Eddo Stern at the AGO

Eddo Stern at AGO – N. Post June 19/04 is an article on the show currently on at the Art Gallery of Ontario on recent work by Eddo Stern. Stern’s work, like Fort Paladin: America’s Army, 2003, combines modified computers and projections from computer games. Fort Paladin has a castle built around a screen and tower system unit. There is a keyboard with actuators controlled by another computer typing away beneath the screen (or castle gateway) showing a violent first person shooter (is the game projected controlled by the keyboard?) To quote from the pamphlet in the exhibit room,

Keywords: Tolkien, Christ, Your Empire and Your Desktop
Fort Paladin is a medieval computer castle automaton trained to kill and master the US Army’s inforamous recruitment/training game, America’s Army, using electro-mechanics and a custom-written expert system.

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Supreme Court rules on online music

The Globe and Mail has a story on how the Music industry takes hit in court. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that ISPs are just conduits and therefore cannot be monitor or pay for music downloading by individuals.
A quote from the Globe article on page A1,

"The capacity of the Internet to disseminate works of the arts and intellect is one of the great innovations of the information age," Mr. Justice Ian Binnie said for the majority.

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Color Music: LaserPiano

laserpiano.com is a site that sells a LaserPiano for color music performances. The site has good links to information about colour music, its history and synesthesia. I remain a bit mystified as to exactly how the LaserPiano works and what you get. The LaserPiano makes explicit how color music has become entertainment – from light shows to music to planetariums that coreograph visual productions to music.
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ITU of Copenhagen: Building

In an entry before on the Academical Village I speculated about hybrid campuses that have both virtue and physique (virtual and physical extension). Now I want to put this another way: How can the intersection of art and technology be expressed in a campus or building? I am interested in examples of buildings designed to house art and technology programs, research and development. Are there ways the design of space can facilitate the desired interactions and exhibit the intersection of art and digital technology? What would Jefferson design?

Two campuses come to mind as example, IT University of Copenhagen – The ÿrestad Building is being purpose built to house a new university around IT that includes Aarseth’s Game Studies unit. If you look at the animations you can see features like the use of glass, large atrium, and projections that suggest an architectural implementation of the values of the new university (which are direction-finding, forthcoming, and accountable.) Openness and transparency is probably a better word than “forthcoming” – I suspect something was lost in translation.
The second, and older, example is the MIT Media Lab: Wiesner Building that was designed by I.M. Pei in 1985. MIT is now added a new building next to it, see the Plan #54. Just as interesting is the Gehry Stata Center for CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab).
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Raph Koster

Raph’s Website contains a wealth of essays, links and other goodies by one of the designers of Ultima Online. There is a thorough timeline and lots of stuff on designing MMGs.
Raph was one of the thinkers on games Espen Aarseth recommended.

Robyn Miller and Interactivity

Wired 7.10: Mystery Man is about Robyn Miller’s new venture, Green Tea, a film not a game. It seems he is tired of the limits of game design.
"I’m interested in pushing interactive further to accomplish one of two things: to find ways to affect people in an interactive world, or to convince myself that an interactive medium is not suitable for affecting people."
His reflections on the differences to creators between game and film design will be interesting to read.

Espen Aarseth: (What) Can the Humanities Contribute to Game Research?

Espen Aarseth gave the closing plenary at the Gothenberg ALLC/ACH 2004. His talk was a masterful tour through the field of computer games research leading to thoughts on what the humanities have to offer. Espen reminded us that he used to go to the ACH/ALLC but didn’t find it appropriate to his interests.
What follows are some notes from his talk.
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Newsmap: Google News Visualizer

Newsmap is an effective visualizer of Google News stories that creates treemaps based on the volume of stories for each topic. The interface allows you to compare different national news sets and to show/hide different types of news (world, nation, business…). What’s more, it actually works visually and for looking at the information.
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