StutterBox Progress Report

for the past couple weeks the team and i have been working hard getting our multitouch video/installation/performance interface to an alpha state, and meet our march 12th deadline. this has definitely been the most difficult personal project i have worked on, as i feel much of the development depends of the diverse skills, knowledge and background of my teammates. some of the hardest decisions to make are simply to trust in the opinions, skills and knowledge that my teammates bring to the project. no longer something i can consider mine, the project has become a great example of the co-creative process. we are not working with the market in mind, but to simply get a chance to work together with good people and have fun doing something we are all interested in.

the project is defined by three key elements. these elements are the hardware design, the software design, and the usability and performative aspects. each element is highly reliant on the other, and i really have no idea how i would have gotten this far if it wasn’t for the excellent, dedicated and incredible people i am collaborating with.

in terms of software and usability, Jan and Martin; our dynamic duo of software developers, spent the weekend setting up the essential underpinnings and infrastructure of the Stutterbox interface. working with our user Crystal; who is a talented designer, video performance artist and fellow MACPNE colleague, we continued to iron out the metaphors we will use for the interface and address the critiques and suggestions raised during the course of its development and production.

at the moment we are trying to blend the VJ workspace with the actual performance output display. by making a hybrid interface between workspace and output, Crystal will be able to construct her performance narratives in the same area where the story would unfold for the audience. this somehow reminds me of the process of making graffiti, as in graffiti the inspiration, workspace and gallery end up being the same place. as graffiti artists make the urban environment all three places at once, so should our multitouch interface.

regarding hardware, Adam and i are now at the stage of putting everything together we made in the woodshop last week. Adam is my oldest friend (we’ve been friends for something like 15 years!) who came over from toronto via berlin to help me out. he happens to be a talented industrial designer and it shows in the craftmanship of the design and construction of the table. it really is well (if not over!) built.

in order for us the have full, 24h access to the table, we have moved much of the hardware to KKOUTLET so we can continue building without the encumbrance of closing times and security guards, which we were running into working at CSM. at the moment we are around 75 percent done with the construction, and hope to begin to drop in the electronics by wednesday.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

MA CPfNE final project: schematic designs

There are just some skill-sets that are absolutely coveted if you are in the creative industries. much of my final project relies on the immense skills and talent of the the people around me and that i choose (hope!) to work with. because the realization of the project i am doing is far beyond what one person can do (especially if that person is me), i have had to rely on the kindness of others. some of my collaborators are talented video artists, others are genius software developers. recently i was able to seduce an industrial designer to join our ranks and what a smooth move that has been! check out some of Adam Krause’s renders of our multitouch table project. looking at these brings a tear to my eye. i can only imagine this is reminiscent of watching the first ultrasound of your baby in the womb.

it’s spelt with a C you ignorant fcuk!

its been about a month now and i have finally digested my recent trip to Korea (and have also finally digested that last korean meal). what can i say about my experiences in seoul? in all honesty i was very much overwhelmed with the entire journey, and probably took so long to write this because i didn’t know where to begin. now that i think about it, i would say it’s about hopeless for me to encapsulate the time i had there, so i will just post an email i sent to an old friend:

i have to say that seoul and korean peeps and korean culture has really blown me away. i was only in seoul for a week, but had the most amazing, most memorable time. other then the usual starstruck wanderings, i really feel that seoul is a place in mid blossom. we went down for a project regarding re-branding the city and are contracted to help it along part of its 15 year plan to change it into a knowledge economy. my minuscule bit of a tiny part of a small section of a grand scheme involves designing experiences for tourists that include the old seoul city walls and gates.

i see many parallels between korea and germany before reunification and this is most apparent in the people. there is something so inherently strong about being korean, but the split has offered two very diverging paths between one peoples, i think i saw some korean cinema on the plane about it. paired with such a sudden and rapid growth in south korea, the culture has been so engineered and is in need of conceptual thinking within its design process. an empty space breeds room for innovation and creativity, and i believe seoul has the void, resources and potential to engineer its own renaissance.

seoul is built on the scale akin to berlin but bigger, just waiting for people to come live the city. sure there is traffic like any city, but there is a feeling of space when you’re on the pedestrian level. seoul’s highest and lowest geographical points offer so much.

one day the grad students from IDAS took us up to the top of one of the many mountains that surround seoul, in a DMZ where the north gate and blue house resided. we were told some funny story about the women who would come out here in full moon to bask in the light for fertility and the men that would stand around the gate singing songs trying to court them (i wouldn’t know where to begin nor would be competent to even talk about korean gender politics).

