Bryn Oh: Composition of the Rabbicorn room

Bryn Oh: Composition of the Rabbicorn room

The NMC Campus...in Second Life!

The NMC Campus is a space for experimentation in the virtual 3-D world. This year Second Life was chosen as a platform to support collaboration, learning, insightful interaction, and experimentation — and to encourage exploration of the potential of virtual environments. (See the Concept document for the NMC Campus for additional background.)

Last May Second Life artist Filthy Fluno visit NMC Campus spoke to an audience via live audio about the process by which he created a real-life painting commissioned by the New Media Consortium (NMC), called “Search For Excellence.”



Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 7,621,579 people from around the globe...some of them are artists.

What was interesting about this session was that Filthy played for the audience a video he shot which captured the development of his piece of art, including the symbolism, techniques, and what he was thinking at different stages.

For more info on Second Life, Filthy Fluno, and NMC visit:
http://sl.nmc.org/2007/05/12/flithy-fluno-art

In other news...

Otis College of Art and Design has a spot on Second Life's EduIsland...and from July 14-August 11 The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design is presenting, The Sims: In the Hands of the Artists. From the press release:

The Sims: In the Hands of the Artists features works inspired by one of the world’s most popular games, The Sims™. Using The Sims as a creative toolbox, Otis’ young, talented and creative artists and designers have created Machinima video pieces, stills, and art objects that extend beyond the virtual world. Functioning as a 3D extension of the popular game, this exhibition makes public the ingenuity of tomorrow’s creative visionaries.

The exhibition showcases works produced for the Machinima and Art competition jointly held by Electronic Arts and Otis College of Art and Design. The challenge invites Otis students to produce pieces that fuse the gaming and art fields and are prized for their expressive content, character development, art direction, originality, and use of music.

I'm thinking about paying a visit to Otis!

Memes and Multi-Touch Panels

I recently created a proposal called Taking Meme-ories. From my web site:

Taking Memeories is about engaging a new audience and evolving aesthetic…one that is participatory and challenges the status quo.

Part of this proposed project is to make a statement about the nature of art (as memorial) in the digital age. It's fluid, it's impermanent, and it’s ever changing. My initial idea of meme+memorial looks back to the trains being ‘bombed’ in NYC back in the 60s and 70s. Some of these moving graffiti murals were memorials and they were not permanent. Our very existence changes what a memorial is. Tags in the 70s used for individual, or artistic expression in a changing urban landscape now define the contents of the World Wide Web.

I think a little more work/research would make this a stronger proposal. I need to tie in my love of hip-hop culture and show more of what I think is the future of hip-hop and art in the 21st century. For example, I found a demonstration of the Multi-Touch Interaction Research project by Jefferson Han (and others) who is developing devices that are "inherently able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls or murals."

See the demonstration at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89sz8ExZndc

or here:



More recently, I learned about a new revolutionary digital instrument, Reactable, that was developed by a team of digital musicians at the Music Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The Reactable, is a

multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Read the article HERE.

After recently reading Jeff Chang's Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop I discovered the work of Brett Cook.

Cook's Colors of Compassion: Healing Our Familes, Building True Community is a project that was an

interactive, multidisciplinary, revolutionary experience in mindfulness that culminated in a large public work illustrating what makes a happy community.

I am inspired to simplify my original proposal and be more focused, to include youth and personal development. Rather than apply to a PhD program I will seek funding...

Another NMC Online Conference

This week I was a presenter on the Digital Media Trends Panel at the NMC Online Conference on The Impact of Digital Media.

The conference is informed by the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialog among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe. This unique event will expand that dialog beyond the project and reach out to an international audience.. For more info on this conference click HERE.

The title of my presentation was The Nature of Participatory Culture:

Participatory culture is about the intersection of digital media tools and the ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving a variety of web-based applications to people. We are at the beginning stages of a shift that allows people to create and distribute media and ideas to where people can act as filters and editors.

Here's a clip of the presentation:



Here is part of very informative keynote by Howard Rheingold on The Pedagogy of Civic Participation:

Challenging Perceptions Through Art & Technology

Regarding art and technology (in Brazil) I came across this interesting website recently about a favela painting project:

In order for the lives of people living in the favelas to improve, the popular perception of their neighborhoods must improve. The "Favela Painting" project aims to achieve this by painting an entire hillside favela. Not in a uniform color, but with each house colored according to an elaborate plan so that the hillside will depict a huge image visible from prominent places in the city center.
...
When completed 'Favela Painting' will be the largest painting in the world, depicted on many postcards alongside other landmarks such as the statue of Christ and Copacabana beach. The favela will become a legitimate part of the city attracting the attention the culture within deserves.

The artists used Photoshop and other software to visualize the project. They created a website, a blog, and even published a clip from their documentary about Brazilian hip-hop to inform people.

