This year’s b.TWEEN forum has a range of creative and commercial opportunities on offer. To win a grand prize of £10,000, industry specialist development workshops and have your work screened in the Interactive Gallery, at the ICA, FACT and on Big Screens across Manchester: get involved. Submissions to be uploaded on the forum’s website.

EXPLODING NARRATIVE: Propose an original, exciting idea for an mscape and you could win one of five £1,000 development grants, a £10,000 grand prize and the chance to see your idea become reality. mscapes are location based mobile games, stories and educational journeys. They are experienced on GPS-enabled PDAs and based on easy to use software developed by HP Labs. We are looking for:

- ideas that engage with location-based collaborative gaming, learning or stories
- from artists, film makers, games designers, e-learning experts and creatives

INTERACTIVE GALLERY: Exhibit your engaging, interactive installation at b.TWEEN08. We are looking for Technology-enabled, life-enriching, glee-inducing works that will engage young and old alike. Every year at b.TWEEN we have a gallery of interactive installations that delegates and museum visitors can play with and be inspired by. Exhibits in the b.TWEEN08 Interactive Gallery will also be screened at the ICA, FACT and on Big Screens across Manchester. Past galleries have included Igloo, Squidsoup, Alexei Shulgin, Soda and Transmute Collective.

b.TWEEN08: Nowhere else will you find such a diverse mix of ideas-rich indies and ideas-hungry big industry players meeting on a level playing field to explore and exploit the creative and commercial potential of digital technologies. Book tickets. Supported by: Channel 4, BBC, New Media Age, HP Labs, NWDA, Technology Strategy Board, Museum of Science and Industry, Ambient Worlds, ICA, FACT, Creative Partnerships and the Arts Council of England.

The DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. The conference theme this year is to promote discussion around new collaborative environments, collective knowledge and redefining disciplinary boundaries.

The aim of the conference is to: * Establish a site for mutually creative exchanges of knowledge * Promote discussion around new collaborative environments and collective knowledge * Encourage and celebrate the connections and tensions within the liminal spaces that exist between the Arts and Humanities * Redefine disciplinary boundaries * Create a forum for debate around notions of the ’solitary’ and the collaborative across the Arts and Humanities * Explore the impact of the Arts and Humanities on ICT: design and narrative structures and visa versa.

There will be a variety of sessions concerned with the above but also with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and theorising around practice. There will also be various installations and performances focussing on the same theme. Keynote talks will be given by our plenary speakers who we are pleased to announce are Sher Doruff, Research Fellow (Art, Research and Theory Lectoraat) and Mentor at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, Alan Liu, Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara and Sally Jane Norman, Director of the Culture Lab, Newcastle University.

In addition to this, there will be various round table discussions together with a panel relating to ‘Second Life’ and a special forum ‘Engaging research and performance through pervasive and locative arts projects’ led by Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham. Also planned is the opportunity for a more immediate and informal presentation of work in our ‘Quickfire’ style events. Whether papers, performance or other, all proposals should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA.

The Deadline for submissions will be 30 April 2008 and abstracts should be approximately 1000 words.

Cambridge’s venues range from the traditional to the contemporary all situated within walking distance of central departments, museums and galleries. The conference will be based around Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Site, particularly the West Road concert hall, where delegates will have use of a wide range of facilities including a recital room and a ‘black box’ performance space, to cater for this year’s parallel programming and performances.

The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player /online gaming, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created new forms of entertainment that attract, immerse and absorb their participants. The phenomenal success of such a “culture” to initiate a mass audience in patterns and practices of its own consumption has supported the evolution of an enormously powerful mass entertainment, digital art and performance industry extending deeply into every aspect of our lives, leading further to major societal and business contacting changes.

The International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA), in cooperation with ACM, is the premier forum for the presentation of societal, business and technological advances and research results in cross-disciplinary areas related with digital interactive media in entertainment, art and creative technologies. This conference is dedicated to build common ground between research, design and development, learning and collaboration in its myriad digital media forms: one of its many objectives is the exploration of ‘play & learn’, demonstrating new arenas and applications for digital gaming and incorporating leading edge technologies, designs and models in our changing views about what is involved in gaming.

DIMEA 2008 is jointly organized by Athens Information Technology (AIT), ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI, Singapore Chapter) and the Society for Excellence and Innovation in Interactive Experience Design (InExDe).

