Urban Realities & Augmented play

image courtesy of Stephanie Fynn

Introduction

About Urban Realities & Augmented play

Urban Realities & Augmented Play was an exhibition that was held by The School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney and the Design Lab at the University of Sydney. And New Media Curation manages this collaboration. This exhibition was held from 9 – 16 June 2011 which is held two months ago at the Wilkinson Building, City road University of Sydney. In this exhibition, Students from the Interaction Design and Electronic Arts (IDEA) showed their interactive electronic artwork as part of their final assignment to the public. Fortunately, I was studying in IDEA course at that moment and joined this assignment and my art was showed on the exhibition and displayed to the public, that’s reason why I chose this exhibition for analyzing and reviewing.

About the exhibition.

The exhibition was held at the ground floor of the Wilkinson Building, City road University of Sydney, also this is the build for the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. The exhibition was separated into two parts; the first part was in the hall, which was inside the building, there were hanged many poster of the students’ artwork, they helped audiences to understand more information about the exhibition and electronic artworks. The outside of the building, there was a big screen was called Smart Lab. The Smart Lab was used to display students Artwork. From the 9 June to 16 June, the Smart Lab kept playing the students’ artwork video which is token from the launch night.

The launch night

The launch night was the last day for students to work on their assignment. Also the launch night was a very important day, lots of University students, students; friends, teachers and many industries professional persons came from around of Australia to join this exhibition.

In the exhibition launch night, guests could get free drink and food. The processes of the exhibition launch night were some important person did some speech. Then students started to show their artworks to public.

Interactive Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts is kind of new art on electronic screen which is as new media in our life. The most popular way to use electronic arts in life is promotion. In the IDEA course, students have to learn how to create electronic arts to attractive audience to interactive with the screen. Compare with tradition arts - traditional painting, traditional architecture, and the electronic arts is much more different. Electronic arts is only for watching but also it is attractive and playable. As the definition of the Urban Playground which is from student Design Brief document, ‘an interface to the built architecture of the city that engages passers – by into playful moments of interaction’[1]. Students have to make their artwork to be entertainable, but it is not a video game.

How to make electronic arts?

Electronic arts are made from codes and words. People usually use programming way to create artworks. The platform called Processing is developed and made based on Java language, as people found how difficulty on programming in C++ and Java language. Also the other way to create electronic is use a platform which is called Quartz Composer. ‘Quartz Composer is a node-based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X for processing and rending graphical data.’[2]

In this project, student could choose either Processing or Quartz Composer to be the programming tool and platform. Also students can find lots of online open recourse and library from Internet. By using the recourse, example and library, student can easily achieve their goal.

How to make interactive electronic arts?

Interaction means a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another [3]. I searched how students make interactive arts. By making the audience can interact with the arts, people have to use image or light detectors. Normal Web computer camera or Microsoft Kinect could be chose as the detectors. They have both same theory, as they detect light of the objects then use programming method to detect light and separate the objects, people and background objects. Microsoft Kinect is a kind of equipment and device of Xbox 360; people could play games without any traditional game platform Accessories. People also can hack the Microsoft Kinect to make them become a interactive electronic arts detector and work without the Xbox 360. Compare with normal web camera, the Microsoft Kinect could much easier to detect light by separated light resource into different section from weakest to strongest. In this exhibition, most of students chose to use Microsoft to detect objects.

Arts Projects

We can find lots of information about this exhibition on the students’ blog[4]. As the blog posting is one part of the students assignment, they put how they started the project, how they researched what audience wanted to see on the Urban Screen and how they faced challenge and solved problems before they finished the assignment and exhibition.

All artiest in this exhibition have their on purpose and represent them on their artworks. The purposes were be creating a colorful interactive art to represent colors and emotion. Some of them use arts to telling people to protect and save our environment and some of them create an underwater world with lots of fish etc

As I motioned above, I joined that project; I would like to introduce artwork before. My group called Luck Koi, which is a Japanese Name means ‘fancy carp’ [5] and described by my group mate Lin. Our purpose is creating underwater world with many lots of fish and those fish can interact with audiences who stand in front of the screen. Our last decision is make fancy carps as the main ‘characters’ in the screen and also lots of shadow effect with them. We chose fancy carp because we are Asian background and Fancy carps are orient fish and could be found in lots of Chinese and Japanese culture painting and artwork, we want to use fancy carp to present Asian culture, also we use smoke shadow and Chinese traditional ink painting. When audiences stay in front of the screen, fancy carp would swim toward to the center of the shadow and as the shadow follow audience, fancy carp would change their swimming dictation. Also in the center of the shadow would create some white smoke as Chinese ink painting on the screen. My initial idea was making a white background and black ink effect to exactly fill with Chinese ink painting style. After tested on the screen, white background is too bright and glaring [6].

Bella’s Boyz team, they created a very amazing artwork – Universal space[7]. This group has very powerful imagination; they made a black ground and lots of the colorful points and circles to represent star and planets in the universal space. When audiences move, the whole space would follow the audience position rotating. This is very creative job with very wonderful interactive way to present.

Team plasma is name from science. This team made a very colorful and simple work; they called it ‘CITY___’ [8]. As the picture above, they make a full black background. They used a processing library called MSAFluid and they used webcam as light detector instead of using Microsoft Kinect. When audience move in front of camera, the screen start to create to two waves from each side of the screen. The speed of waves and size of waves are depended on the movement speed of the objects which in front of the camera. Then the color of waves is automatically keeping changing as part of the programming. They want to use color to repent feeling. This makes audiences feel they make a very colorful and beautiful painting on the screen.

Fy created is very interesting artwork and they gave it a name called Skin[9]. But this is not a skin or something is related to skin. They make a artwork with plastic bags and the artwork showed on screen is a piece of plastic and part of bags. From their introduction, the purpose of the idea is creating something that people can’t touch and they can feel and see on the screen as the interactive arts.

I only introduced four groups’ artworks and there are many artworks I don’t mention in this report, all the art works in the exhibition are very incredibly, those student spent about two months to complete their assignment. Here is the link of the blog website. http://www.idea9102.net/wp/. You could find lots of artworks’ pictures, videos and stories on it.

This exhibition was very interesting and very important for me as my work was showed in the exhibition, interactive electronic arts in new kind of arts on technology to create more different feeling and changeable compare with traditional art painting. Electronic arts are not only arts but also parts of programming in computing. In inclusive audience in to them and motivate audience to play and watch on them.

Reference

http://newmediacuration.com/

[1] Design Brief of Urban Playgrounds - The University of Sydney | IDEA9102 – Installation Studio

[2] Dentition of Quartz Composer- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer

[3] Dentition of interaction - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction

[4] Installation Studio Website - http://www.idea9102.net/wp/

[5]Name of group Luck Koi - http://www.idea9102.net/wp/groups/the-lucky-koi/

[6] Fancy Crap report http://www.idea9102.net/wp/archives/3311

[7] Universal report http://www.idea9102.net/wp/archives/2946

[8] Team Plasma http://www.idea9102.net/wp/archives/3335

[9] Team Fy http://www.idea9102.net/wp/archives/3456