|
Interactive Digital Media
Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, London Postgraduate Faculty The MA program at Ravensbourne is about individuals working digitally, experimentally and collaboratively in Ravensbourne's hothouse postgraduate community. The focus is on developing interaction strategies with audiences on various hard- and software-based platforms related to art and design.
If you have a strong vision of how you wish to develop your own work, Ravensbourne will offer you a challenging international environment and provide you with a platform where innovative ideas and cutting edge applications in art and design can be brought to life. We encourage critical awareness of cultural and social aspects as they are relevant to digital art and design and relate to a humanising strategy about digital technology. We place particular emphasis on evolving an individual approach to working with digital platforms in a wide range of fields: entertainment, information, communication, art, product design, fashion, marketing, advertising and education.
Further information can be found here:
http://www.ma.rave.ac.uk/nmePage.html
Homepage for MA programmes at Ravensbourne
(with contact details and application forms):
http://www.ma.rave.ac.uk/
More information is available on request.
Team: Prof. Karel Dudesek (Course leader), Neal White, Jim Wood, Martin Schmitz,
David Muth, Christian Benesch and Mathias Gmachl.
Wacom Rock
A sound performance instrument
Jon Cambeul
I propose to perform a piece of real-time music composition using the speech synthesis manager in OS9.2. The project considers the possibilities of using a Wacom tablet as a device for the control of a laptop during a live music performance. It is a study into how it is possible to control the various parameters of the Apple speech manager.
The initial idea came from looking at two rock guitar bands—Status Quo and ZZTop. The way these bands hold their guitars is quite a spectacle and it seems it would be fun have a real-time electronic oneman band perform using the Wacom tablet instead of standing behind a laptop.
The Word Watcher
3-Dimensional Representations of Idiomatic Structure
Martine Hermsen
The Word Watcher is an interactive learning game that creates 3-dimensional representations of the statistic structure of texts in the languages English, French, German and Dutch. When the user types in a sentence, the application visualises the use of characters, letter combinations and words. The Word Watcher analyses the different units that occur, and subsequently concludes in which language the text was written. The user is challenged to find sentences that cannot be recognised and develops a basic understanding of the spelling in the different languages.
Spice—Memories of Curry
Noe Kozuma
Spice—Memories of Curry is a video installation; imagery is projected onto an everyday object. The image and sound combined with the aromatic smell evoke recognition of food through the physical action of the participants. Upon their opening the food cover, the video of the chosen plate begins, and is projected onto the plate.
Where does a definition of taste come from?
How do you define your taste?
Why does food create emotional feelings?
Food is symbolic of our identity. Food always reflects its personality as taste, an aspect of the food on our plate exposes our individual personality. In other words, cooking is one form of self-expression.
The foundation of human taste is built up by the age of 3, and continues to grow to maturity at between 15 and 20 years of age. Our taste preferences are determined by our culture. Additionally, taste can serve as a cue for memory; bringing back memories not only of the flavour, but also emotional feeling. We have various words of expression about taste. We can imagine how delicious the food is and guess the flavour without eating it. Because it is a memory of taste, those words are based on our experience of taste such as the ingredients, the intensity of the flame, people with whom we have eaten, or had conversations with at the table. We define the taste of food with all of our sensory organs, by using visuals, smells, touch, sound, heat, etc.
The first memory of taste that I had was that of my mother’s cooking. I later discovered that the flavour I tasted was that of curry, and that the ingredients are common to many cultures around the world. The action of eating food is routine in the modern age. However, food is important for our lives. It keeps your body and mind healthy. While you are enjoying the food, it enables you to communicate with people, it brings new discoveries and happy memories and many other worthwhile experiences.
This installation presents the spices that make up the curry dishes as found in four different cultures—those of Japan, Mexico, India, and Thailand.
Interactive Surround Sound Cube (ISS Cube)
Markus Quarta
The ISS cube is a surround sound mixer that tracks the position of several physical objects on a tabletop surface to provide the user with an intuitive way of creating a non-linear soundscape. Sounds of different categories can be added, combined and positioned in space simply by moving these objects. The sound space is provided by four surrounding speakers.
Each object functions individually and simultaneously to modify the volume and position of different sound sources. However, with common audio mixing consoles and systems this would not be possible as the individual sound sources are usually mixed one after the other. The limitation is due to the nature of the input devices: joysticks on surround consoles and single mouse input on software systems.
Sound has a substantial impact on our mood. The users of the system can easily change their mood by recreating their spatial sound scenery. For example, nature sounds can be positioned within the space to create a calm and natural environment. To evoke the ambience of a forest, one could have a waterfall in one corner of the room, birds singing in another and the wind whistling through trees.
