Hopefully no actual breastmilk was harmed in the making of this poster.
Deep in the throes of Gamma4 preparations this week, but also have some happy news for my personal efforts. At the beginning of April I’ll be in Hong Kong for an upcoming sex+tech gallery exhibit co-curated by monochrom, founders of Arse Elektronika (not to be confused with, or at least only briefly and bemusedly confused with, Ars Electronica) and Hong Kong new media gallery Videotage.
I’m working with Damien on a new piece called Body Heat that’s a manifestation of some concepts I’ve been thinking about for a year or so. So, they’re not showing Lapis!
This will be my first time in China, or anywhere in Asia, for that matter. Very much looking forward to it.
GDC is fast approaching, and Erin Robinson and I are already hard at work on our 2010 Game Design Challenge concept, defending our title after winning last year’s challenge. I don’t think the theme has been announced yet so I don’t intend to reveal it here, but I can safely say it is NOT a sex-themed game! Hooray. Seriously. Also, looking forward to sitting on the panel with Kim Swift and Jenova Chen. Can’t wait to see what they come up with!
Both of the panels I spoke on last year ended up as free content on the GDC Vault. So, if you want to catch up on last year’s Game Design Challenge on sex+autobiography, or the Indie Game Maker Rants at the IGS, head over to the Vault and check ‘em out.
View of Lake Champlain from the Firehouse Center for the Arts
What you see here is the view from my window. I’m in the top level of a turn-of-the-19th-century firehouse, in Burlington Vermont. The old structure has been converted into a downtown center for the arts, and at the moment the entire ground floor has been transformed into a stylish arcade of some of the most notable “art games” (or, artistic games) of the past 3 years or so. The show is called Game (Life) and it’s on display until February 13th if you want to come check it out.
Up here in the tower, I’m the Artist in Residence for a week. I’m primarily working on an oral/visual history of Kokoromi and Gamma’s first four years, which I’ll present at a lecture on Friday evening at Champlain College, just up the hill. I’ll also be doing an artist’s talk and discussion here at the Firehouse on Saturday evening, followed by a reception. At that one I’ll talk more about my Live Game Code project, and SUGAR, since it’s on display here in the gallery arcade.
I’m back in Montreal (though I’m now actually in Austin, which should (and will) be a whole ‘nother post) where I’m doing research in the Technoculture Art and Games research group at Hexagram – Concordia. I’m working with Jason Camlot in the English department to design an experimental game inspired by his research on late Victorian sound recordings.
Meanwhile, SUGAR, the game I created at my Subotron/Quartier21 residency, is debuting in the U.S. on Friday in the show Game (Life): Video Games in Contemporary Art at the Firehouse Gallery in Burlington Vermont. If you’re nearby, come play! In January, I will be holding a short residency there, and giving some lectures.
And of course, Kokoromi announced the theme for Gamma 4! Things are really heating up… developers seem excited by the accessible challenge (not to mention the accessibility challenge), and by the event’s visibility since our move to GDC. Submissions this year could be an order of magnitude more plentiful than previous years. So we’re preparing for that possibility….
Oh boy. These last three weeks were whirlwind. The residency is done, and the final show was Friday! I will be finishing the documentation later this month, and until then I have at least a few tidbits to share. First, a video by Damien from his mid October visit with Anderson and Kelly. In front of the Hofburg, Anderson contributes to the olofactorizer project….
My residency is halfway completed! I took a break last week to celebrate my birthday with friends in Berlin, and now I’m back and in full swing on Live Game Code: Stable Build, but wishing time would slow down! Here’s a little update on my in-progress third “visualization” – the Action Olofactorizer, which I’m working on with Mitch Heinrich.