and the food! korean food is my super-fav now! every night we ate like japanese businessmen, from bbq to traditional dinners, drinking soju and bamboo wine like water (and some milky, slightly fizzy from the fermentation, cool rice wine), going to karaoke and hiphop/r&b clubs and window shopping at 4 am in the morning at dongdaemun sitting in little tent cities of street vender’s, eating dumplings. on the last night we sat in our studio and ate cake and smoked mackerel using chopsticks and sipped on egg broth while downing soju till the morning to catch a plane. one of my colleagues lost his passport while on his way to the airport (so he says ;-P) and had to stay a few more days by himself; our contact at the school brought him out to a sauna as absolution (lucky devil).

for some images of Seoul take a look at my flickr album here.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

MA CPfNE graduation project 1st presentation

monday marked a milestone of good intentions, as 2nd year students from the 2008 graduating (pending) class of my MA degree hosted schematic proposals for our final project. i was lucky enough to grab a good spot to present (last before the first brake) but was still stoopid nervous at trying to pitch my project in front of both years of the program, the program director, the guest critique tutor and our 4 project tutors.

the projects were pretty interesting, and it’s good to see that most of the projects are developing quite nicely. people seem to have solidified their concepts and there appears to be an end in sight!

some of the projects included a psycho-geographical atlas, a ceramic tile that gets worn away with the passage of people to reveal evolving content, the future of outdoor media, emergency shelters that are customizable to the typology of refugee, an allegorically immersive museum installation of baroque carriages for the pope, a user-design led participatory show, an engaging workshop that reaches out to the muslim communities in london, an urban installation that addresses the feeling of danger and security in hackney, a workshop that gets artists and architects to understand how to collaborate, an edible garden, and many, many other insightful projects.

and my project? i will hopefully get to work with some inspiring people to develop a grassroots oriented, multitouch interface. if you are interested, here is the link to a pdf of my presentation.

summery of thoughts regarding OMA internship, week 1

it’s hard to draw lines. no, i don’t mean lines that make drawings. i am talking about the virtual lines and psycho-geographical boundaries we make for ourselves and the world around us. now that kairn and alex have joined me in rotterdam, our internship is in full swing. it seems like we have been working on this together for months already…

on order for us to digest the massively huge amount of data that AMO has produced over the years, we came up with a simple but effective way to quantify the ideas, concepts, themes and typologies. here is a short video that we produced during our first week of research. enjoy!

forget that. forget you even saw it.

look away! nothing to see here! whatever you thought you read, you didn’t. just look over there at the pretty pictures of our ultra-bland and non-eventful stay in Rotterdam, where we concentrate on a job we truly love to do:

robot tattoo.. or .:|-=r0b07pr0n=-|:.

i asked what the bleep is it too when i first saw one. QR code is what’s known as a two dimensional barcode, or matrix code dreamed up by Denso-Wave of Japan in 1994. they are used in Japan quite a bit, but you can also find QR code online. i first saw the code on cityofsound.com and became curious, so i did some research.

QR code can be read by most modern camera phones. you can grab the software from here, and start generating codes here. what’s fun is that you can load it up with all sorts of info and also has some pretty dope applications.

for instance, you can have a phone directly sms any number upon acquiring a positive scan. you can load rss feed addresses so that you can aggregate information such as flickr photostreams, gmail and podcasts. you can also use it to leave simple text messages or numbers. the more info within the code, the more complex and dense the pattern becomes.

being a relatively old system, i am sure that people have been using it in graffiti and urban art. it is most definitely being used in the advertising sector and there are even design firms that specialize in integrating QR code into communicative design.

karin and i were toying the other day about using QR Code as blueprints for urban planing. imagine scanning QR code in google earth of entire city blocks and getting links to concise information directly to your mobile phone. well.. just a thought. if it has already been implemented then please post a link.

i have incorporated QR code into my weblog on the sidebar. with a flick o’ the wrist, you can have my contact details automagically upload directly into your phone. pretty sweet at the bar, if it was tattooed somewhere accessible.

activating granary square through interaction

fitting that the final project for the first year of my MA degree involves working with fellow worshippers of the mightiest of all the of pantheon of gods, King Pendopoo. joining karin, alex and i on this final project is violeta and niki; video artist and scenographer, respectively.

the brief for this particular project involved generating sustainable and lasting dwell time within Granary Square, which happens to be the largest area of contingent public space in Kings Cross. this space is also important because it will link public, private, business and residential areas all together. i should probably also mention that Granary Square is situated directly in front of the site of the new Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design building which will finally bring all 4 campuses together under one roof.

The purpose of our proposal is to generate emotional durability within the social-geographic community known as Kings Cross Centre, focusing on the office worker and the cyber-slacking generation. Our proposal is a hybrid community building system consisting of three elements that are developed to engage members of the Kings Cross populace.

