July 1st was Canada Day and we went to a Military Tattoo at Dundurn Castle here in Hamilton, Ontario. Tattoos are left over from the Empire – marching bagpipe bands and highland dancers. It was, after all, the colonies like Canada that benefited most from the British Empire. Tattoos and jubilees are a passing type of performance, enjoy them while they last.
Click here to see a selection of pictures.
OCAD’s Virtual Building – explore, pick, and donate! allows you to page around the floating zebra box (the Sharp Centre for Design) that they have built and sponsor a window. Now you may ask, “Who would donate $2,000 to sponsor a hole?” but don’t think of it as a whole – think of it as a view, a looking out by someone floating up there. They won’t see the building from your view, they will see through your generosity!
Continue reading OCAD’s new building; sponsor a view
sally mckay has a blog about “toronto art and other stuff” including her own short mixes. I came across this looking for stuff on Eddo Stern after giving up on blogging the bland news release from the AGO (or their pretencious pamphlet). Included on her site are some neat images and mix animations. What does one call these extremely short image animations/video clips – so short the animated parts are texture, not narrative?
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.
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.
Pictures taken from Airplanes is a site by Susanne Z. Riehemann with pictures like my Air Screens (but better I think.) She also has other photos, including some beautiful wilderness ones.
Continue reading Pictures from the air
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.
Continue reading Color Music: LaserPiano
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).
Continue reading ITU of Copenhagen: Building
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.
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.