Basic interface design for the Action Olofactorizer
Last week I designed a plan for how my game development behavior (both responsible and ir-) will be represented using scent. Based on my productivity or slack, the hallway at Quartier21 will smell more or less like a dirty stable, or an open grassfield. Our hope is to do this real time using a direct feed from my RescueTime account, but to get things going quickly we are starting with the easy-to-manage Comma Separated Value format, which I can generate from the RescueTime dashboard. Once I’ve created a CSV file, I can load it into the application Mitch is developing, and this will drive the hardware to create the appropriate blend of scents, via Arduino.
Yesterday we made a shopping trip to Margarethen to get supplies for our hardware. First stop was Neuber GesmbH. What an amazing place, straight out of the last century, when druggists mixed your salves bespoke. A chemical wonderland stocking everything from aromatherapy oils to bug spray. Paint. Cleaning solvents. Organic fruit juice. Hydrochloric acid. Rum flavoring. Adhesives. Plus the various containers you’d need to safely store all of these compounds. We were there just to pick up a beaker and test tube for the smell device, but with requisite ogling, it took us a full 45 minutes.
Next stop was the posh and miniscule shop of the Lampe Berger – a brand of French home-freshening wick lamps. A friend pointed it out to me late one night (thanks, Lauren!) and I saw they carried scents like wood and leather that could be useful in re-creating an equine environment. Mitch wanted to check out the chemical composition to know if they’d be useful for the project. 90% isopropyl alcohol, mixed with esters – so, basically exactly what he was already using for the smell graffiti. Of course home fresheners are not naturalistic as far as smells go, but they are as close as you’re going to find in a Vienna storefront. After smelling about half the products in the store I settled on Leather.
This week we’ll start putting it all together, and hooking up an arduino to an application that Mitch is writing to convert the Action data into servo movement to control the lids. More as this progresses!
So I’m all set up here at Subotron Shop, in the high traffic Electric Avenue section of Quartier21. Had a few visitors already, like Johannes, of monochrom fame, and Peter, the lead programmer of And Yet It Moves (they have their offices right above the shop!)
I can finally show off my two brand-new visualizations, the Diffstream Meadow and the Code Musicker (more on those soon!) Learning-wise, I’m finally at the part of the Processing book that gets into interactivity, but the first exercise is writing some pseudocode for the setup() and draw(). Good thing I use WriteRoom, so I can at least look programmery (and stay a little focussed) while sitting in a corridor and writing out a prose version of Pong. “Step 1: Draw a line 3 pixels wide on the left side of the screen that’s about 1/5th the screen height. This is the paddle of player 1….”
A little later I’m meeting with Mitch to plan our “olofactorization” of the project/game… pretty soon (after a research trip to a historic landmark to “gather” some smells) we’re gonna go to the rightfully notorious Metalab and hack us some arduino goodness…
Oh — not to forget! All my visitors today get cookies!
So it’s now week 2, and I’m not as far along in my lessons as I’d hoped (thanks mostly to the amazing Paraflows festival), but I do have something to show, finally.
This last week has been a bit like Kindergarten with numbers instead of crayons. I’m only getting the simplest things done, like drawing shapes and colors to the screen, but I’m having fun playing around. And so, I bring you, a horsie. Click it to open the applet, if you dare.
It’s Day 1 of my Live Game Code residency at Quartier21 – the day I officially start writing lines of code, and cranking up the visualizations. I’m settling in at the residence and today I wrote my first nascent lines of code in Processing.
Learning Processing
I’m using the fantastic new book Learning Processing as my tutorial into code-writing. I highly recommend it! My first public appearance is in front of the Subotron Shop next Friday, September 18th, and by then I should have a nice collection of visualization data, and be well underway with my learning effort.
I also met the other Artists in Residence, and have started planning a collaboration with one of them, Mitch Heinrich, a product designer from SF. He’s working on a smell-based urban hacking project with monochrom, and we are going to figure out how to make a scentisization of my code. I’ve been interested in scent design and scent interface since forever (following the work of Jofish Kaye, Jenny Tillotson, perfumist Mandy Aftel, and the ill-fated scent peripherals of the late 90s like DigiScent), so I really look forward to it!
GDC
