Hi Siri

dance, performance

Last Friday evening I was working with producer/writer/choreographer Lydia Fraser-Ward and dancer/physical actor Philippa Hambly at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green where Hi Siri was presented as part of the Women of Mass Destruction 3. Hi Siri featured pre-recorded and live interactive visuals created with the latest version of the Kinect sensor which is basically even better all round than the first version, in itself quite excllent.

Hi Siri is about a relationship between a woman, Iris, and her phone, Siri. It begins with Siri being plugged into the ‘flat OS’ thus giving her control of all domestic services, signalling the start of a general takeover bid by Siri upon Iris’ life. The interaction design follows a trajectory from Siri being a jumble of curves and lines to a recognisably human (albeit digital) form.

It was great to work within the performance environment for a change. After a lot of pre-design I only had to press a few buttons on the night, but obviously they still had to be the right buttons in the right order! That 20m USB extension finally came in handy. Thankfully the perfomance went well and congratulations are due all round. A couple of stills follow…

Hi Siri

Hi Siri

 

Play Table: Iteration 3

Development, Exhibition, play table, R&D

Now that the dust of the summer holidays has settled, I’ve had chance to edit some video of the Play Table R&D project as it appeared at FACT, Liverpool, in August.

Play Table : Iteration 2

Development, Exhibition, play table, R&D

Installed at The Minories Galleries, Colchester.

Introducing ‘play table’

play table, R&D

I am pleased to introduce the ‘play table’ project.

“An innovative art technology project that will develop an experiential artwork with which four or more participants may interact simultaneously. A video image projected from above onto a large tabletop surface will be calibrated to allow multiple-participant touch interaction. Participants will be invited to manipulate virtual objects on the surface using bodily interaction resulting in an audiovisual experience that is a direct product of social playfulness.”

It’s an iterative project with key stages taking place in public. This video documents the first stage.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Commission for Metal Culture NetPark

NetPark

Finally I’ve found a moment to announce the good news that I have been awarded a commission by Metal Culture to develop an augmented reality art work for the NetPark project which you can read more about here. I’ve been busy developing technical and artistic approaches to this exciting project. My basic idea is to create an experience that brings the trees of the park to life as they tell stories of events and happenings that have occured in the park’s 100+ year history. But are they to be believed? Especially given the highly opinionated nature of the story telling 😉 I hope to post some snippets  in the coming weeks. The project is set to go live in September.

Here’s a short feature about the project in today’s Observer Tech Monthly…

observer-tech

Harwich Concept Development

Harwich, R&D

I’ve been developing ideas around visualising journeys to and from Harwich. Some ideas are for interactive work, some for projected moving image.

Concept 1 – animated projected image

hotel-comp

Concept 2 – ‘coarse’ interaction with journey sentences

Concept 3 – ‘fine’ interaction with journey sentences

step01

step02

step03

step04

step05

step06

step07

step08

step09

Harwich Commission

Harwich

I’m happy to say that I’ve been commissioned by Place Services at Essex County Council and ENAS (Essex Network of Artists’ Studios) to produce an ‘experience based activity’ to occur in Harwich within the coming months. This is an exciting opportunity to follow on in the footsteps of Journeyer although mine will be a relatively small footstep in the wake of this larger project!

I’ll be adding some notes and thoughts to this blog as the project progresses. In the meantime, here is a nice Wordle created using text from the Wikipedia entry for Harwich.

harwich-wordle-png

Data Flow at FACT

Exhibition

Data Flow is now up and running at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), Liverpool, as part of the Type Motion exhibiton which opens tomorrow evening (13/11/14) and doesn’t stop until 08/02/15. Just as I threw the switch to demonstrate the installed work to FACT people, after some time spent tweaking, 50+ students turned up directly in front of the screens and immediately started jumping around and taking pictures. That was a good start! Here’s a short screen capture of the piece being put through its paces by a combination of FACT staff and passers-by.