DIMEA 2008 will bring together academics, technologists, artists, designers, and industry representatives to address and advance the leading edge of new digital and interactive media.

Who should attend:

Academics, Animators, Artists, Designers, Developers, Educators, Engineers, Game Designers, Industry Professionals, Media Industry, Video Producers, Directors, Writers, Performers, Photographers, Videographers, Researchers, Students. Anyone who wants to be inspired to adopt advanced ways in industry, society, business, research and teaching, expand their knowledge on a wide variety of topics within the field of digital media, network with cross-disciplinary experts from digital media professionals to academic experts, and evolve with this ever-changing field!

DIMEA 2008 is one of the few conferences that combines full technical papers as well as artwork / game / demo submissions, to accommodate, after evaluation and selection, both technical oral sessions as well as artwork / game / demo exhibition sessions. For each one of the two tracks of the conference further information is separately provided below.

Technical Conference Track: The following, non exclusive, topics are called for:

Entertainment, Art and Technology - Location-based and Pervasive Gaming, Mobile Entertainment, Digital Games in Practice, Computer Entertainment Research, Open-Source Gaming Engines, Implications for Multimedia and Web Design, Artistic Games, Commercial Games, Edutainment, Educational/Serious Games, Interactive Games, Games as Pedagogy, Analysis of Games, e-Performance (e-Opera,e-Theatre, e-Concert, …), Virtual Exhibitions and Museums

New Media Emerging Technologies - Personal Broadcasting (Podcasting and Vlogging), Novel Applications for Mobile Phones, Social and Interactive Computing Applications, Collaborative Spaces/Environments, Innovative Applications of Technology in the Arts, Mixed Reality and Enhanced Visualization, Context-aware Environments and Devices, Immersive Learning Experiences, Communication Technologies and Systems for Digital Media, Advanced Authoring and Composition of Media, Advanced Interaction, Targeted/Personalized Media, Adaptable Media and AI

Code Art - Algorithmic Art, Software Art, Net Art, Installation Art, Tangible Computing, Sonic Art

Digital Visual and Auditory Media - Digital Photography, Digital Imaging as Art, Advances in 3D Modelling, Digital Printing, Non-Photorealistic Rendering, Digital Sound and Music, Digital Music Synthesis and Composition, Graphics and Animations, Digital Comics

Moving Media - Digital Video, Distance Collaboration/Performance, Computer Animation, Interactive Movies

Culture of New Media - Network Culture, Philosophy of New Media, Digital Identity

Interactive Stories - Digital Narrative, Digital Asset Management, Semantic Web Technologies, Interactive Television and Cinema, Game Design and Storytelling

Full Paper Submissions: Prospective authors are invited to submit full technical papers of not more than 8 pages, including tables, figures and references at the conference online paper submission system. Prospective authors should adhere to the conference full paper submission guidelines. Full Papers should present original research related to the above mentioned scientific areas, not published elsewhere. Please refer to the conference Web site for detailed submission guidelines. Full papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from the International Technical Program Committee in a single-blind process, judging on their relevance, novelty and technical quality.

Art Work / Game / Demo Exhibition Conference Track: DIMEA 2008, with the participation of the MEDIATERRA FESTIVAL, aims to offer the opportunity to artists, independent creators, multimedia authors, programmers and theorists to exhibit their digital interactive rich-media works in art and entertainment, and at the same time to create a forum of communication, discussion and collaboration on advances in the already deployed practices.

We cordially invite artists, creators, designers, game developers, generally practitioners working with digital interactive media to submit their original contributions to the DIMEA2008 Artworks / Games / Demos exhibition track, in the context of the following five DIMEA 2008 subject art-related areas:

Entertainment, Education, Art and Technology: Location-based and Pervasive Gaming, Mobile Entertainment, Digital Games in Practice, Computer Entertainment Research, Open-Source Gaming Engines, Implications for Multimedia and Web Design, Artistic Games, Edutainment, Educational/Serious Games, Interactive Games, Games as Pedagogy, e-Performance (e-Opera, e-Theatre, e-Concert, …), Virtual Exhibitions and Museums

