[spectre] Digital Research Unit Announcements

Tue Jun 14 18:55:01 CEST 2005

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DRU {44} / 14.06.05 /
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Digital Research Unit Announcements
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1. Evolution is Not Over Yet - Seminar
2. spring_alpha: spring_city - Medialounge
3. Artist in Residence - Amy Alexander
4. Artist in Residence Remote - James Tindall
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1. Evolution is Not Over Yet - Seminar
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24 June 2005 | 2.00 - 4.00pm | Free

Gallery 5
Huddersfield Art Gallery
Princess Alexandra Walk
Huddersfield
HD1 2SU
United Kingdom

Speakers:
Chad McCail, Simon Yuill, Dennis Kaspori,
Jeanne van Heeswijk, Derek Hales, Francis McKee

An afternoon of presentations and discussions to
open the exhibition 'Evolution Is Not Over Yet'
by Chad McCail.

Chad McCail's drawing 'Spring' and the series of
paintings 'Evolution Is Not Over Yet' narrate the
attempts of a small, urban community to create a
'utopian' society. Inspired by these works, Simon
Yuill is developing the ambitious spring_alpha
project, an online game-world which acts as a
vehicle for social enquiry. This event provides
a platform for discussion of issues arising from
both Chad's work and the collaboration between
these two artists.

Chad McCail is a Scottish artist whose work
depicts alternative forms of society, often
emphasising the links between personal
relationships and social freedom. He has
exhibited as part of the British Art Show and
Beck's Futures.

Simon Yuill is the current Artist in Residence at
the Digital Research Unit. His project
spring_alpha adapts Chad McCail's drawings into a
computer game-world through which users can
experiment with the game's utopian community.

http://www.spring-alpha.org

Dennis Kaspori is an architect and a founding
member of The Maze Corporation, an office for
research and design relating to the urban
condition. He collaborated with Jeanne van
Heeswijk on the 'Face Your World' project in
Amsterdam, which used a computer game to enable
young people to become urban designers for their
neighbourhood.

http://www.themaze.org

Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist whose work
addresses art production and discourse in a broad
range of ways. Her work is based on the idea that
art must cross the boundaries it has historically
developed in its relation to society. Collaboration
is an essential part of her practice.

http://www.mediamatic.net/article-200.6156.html

Derek Hales is Research Leader for the Department
of Creative Technologies at the University of
Huddersfield School of Art & Design, where he
also leads the Multimedia subject area. Derek is
a chartered Architect and a regional councillor
of the Royal Institute of British Architects,
chairing their Digital Futures Group.

Francis McKee is Head of Digital Art and New Media
at CCA in Glasgow and is a research lecturer at
the Glasgow School of Art where he teaches on the
MFA course. He is currently researching the
relationship of 'open source' and 'open knowledge'
culture to socially engaged art practice.

+ Please book in advance!

Contact details are listed below.
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2. Medialounge Exhibition
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spring_alpha: spring_city
by Simon Yuill

Medialounge
The Media Centre
Huddersfield

14 July - 14 October 05

spring_alpha is a computer game-world based on
drawings by Chad McCail which narrate a
community's attempt to create a utopian society.
Set in a fictitious industrial town, typical of
many in Britain, elements of a dark science
fiction emerge, reminiscent of John Wyndham,
Alasdair Gray and J.G. Ballard.

This exhibition presents spring_alpha: spring_city
which looks at the creation of the urban
environment, the graphic rendering style and
'livecoding' interface. The exhibition includes
project documentation, animation, physical models
of characters, a demo version of the game,
a table-top map of the city from the original
drawings, and extracts from Mark Vernon's audio
environment for the game.

The exhibition will run concurrently with
'Evolution Is Not Over Yet' at Huddersfield Art
Gallery, which offers a chance to see Chad
McCail's project of the same name, together with
the results of workshops inspired by his work.

