PhD

to nottingham for the ‘dtc summer school’, a meet-up of all the doctoral training centres that fall under the digital economy initiative. hosted by horizon, it meant the theme was right up my street: the lifelong contextual footprint, ie. the act of living is generating all this data/media, so what are we going to do with it?

given it was a meet-up and we’re the first generation, networking and sharing of research interests was built-in to the programme. show-and-tell, however, would have just been too conventional, so there were we with t-shirts, pens and 80 sheepish expressions. and yes, thats my shirt above, excuse the terrible photoshop shlepping of back and front. bonus twitter comment from jeremy morley: “seeing the different dtc student groups rather like the bit in shaun of the dead where shaun’s group meet an alternate group.”

lots of interesting stuff, including cool talks from matt adams of blast theory and aleks krotoski of the guardian and much more. it was a shame not to be able to participate in the “life stories” workshop, which was my interest almost verbatim, but the reason was good: my DTC MAT were hosting their own, and it was a little bit crazy: what if data were the fifth dimension? a thought experiment and some design fiction. there’s a kind of slides-made-through-the-workshop pdf attached, including the diminished-reality-3000™.

the marvels of the internet and the crowd there being what they are, there is already a series of blog posts that outlines the various talks and activities there: props to liz valentine.

to thatcamp london, an “unconference” ahead of the juggernaut that apparently is digital humanities 2010. loved the fact that for a conference organised on-line and firmly embedded in a world of twitter hashtags and multi-channel ADHD, the actual schedule was organised on the day using a giant chalkboard and people putting up their arms.

i was there for the semantic narrative / semantic web work i’m doing with the BBC, which has a lot of serious implications and opportunities for historians and whatnot, but these tweets are much more fun:
- dancohen not to adore #thatcamp too much, but what other conference has academics, the BBC “future media” group, and comic book junkies in one room?
- mbtimney more #doctorwho at #thatcamp! now we’re onto spitfires in space (an apt metaphor for our TEI / comic book / fanfic / narrative discussion)?

as part of the PhD programme i’m on, there is a six month placement in industry. i’m super-stoked that i’ve landed a project with the BBC that is right up my street, and could serve my ideas about live cinema very well. they wrote a great post on their r&d blog about what they’ve done so far, and springboarding from that i’ll be looking at possible futures for that kind of stuff. check out their post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2010/03/the-mythology-…

and mid-stripdown here are the audience tables, each one microphon and speaker’d up. these all turned into a lot of wires, a big multi-channel sound card, and a heroic max patch made by henrik. not a trivial task conceptually, making audience audio feed back - as in, bounce around, echo, etc. - without actually feeding back - as in, screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!.

as part of the media and arts technology programme, a group of us have been investigating live performance in terms of the audience. its an area i have great interest in, believing that the entertainment can be an emergent property of the audience rather than something that has to be received from a singular performance/performer: eg. kinetxt. this project is more subtle than that, instead trying to tease apart what exactly makes an audience an audience and play with that. the first step is to stop thinking of an audience as a single thing. its a collection of people who at some point, hopefully, come together and somehow an audience emerges. its the interactions between the individuals that create an unstable state we call an audience…?

as our experiment, we created a mini-cabaret event and tried a few things out with our technological twists. here is keir performing john cage’s 4’33”, and for once not because we suddenly needed to fill five minutes, but because we had the whole venue decked out as an audience noise feedback matrix, gently developing and becoming more overt through the piece.

with the augmented human interaction lab at their disposal, some of my media and arts technology partners made invisible ping-pong. tracking the bat position and your head, they piped in binaural (ie. positioned) sound to the headphones so you heard the ball rather than saw it. weird to play, but as atau observed, could be just the thing needed to augment the wiimote type games into the kind of natural feeling reality you need to best play the games, or wield that “bat”.

i really like dave’s motives for this - touch control not on a flat screen, but rather a really touchy interface.

great timing with atau being on the campus on the same day as our ‘interactive digital multimedia technology’ course assessment/demo day.

stand-out talk at the outside the box conference by thor magnusson, talking about making creative tools in the digital realm. ostensibly about the nature of digital music instruments, it really dug into how their design is far from a neutral act, and how in use our minds often extend to think through them.

there’s an academic paper from thor that deals with a lot of this at: http://www.ixi-audio.net/thor/EpistemicTools_OS.pdf

Through the analysis of material epistemologies it is possible to describe the digital instrument as an epistemic tool: a designed tool with such a high degree of symbolic pertinence that it becomes a system of knowledge and thinking in its own terms.

i’d be the first to admit its a much nicer way in to have the presentation before chewing on such texts directly, but its good stuff.

a new chapter starts: i am a student again, hopefully to have a doctorate in four years time. as twitterville put it, dr.spark.

Ph.D. Programme in Media and Arts Technology
An EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training

Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) is one of the UK’s leading research universities and is located at the heart of Europe’s largest concentration of creative industries. We are launching an innovative inter-disciplinary training programme in the science and technologies that are transforming the creative sector. Our mission is to produce post-graduates who combine world-class technical and creative skills and who have a unique vision of how digital technology transforms creative possibilities and social economies.

This is a unique 4 year Ph.D. programme built around core courses in advanced research methods, interaction design and digital media processing, production and recording techniques and optional specialist modules ranging from Digital Audio Effects through Digital Rights Management to Contemporary Performance. You will work under the supervision of internationally recognised experts in: Digital Music, Digital Video, Human Interaction, Performance and Live Art, and Digital Media Law. You will also develop a working partnership with one of our strategic collaborators including: BBC, The British Film Institute, last.fm, SONY, Solid State Logic and TATE.

http://www.mat.qmul.ac.uk/