New Media Emerging Technologies - Personal Broadcasting (Podcasting and Vlogging), Novel Applications for Mobile Phones, Social and Interactive Computing Applications, Collaborative Spaces/Environments, Innovative Applications of Technology in the Arts, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and Enhanced Visualization, Context-aware Environments and Devices, Immersive Learning Experiences, Communication Technologies and Systems for Digital Media, Advanced Authoring and Composition of Media, Advanced Interaction, Targeted/Personalized Media, Adaptable Media and AI, Semantic Web Technologies, Digital Identity

Code Art - Algorithmic Art, Software Art, Net Art, Installation Art, Tangible Computing, Sonic Art, Artificial Entities

Digital Visual and Moving Media - Computer Animation, Interactive Movies, Advances in 3D Modeling, Semantic-based Approaches, Real-time 3D

Interactive Media - Digital Narrative, Interactive Television and Cinema, Interactive Drama, Interactive Storytelling

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, “Survival,” with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book “Survival”, the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to “write” the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth…). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my “survival” here.

The word “SURVIVAL” has been changed to “SUR-VIV-ALL,” trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred “SUR VIV (R) E / VIE …”, something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, “VIVA”, claiming to live, an imperative. In English “survival”, has its original meaning, plus the “ALL” that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The “Waypoints” on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we’ve accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhMl7_HiuKo

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

Its theoretical basis lies in ideas of locative art and pyschogeography. The camera and descriptive text are its locative technologies, and the pyschogeography consists of the spaces we inhabit as a global community. Cityscapes is a browser-based application. It embeds mapping software and geographical locating services in a wiki framework, which enables multiple users to contribute texts and images to a common project.

Cityscapes is built entirely on open source components and cost-free Internet services, most prominently DokuWiki, Google maps, geonames.org, and the FCKeditor. This truly remarkable freedom of technical access is important to how Cityscapes has been conceived, as inhabiting a shared imaginative space made possible by the Internet.

We hope that you will visit Cityscapes and, even more, that you will take the time to contribute. The wiki is set up so that only you have editing access to your posts; you can always come back to them, revise them, even delete them. Read about the Cityscapes Aesthetic.

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates.

In between the record sets are the most interesting possibilities for new services, new ways of experiencing the physical world and new kinds of adventures. What I’m thinking about are ways to creatively explore within a fully instrumented, surveilled and mapped world, with counter intuitive uses of this data. There are some excellent examples within the art-technology and design-technology communities, such as GPS Drawing, as shown above. This practice is intriguing because it couples measurement with expression and finds an alternative use for the devices involved — a GPS and a mapping application like GoogleEarth.

Surveillance Camera Players using CCTV cameras as a site for performance opportunities

Younghee wonders, in this context, what are the ways of minimizing “digital traces” — those indications of where you are, and where you have been, in a surveillance world. She says,

That leaves another interesting question: How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.

Similarly, in a reverse mode, Life: A User’s Manual by Michelle Teran captures the signals leaked into public space by RF-based video cameras and reveals intimate spaces in a very DIY and performative fashion.

Minimzing traces is one possible perspective. I think, perhaps in this era where digital kids do not reflect so much on how much of a trace they leave behind, and indeed have entirely different perspectives on the meaning of surveillance and its implications. How many digital kids (the next “us”) have read “1984″ for example?

In contrast to the Surveillance Camera Players and their performances — where they are maximizing their impact and traces for counter-intuitive purposes, and counter-systemic purposes — groups like the Institute for Applied Autonomy have constructed — years ago, pre-Google Maps — a digital map system called iSee of surveillance cameras that would allow one to plot a course that does precisely what Younghee wonders about — minimizing one’s impact. In other words, the mapping system plots routes that avoids surveillance cameras.

It may be that the question is no to much avoiding “capture” but how to turn that space into something where your voice can be heard. I’m not convinced, but it seems that we (a bit older people) think of surveillance in one way that digital kids (the next “us”) will see as an opportunity for a new form of living.