The spring_alpha team comprises:

Simon Yuill [Project Director] Chad McCail [Project
Advisor/original drawings], Ricardo Creemers and
Stefan Gartner [Developers], Eleonora Oreggia
[Video], Mark Vernon [Sound], Richard Dawson [Models].

Supported by Digital Research Unit, Alt-W Digital
Media Fund [Scotland], the Netherlands Media Art
Institute [Holland], Piet Zwart Institute [Holland],
University of Huddersfield, and Huddersfield Art
Gallery.

www.spring-alpha.org
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3. DRU / AiR / Amy Alexander
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AI to the People

July - October 2005

Amy Alexander will be developing a project in
which surveillance technology is subverted in
playful ways: the pattern recognition technology
used to analyse crowds for criminal or activist
behaviour, such as face recognition and motion
tracking, will be used to determine similarities
between people appearing on surveillance cameras
and typical shots of people appearing in music
videos. The video will be processed in amusing
ways to look like computer-processed music video
shots. The project uses humour to examine
contemporary concerns with surveillance from
the 'watcher' perspective rather than the
'watched'.

Amy is a software and performance artist and
'software-yapper' [occasional speaker, writer,
curator, etc.] who has worked in film, video,
performance, music and UNIX systems administration
as well as in digital media art. She is currently
an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the
University of California, San Diego. Since 1996
she has been working primarily in net art and
software art, Much of her recent work has been in
public performance and software art
[often at the same time], playing with the
juxtaposition of geek culture, business culture
and leisure life.

Amy is one of the founder/developer/administrators
of the runme.org software art repository
[2003-present]. She is also a member of the TOPLAP
live coding audio-visual performance group
[2004-present]. Her latest solo project [May 05]
is 'Scream' - a software application to facilitate
screaming.

http://plagiarist.org
http://www.runme.org
http://deprogramming.us
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4. DRU / AiR Remote / James Tindall
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May 2005 - May 2006

AiR Remote was launched in May 2005 and targets
outstanding creative practitioners living in the
UK. The programme offers support for a 12 month
period, enabling them to explore new areas of
work, and benefit from regular contact with the
Digital Research Unit community. Participants
will visit Huddersfield regularly in order to
attend and participate in our existing events
programme; to present their ideas and work to
peer groups and the public. Each AiR Remote
will write a Blog about the development of their
work.

[http://atomless.blogspot.com/]

James Tindall is an art director, web developer,
designer, and artist based in Brighton. Over the
past seven years he has produced complex, digital
solutions [websites, kiosk software and playful
interfaces] for clients ranging from Sony and
Nike to the London Science Museum and the art
collective Greyworld. His personal work focuses
on the creation of responsive, dynamic,
audio-visual artworks that have been exhibited
in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, and across Europe.

James will explore, within the context of
digital, interactive, multimedia, the
possibilities of the theme of figurative
portraiture.

He has been considering how much of the
code-based art produced in the last ten years has
been abstract in nature, perhaps due to the ease
with which abstract patterns can be generated
using the algorithmic nature of code, and the
difficulty of creating representations of
real-world objects beyond simple flora and fauna.

James will be investigating the creation of
figurative portraiture within the context of
real-time interactive code-based artwork, in
which the system will respond to and represent
the human form using the subtleties of the
drawing process, whilst also offering the
benefits of the dynamism of code-based art.

He proposes to create a system that
'digitises' painting or drawing, then presents
it in such a way as to allow the user to respond
to and manipulate the appearance of the figure.

He is also developing an alternative word
processing programme that allows users to create,
save, open and edit simple text files; in
contrast to other word processing programs, it
will allow users to introduce degrees of
messiness to the appearance of their documents,
reclaiming some of the idiosyncrasies of
handwritten typography.

http://www.atomless.co.uk
http://atomless.blogspot.com/
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For information about any of these projects
please contact us:

info at druh.co.uk
0870 990 5003
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http://www.mcnetwork.co.uk/creative.html
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