The low-tech appearance—a wooden box with a glass surface—allows the cube to fit easily into a living environment, as if it were a piece of furniture. Due to the multiple input devices, the square tabletop display, which enables equal access from all sides, invites collaborative interaction.
Sonic Mobile
Yasser Rashid
Sonic Mobile is an on-going project exploring the use of mobile phones as a way to engage, interact and navigate through audio in public space. So far, I have been exploring the use of the mobile phone as a creative music device allowing people to play, mix and manipulate sound. I have been focusing on how people collaborate and exchange using a device not often used creatively.
Shifting my attention now to personal relationships to sound, I ask the question: can we locate ourselves through sound? I'm interested in how religious sounds can serve as a method of affiliation and identification within global, local and personal environments. Can sound within this context serve as a point of representation, to look inside and locate oneself within this world? With this project I hope to explore how an interior belief system can be externalised via a radio mobile system located in the exterior, fusing the public with the private.
Accessed via the mobile handset, multiple sounds are streamed to the mobile phone so that participants can listen through the handset itself. Using the aesthetic of a traditional radio system, users of Sonic Mobile are able to "tune" into the various sounds placed within the soundscape. They can also contribute their own sounds for others to experience. As with traditional radio systems, when tuning between sounds, there may be moments when the transmission of one frequency becomes mixed with another, causing a clash, mix or fusion of sounds.
Through this experience, the project aims to highlight the tenuous relationship between sound as a representation, as a point of synthesis, tension, harmony or conflict.
The m.pleasure
Nagore Salaberria
In a time when portability and being ubiquitous are a must for any communication device, mobile phones are the main characters of our everyday life. The Bluetooth technology, not yet enough exploited, has enabled this portability even more, and thanks to it mobile phones are becoming more and more integrated onto our bodies. Nowadays we don’t need to hold the phone on our hand anymore; the Bluetooth headphone-microphone and the voice recognition system implemented on some phones permit us to talk to the phone and tell it to call any person in our phonebook, or enable us to answer the phone and keep up a conversation while we have both our hands busy with other things.
All this technological progress is changing our relation with the tools and especially with the phone. Mobile phones are starting to be physically part of us. We are becoming communication cyborgs.
The mobile pleasure unit is a product that pushes forward the relation we have with the mobile phone. m.pleasure is a device that works together with the Bluetooth enabled phone. It is wearable to the limit of being directly attached to the most sensitive areas of our body. Its intention is to translate the ethereal digital messages into something physical, letting us feel the communication.
m.pleasure is also a critical approach to how we have sacrificed our personal relations for the benefit of technology. Be it for the shield that a phone or a computer screen offers, or be it for the commodity that the technical advances provide, it is obvious that the faceto- face, hand-in-hand, personal relationships are setting themselves aside to let distant and ever less physical communication gain ground. As in every relationship, with the m.pleasure there will be a giver and a receiver. m.pleasure helps everyone who prefers the security that the distance and secrecy give. The giver is totally safe acting from his almost virtual position and sending messages to whomever he wants. But his act intends no harm at all, it is an altruist act of pleasing people, which is what m.pleasure users are looking for.
On the other hand the situation of the receiver is completely the opposite. By connecting the m.pleasure to his body, he is absolutely vulnerable and open to let technology act upon him. It is also an egoist and carnal act of being physically pleased. The technology behind the m.pleasure is what already exists in the market. Nothing but what it is being used for is new. And strictly speaking not even that, for what do we use technology for other than for pleasure?
Memory Tree
Mintra Tansukhanunt
Memory Tree is the simulation of human memory tangibility in a computer system. The inspiration originated from the ancient treatise, Ars Memoria, together with the will to make one’s memory alive in the virtual space based on visual sensitivity. Computers are chosen to interpret and display the Memory Tree due to the impression that the human brain electrochemically uses connections between groups of brain cells to record the event, which is similar to how the computer stores its memory, by electricity. A mobile is used as a substitute for the human eye and records the image and image information, sending this information to the computer through email.
Box
Jim Wood
The viewer is presented with a small cardboard box that has a screen at the base of it. It also has a microphone, camera and speaker hidden in it. Inside they can see a small image of a space with people in it. It is connected to another box with another space. A box is a space and a container. The box here is connected to somewhere else, another box, another space and time. The space here is a container for people and their thoughts, and by way of Internet chat software we allow people to talk into this little box, and to express themselves, from one place to the other. We’re interested in creating space based design, and human computer interaction. So presenting work on this scale that plays with ideas of size and sense is in fact not really interactive, in the sense of what has become common in new media design, but goes back to basics—just paper and pen. It is a statement about possible ways to deal with our forms of communication, and also not to forget about our relation to ourselves and others.
|