In order to generate sustainable desire to participate in the initiative, the proposal uses two easily accessible digital platforms that are facilitated with an essential third physical layer. The first digital platform is packaged in the form of a web-based, online community using Web 2.0 concepts. The second digital platform is packaged within the widely accessible platform of digital mobile phone technology to provide a personal, “always on”, portable interface device. we looked at accelerometer technology and other emerging technologies that would facilitate more intuitive game-play.

some other inspirational research included the Pacmanhattan geo-centric game:

Both digital platforms are used as interface to the physical “playground” of Kings Cross Centre for interaction with the various games and social networking systems. think Web 2.0 + Nintendo Wii + mobile phones using a physically real and unique space (Granary Square / Kings Cross Centre) as playing field; kinda like a giant Dance Dance Revolution game, er something…

imagine office workers getting a little exercise in the morning before work by playing a short game in the square with their phone:

or spending their lunch break virtual fishing with their phones by the canal:

and then meeting in the evening to play dating games or larger, league tournaments:

in terms of learning outcomes, the great thing about this final project is that we were not limited by technology when it came to proposing our ideas. we worked together quite smoothly which was proof that karin, alex and i could collaborate together successfully.

i hope this is a sign for things to come when the three of us collaborate together again for our up-coming joint internship at the Office For Metropolitan Architecture this summer in rotterdam.

for another perspective from one of our tutors, please check out his blog entry about the project here.

Zeitgeist Heist Redux

shit fuck god damn.

it has taken me three months to reflect upon the recent quasi-disaster that was the abake prescribed, three part project, the zeitgeist heist.

since posting about the first two elements of the project, team dynamics have run-a-muck, and the last group dinner/brainstorming session ended up in a… shall we say, heated discussion, at best. after a particularly critical reaction from the panel during the second presentation, we did manage to meet one more time before the final crit, and came up with a poetic proposition to end such a seemingly futile attempt at designers trying to generate interactivity through performative means.

designers. actually we were a group which consisted of an architect, curator, exhibition designer and yours truly, media art monkee. without strong graphic design skills between the 4 of us, we luckily didn’t have to present a high in concept and research illustrated with flashy graphics presentation and presented as simply and to the point as possible, while adhering to some narrative themes (a guided tour comes to mind) to efficiently convey what we wanted to say.

rounding-up our colleagues and tutors into the stairwell on the 9th floor of our building, we made the group walk down the stairs holding a rope which formed a line. the stairwell is kinda groovy, with huge glass windows overlooking holborn. its cool and windy, walls littered with forgotten posters of past CSM shows and bad signage so you never know what floor you are on. hundreds of students walk up and down these stairs throughout a day.

people being people, we were soon a mix of bodies, while the four of us narrated a metaphorical and critical journey of our experience throughout this laborious project. we told emotional experiences, criticized the brief and its prescribers and more or less vented. we role-played as if we hated each other, which wasn’t far at the time (big kiss to aranzazu, gilly and anna)!

in the end, the tutors seemed positive about it and we had a chance to present something we were happy with, not to mention it made us stronger in the process. as the saying goes; you can only collaborate with people who want to collaborate. i have learned that my colleagues are damn good.

in anticipation of rotterdam

a few weeks ago i had a taste of life in rotterdam while working for the V2: Institute for Unstable Media. called in by my good friend and colleague danja, i had the opportunity to work in the “hack” department of the V2 Lab during this years DEAF07 and V2 25th anniversary events.

most of the work i did was of a technical nature, and involved climbing up to the tops of buildings fixing yagi antennae (all hail the mighty zip-tie!!!) to throw network accessibility wirelessly between the various locations of the festival. some buildings i am proud to say i stood on the roof of include Witte de With / TENT, NAi and of course the V2 building proper.

we also had to lay down quite a bit of patch cable (we were dropping CAT-5e like spidey slings web) and also deployed numerous wireless hotspots, computer terminals and workstations for visiting artists and other tech-monkee-ish jobs. even had a chance to VJ along side danja at unDEAF… that was cool.

one of the more mundane tasks i had to perform at the festival was to monitor audio and video live-streams that were being cast on the DEAF07 webpage. this involved sitting and watching and listening to lectures… which isn’t so bad until you realize that you have spent the entire day sitting in a dark hall staring at 4 or so monitors while outside it is immaculately sunny and 25 degrees.

what i did enjoy the most was getting to spend time with some sorely missed friends. sabruno and danja were kind enough to let me stay at their place during the duration of my contract with V2, and even though i was pretty tuckered out by the time we got home from work, we still managed to have that cozy feeling. eating good food and sitting in the twilight of the setting sun over the vista of rotterdam’s skyline, on top of bruno and danja’s building, drinking beer and fixing bikes, is my minds’ eye of the netherlands quintessential.

thanks to danja and bruno for putting up with me while i was in rotterdam and i can’t wait to come back this summer with karin and alex to begin work with OMA/AMO… w00t!