When many people think about Brazil they think City of God or inaccessible, dangerous urban areas that are dominated by drug gangs comprised of local child soldiers. The Favela Painting project seeks to challenge that perception and the status quo by painting an entire hillside favela.

I am interested in bringing these artists to exhibit in Boston. I also think this might relate to my S.O.A.R. project.

SIGGRAPH 06...Day #2

Well, I went back to the conference for another half day. It was a few degrees cooler but still hot outside. Since I knew the venue I went straight to the exhibition hall (see clip above) found the Second Life booth and grabbed more "swag". Second Life gave me a cube that glows in the dark (see left) and some game cards.

It all starts with a cube.

The Second Life folks were very cool and so was the art gallery/playground but this time around my goal was to catch a couple of Educator Panels. I caught part of "A Knowledge Base for the Emerging Discipline of Computer Graphics" but "Creative Manipulation of Time, Space, and Image" really interested me.

The first presenter talked about math and imaging. He wasn't very dynamic and I nodded off a couple of times. The last couple of presentations were much more interesting to me.

Christopher Bauder and Til Beckman from w-h-i-t-e-v-o-i-d (beta software is available at http://www.whitevoid.com/) talked about metaphors & mapping. They have been using common objects such as ladders, guns, etc. as musical instruments and building in them interfaces. They showed a video projection system with perspective distortion. In the "playground" their electric moons or balloons with bump maps and illumination (physical 3D pixel display) was on display for all to see.



The next couple of guys presented the Fall of Antioch: From a Concept of Defamiliarization to Realization (an experimental music video) hinting at the demise of the city Antioch. The main inspiration source for the video was a Windows Media Player with "particles realization" (?) turned on. By defamiliarization the artists meant concepts or principles such as repetition, isolation, irony, satire, and slow motion cinematography evident in works by artists such as Duane Hansen and Andy Warhol. A realization is the relationship between visual elements that specify different behaviors and provides an implementation. Watching the final video it become easier to grasp these ideas and concepts. Click on the image below to see the Fall of Antioch video.

SIGGRAPH 2006

Today I spent a half-day at SIGGRAPH, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (whew!). The conference is in Boston this year and I went in 100+ degree weather. (ouch!) The event was HUGE and a bit overwhelming at first because it looked like a thousand people were there, from all over the world. Plus, there was signage overload...tons of venue signage on top of the easels every other step along the hallways. In minutes I was exhausted but once I registered I figured it was a good idea to stop running around, chasing my tail...to eat my homeade lunch and get acclimated to the surroundings.

I grabbed loads of stuff, esp. the free magazines and postcards. There were a couple of highlights: an actual figure drawing class with Sony Imageworks (they're doing Monster House), a digital art gallery, and the emerging technologies “playground”.

Intersect with art that explores new territories, crosses traditional boundaries, provokes thought, reveals ideas in innovative ways, and addresses contemporary issues. Intersections features 2D, 3D, and 4D wall-hung works, sound art, installation art, art animations, and screen-based work from throughout the world. - from the site

I waited around for a whole hour for the figure drawing class surrounded by Pixar, ATI and LucasArts/ILM booths. There was a live model posing (she replaced another very buff male model...rats!) and people got to take their final sketches home on special (free) Imageworks T-shirts. I wanted to see if I still had the skills...in college I had to draw from the figure for hours at a time. This time we had 20 minutes in total to practice and only 5 for the final sketch! The facilitator saw my T-shirt and complimented me after the session. I should have brought my resume and portfolio…maybe I could have gotten a job at Sony. Riiiight (not)...seriously though, I was just getting warmed up. Hahahaha.

In Emerging Technologies there were a couple of ping pong-sized digital drawing tablets that allowed me to paint like Jackson Pollock with my finger on one hand and with my other hand on a special pad. I went virtual fishing with a real pole and lure. Once the virtual fish bit the lure I had to reel in an actual (plastic) fish that tugged frantically and tried to get away from me. The virtual lake was projected onto a special surface that rippled and moved like water when the fish moved...it really felt like I was fishing in a lake. Amazing!

Another cool thing to look at was the MorphoTower/Spiral Swirl by Sachiko Kodama, a media artist and theorist. She makes interactive art using new materials such as magnetic fluid. Her Tower was awesome and part of a project called "Device Art" (see image above). This project comes from work derived from Japanese interactive art.

I didn’t get to play with all the toys or see all the art, so I’ll probably go back tomorrow. I was hooked like those plastic and virtual fish. Hahahaha! Also, no digital cameras were allowed in the gallery but folks had their camera phones, so I'll see what I can do.

Next year the conference is going to be in San Diego (yay!), so I am going to save my pennies now, so I can attend in 2007. The future theme is "Face Tomorrow" and I have a nice poster and shiny button to remind me. :)