Integrating data and animation
An interesting tool for digital-native indexicality– The Ecosystem Engine. “The initial impetus for the Ecosystem Engine stemmed from artist-animator Marina Zurkow’s desire to incorporate non-linear, generative and data-driven processes into her otherwise linear animations.”
If you happen to be in Spain, check out:
“The core of PLAYLIST will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show will demonstrate that the retro-gaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-res sounds and aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. For the first time, retro-gaming will be explored through the lens of musical production and distribution, displaying not only tracks, but instruments, tools, softwares and hardwares, skins and graphics, but also discographies, platforms and communities. Thus, PLAYLIST will serve as a starting point for an archive / collection of materials produced by artists and musicians, and as a relational context where visitors can practice with tools produced by artists, and take part in workshops, lectures, improvised performances…Furthermore, PLAYLIST will try to provide a context for this kind of research, not necessarily game related, selecting seminal projects and artists that helped forging the conceptual frame in which retro-gaming took place.”
December 9, 2009
Documenting the analysis of the analysis of documenting
Georgia Tech’s News Games blog has an interesting critique/post mortem of the Remembering 7th Street: The Virtual Oakland Blues & Jazz journalistic game. Analysing the project as a news game, the review finds the work a failure in creating the feeling of lived place that the design goals intended. I wonder how crafting either a phenomenological sense of place, or an experiential perspective on, say, what it may have been like to live there (two slightly different things) could be incorporated into this sort of game. For example, (in terms of the former), what could the design team integrate into the game world that would have a sort of reality-bleed effect: things that would tell the player directly that this is not just a world that LOOKS like 7th Street– this IS 7th street. In terms of the later, how does placing the player in a quest position impact the situated perspective of placing them in the game in the first place?