Beyond this, I am interested in a kind of Personal Positioning System that points out the absences in my experiences in the world. For example, showing me where I have not been rather than showing the entire world from above, as if its fully prepared for my exploration. I’m interested in finding things like longer route between two points, rather than the minimal route. Or routes that are deliberately constructed based on streets or regions I have not been. Purely as a form of creative, digital-era perambulation or motoring. Exploration in a world that is pretty much completely mapped, indexed, databased and optimized. What is exploration in an optimized, instrumented world? [posted by Julian Bleecker on Near Future Laboratory]

Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design / mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

WORKSHOPS

Everyone - young, old and in-between is welcome to take part! First public workshop April 5, 2008 1 pm - 5pm FREE!* Bring your local newspaper, favorite story, images and anything you want to put on the Brentford map!

Further workshops will take place on:
Saturday, April 12 1-5pm
Wednesday, April 23, 6-9pm
Saturday, May 10 1-5pm
Wednesday May 14 6-9pm

Register online: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/join.htm

If you care about the Brentford area you are invited! Come with your own agenda and we will include it!

If you can’t attend a workshop we have arranged for you to be able to contributer online. For online contribution please log on: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/upload.htm.

Environmental Risk Assessment Rover-­AT, Version 1.0, 2008: “Sooner rather than later, one comes up against the law that so long as risks are not recognized scientifically, they do not exist–at least not legally, medically, technologically, or socially, and they are thus not prevented, treated or compensated for. No amount of collective moaning can change this, only science. Scientific judgment’s monopoly on truth therefore forces the victims themselves to make use of all the methods and means of scientific analysis in order to succeed with their claims.” -German risk theorist Ulrich Beck

ERAR­AT is a mobile, solar- and GPS-powered, networked video installation that will accumulate and aggregate the environmental threats and risks faced by the population in its immediate location. ERAR-AT performs the difficulty of perceiving, evaluating, and understanding risk scenarios and presents an assessment of its given locale by producing a unique fourteen-tiered threat level embedded live within video projections onto local natural and architectural surfaces.

What kind of local and global environmental risks do you face everyday? How far is the closest superfund site or nuclear power plant or agribusiness? How do the 148 industrial chemicals already in every American human body interact with the synthetic hormones and antibiotics in the dairy products we eat? How many chemicals are in human breast milk? How do the chemicals in your toothpaste interact with the pesticides on your food? Why has modernity, which was supposed to create a sense of security, produced more anxiety and threats than ever? Can scientific data and research help us understand the “riskiness” of contemporary life?

ECOARTTECH is Christine Nadir & Cary Peppermint ERAR Programming & Research Assistant: Colin Twomey.

ERAR-AT is part of the Neuberger Museum of Art’s Off the Grid Exhibition, March 30 - June 1, 2008. “Off the Grid” features works that subvert and circumvent conventional infrastructures. Co-presented by the Neuberger Museum of Art and free103point9 and curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Tianna Kennedy, and Tom Roe.

Participating artists: Benjamin Cohen, Dylan Gauthier, and Stephan von Muehlen, EcoArtTech, eteam, Max Goldfarb, Louis Hock, Nina, Katchadourian, Kristin Lucas, Joe McKay, Trevor Paglen, Temporary Services, Seth Weiner, Bart Woodstrup

To create a double image of space and place, Esther Polak used the “mashup website” VeoGeo.com. The website combines images of GPS registrations with YouTube route-footage. Combined and synchronized, tracks and video’s can be followed step by step resulting in an extremely realistic experience of armchair traveling.

Esther Polak is best known from her earlier prize winning GPS projects like AmsterdamREALTIME and MILKprojec.

Deer Blogs His Own GPS Position in Google Earth - In what may be a short-lived cool geo hack of the day, a deer named “Thor” now has his own blog where he shares his GPS position every five minutes. Someone named ‘Siberian’ at the Google Earth Community posted how he managed to make this happen. Turns out he had collared a deer they named “Thor” with a GPS and cellphone with SMS capability. They are studying deers living in suburban areas in Pennsylvania. Siberian then hacked up a way to use the resulting E-mail to create a spreadsheet which is then converted into a file you can use to track the deer in Google Earth. The system is totally automated using free services. His post goes into detail on how this was all accomplished. Siberian is using some tools by Valery Hronusov - who has developed and posted dozens of cool geo hacks for Google Earth (see his global rainfall example). Valery came up with the idea to let the deer blog his coordinates as well. Thanks to Valery for the tip on this cool deer hack! Note: you can also view the deer’s map in Google Maps. [blogged by Frank Taylor on Google Earth Blog]