage.

He is currently working as a freelance web designer with IntrAktion and is about to commence an MA in Digital Theatre at Wimbledon University.


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

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

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