I wish george and helen had a real web page
A new prototype
We’ve had a good week with for development, after going along to Dorkbot this week we spoke with Tarim regarding wet bots (or spiders, crawlers, and many more) and how to physically collect the data we want from blogs. Since then George has been developed scripts to trawl, find, collect and display instances of ‘i wish’ from a google blog search….. Here we have a single wish that is called and displayed on a page. Here we have all the results drawn from one search page and a lovely title to give it meaning and also a link that we have put there for testing purposes, where you can see where we drawing the sentences from.
We want to use the potential of the internet as a library of knowledge, opinion and culture and re-represent it in a public space, taking the private musings of people and presenting them out of context, thus changing the intended meaning and (re)creating narrative. We hope that an amalgamation of the the two ideas mentioned in the last blog will suitable approach this theme.
The results from the drawing of information from blogs is like the realisim that was caught on camera in early ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentaries, I say this because ‘both’ are knowing participents allowing themselves to be exposed however, (most) people won’t know of our search for instances of I wish and therefore won’t change as a result of (more) exposure.
Testing, testing. . .
Diagram of Wishing Well Project
Diagram of Branching Narratives Project
George and I thought of the Seeds of these two ideas on a walk home last week, we had spent all evening in the studio wracking our brains as to what sort of project we wanted to make. Although we both produced ‘After We Come and Go’ our individual interests had not yet, in our mutual agreement, combined fully to create a piece that is representative of our collaborative creative practice. Take this picture for example;
first prototype
What we have here is a screen shot of an application that George made in Flash this week to test linking and branching from text inputs (click the image to enlarge). Firstly, creating an app like this would have been inconceivable this time last year, in addition, we would not have been as aware of the importance of prototyping (or indeed our proposed idea). The project proposals and application that we have written this week show a development in our practice, away from that preliminary period of learning to a stage where we can apply what we gained from ‘After We Come And Go’ technically and focus on communication, functionality and usability.
Week One
One of the major events for us this week was experiencing Mscapes and repositioning our opinions of them. ‘Always Someone Somewhere’ is a Mscape walk by Dunacn Speakman which approaches the theme of memory, we were drawn to its fragmented narrative which was triggered by the marking of locations on the ipac. This approach to locative media really made us engage with the piece and was a far cry from our preconceived ideas of Mscapes being a flash game on a smaller scale (yes, sorry, we did really think that). In comparison to Dunacans piece the ‘SouthWest Sound’ application was not as multi layered or rich in terms of narrative, but nevertheless a fun experience, especially when the sounds from the virtual speakers overlapped and worked as taster as to which direction to take.
Addventures
I have spent most of the day looking at collaborative story creation and stumbled across Addventures (thanks Wikipedia). An Addventure is a search based drama and an interactive fiction and often the narrative is communicated through a text only command line interface, I lost a lot of my time this afternoon immersed in Anchorhead, a horror game created by by Michael S. Gentry (1998), where by the protagonist, the wife of a university professor is exploring her new town (there is more to it but I found it confusing at first and by the time I had worked it out I felt like I should do some work…I have sworn to revisit it tonight!)
As a fan of the matrix, I was instantly drawn to its green and black command line interface and once I had got to grips with the imperative sentences (’walk south’ or ‘open window’) it was easily navigated. As mentioned earlier I had to play with it a lot before I fully mastered what I had to do and as a child of the digital revolution, the absence of images to illustrate my surroundings confused me at first as I skipped through the instructions (tut tut). However once I had realised the importance of the descriptive passages I was able to navigate myself around the mentally envisaged town of Anchorhead.
When using this game, I was reminded of Geoff Ryman’s hypertext novel ‘253‘, beacuse I felt that although my path through the game would be determinded by my own decisions I was inevitably being pointed in the direction of an ending, an ending which would become more apparent as I progressed through the game.
Possible applications of this style of game and user experience, could be the creation of a front end management system for a story like this, which would enable users to be authors and to have a say in the progression of the narrative. However, this idea made me question the validility of open ended immersive complexity in the formation of narative – you cannot rely on users inputting text that will make sence (as we found with After We Come and Go) and I am reticent to apply censorship to projects I create. A way of approaching this would be to allow users the right to be an administrator of sorts and perhaps have a voting system in place to allow the deletion of input.
Games such as Anchorhead can be coded in C and other such languages, there are object orientated programmes such as TADS, a freeware programming system that allows you to programme games like these.
Our First Day
Today is the first day of our three month residency at The Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. During our time here we will develop one major project that we will see through to a finished piece. Alongside this we endeavor to work on several smaller projects that will prototype ideas to explore tactile interfaces, wearable computing and location based media.
Our main project will utilise user-generated content, a theme that has been present throughout our past collaborative work. Our time at the studio will begin with a research period whereby we will develop our learning brief by defining questions that we will approach with our work. The brief for this project is yet to be confirmed, however, initial thoughts include projections that utilise motion graphics and text data, most likely created in either Flash or VVVV.
We plan to negotiate with Encounters Film Festival to create a piece that will engage with the digital platform and approach themes such as user generated content and immersive technology. Current ideas for harvesting data include; scanning blogs using recursively created keywords and using SMS and Bluetooth data.
Newbs
A bit about us
Helen and George are recent graduates from the University of West of England where they completed a Media Practice degree both specialising in interactive media.
George’s interests are wide and varied although they generally revolve around making beautiful things with technology. Recent activities include, writing VJing software in Pure Data, hand building a multitouch surface, working with user generated content using Action Script, PHP and mySQL, getting tangled up with his Arduino cables, creating fractal based motion graphics using VVVV, and recently collaborating with London based company Musion to create holographic installations.
In his spare time George likes to party hard, watch cartoons, ride his bike, cook, play with his sound system, travel and read.
Helen is one of the most passionate and energetic people that you will ever meet. Coupled with her people and organisational skills she makes one hell of a producer. Over the last three years Helen has produced numerous works across film and new media platforms, as well as supporting the studio development team at Team Rubber. She is deeply immersed within the Bristol media industry, supporting events such as Encounters Film Festival, Venn Festival, Cine Formation, and QuWack(e). She has also been a regular assistant at the Bristol Media events for the last two years, where hundreds of the cities creatives come together for networking and socialising.
When Helen is relaxing she is usually spending time at home baking cakes, getting her head around new media theory, playing Sim City, looking at the constructs of language, or more often than not, reinstalling windows.
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