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Go get warmed up!

It’s autumn – time to get warmed up.  So, we’ve got some great news: as of today, Body Heat is available in the App Store!

Go get yours!

IndieCade!

This week I’m in L.A. (Culver City, actually) for IndieCade!

It’s going to be great fun, and they’re sure keeping us busy.  Personally, I’m on the “International” team for the Iron Game Designer event; I’m MCing the guest developer demos at the Work + Share, and I’m on a panel about curating games.  Check out the full schedule, and hope to see you at one of my gigs:

//Iron Game Designer

Saturday, October 9, 11:30am – 12:30pm, The Ivy Substation (9070 Venice Blvd)

Whose design will reign supreme? Join host Eric Zimmerman and several of the IndieCade finalists and speakers as they rise to the challenge of real-time game design. Teams of designers will be given a theme, materials, and a secret ingredient, and then will have to design a real-world game — right before your eyes. As they wrack their brains for the right recipe, get a sneak peek into how these game designers solve difficult design problems. And who knows? You might just witness the birth of a brand new kind of game.

//Game Walk, and Indie Work and Share

Saturday, October 9, 1:00pm – 7:00pm, Downtown Culver City

Check out the official 2010 Finalist games as you play, meet, and greet your way through downtown Culver City.   From 1:00pm – 4:00pm on Saturday, join us at the Indie Work and Share sessions, at the Grand Casino cafe for Indies to hang out, work, and share work amongst one another.  Featuring designer demos of in-progress games from Chris Hecker, Mark Essen, and Borut Pfeifer!

//Panel – White Cubes, Show Floors and Dance Parties: The Curation and Exhibition of Games

Sunday, October 10, 10:00am – 11:00am, The Foshay Lodge (9635 Venice Blvd)

Games are a tough nut to crack when it comes to organizing and exhibiting public shows — they don’t really work with most of the assumptions of traditional art display, and are often at odds with the assumed passive consumption of art exhibitions. Nonetheless, game exhibitions have become commonplace in both the art world and within the game conference and festival circuits. This salon will consider the gallery and museum traditions, audience expectations, the concerns of exhibition design and the role and purpose of games exhibition in the broader culture.

Vibe-on-Vibe performance! so meta!

Thanks to everyone who came out last night to the Center for Sex and Culture to catch the sneak peek of Body Heat! I don’t know which was better, getting to play with hottie chip music artist Starpause, or being able to make music with my vibrator by rubbing it against “The Scientific Normalizer” a 100-year-old  medical “hysteria reliever” from the CSC’s historic vibrator collection.

So awesome, so META!

Vibrator control app Body Heat (hopefully) coming soon!

Been flying under the radar for this one, but finally it’s time to talk: I’m >this< close to launching my brand-new iPhone app Body Heat! Last night was the sneak peek performance with Starpause at the Center for Sex and Culture, and now I’m running at a dead heat to get all the promotional engines fired up (ok, i just got a crazy mental image of me running on a giant hamster wheel attached to a giant steampunk engine like one on an ocean liner…not too far from the truth!).

The app is in cue at iTunes Connect, waiting for review and approval. I was reeeeeeal careful to follow their acceptance guidelines, so i cross my fingers hopefully, but I can use all the good juju out there so send it if ya got it!

Body Heat sneak peek!

Body HeatBody Heatâ„¢ will appear exclusively at the Arse Elektronika Festival for Sex and Technology in San Francisco on October 1, 2010, at the Center for Sex and Culture.  To introduce the software, designer Heather Kelley has teamed up with San Francisco-based chip music mainstay Jordan Gray, aka Starpause.   “During our performance, the signals that the application generates will feed into synths, samples, and effects in a live remix of Starpause tracks.” Kelley explains.  “Plus, a vibrator driven by Body Heat will add percussion sounds.”  Gray adds, “I’m a user experience nerd and this app is the most intuitive interface I’ve seen for making a vibrator wiggle however you want. Combining my music with Body Heat has been a treat — the next best thing to exciting a lover is making some synths squeal!”

For more information about Arse Elektronika, visit http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/ or contact symposium organizer Johannes Grenzfurthner at jg @ monochrom.at.

For more information about Starpause including downloadable mixes, visit http://starpause.com/

Pant pant pant…

I have a broken knee, yet I can’t seem to stop running!

With much assistance from an amazing team of artists and technologists, Fabulous/Fabuleux is back from oblivion and we’re installing it at the künstlerhaus in Vienna Austria, as part of the exhibition for the 2010 Paraflows festival for digital art and culture.

Opening night is tomorrow, and the show runs for a month, through October 9th.  Come play!

Franky Plays Fabulous! from Heather Kelley on Vimeo.

body heat. Coming soon!

Our exciting new app is in development just for you!

Until then, allow us to recommend a super fun music-driven vibrator from OhMiBod. This will come in VERY handy.  And by purchasing through this link, you help make body heat happen!

OhMiBod

How does this happen.

Seems i’ve morphed into the Producer of an epic postapocalyptic RPG improv theater show with realtime livedrawing and digital scenery.

Typical.

advice for a female artist

Sometimes while filing ancient email I run across something powerful that I wrote years ago in correspondence with a friend.  That happened to me yesterday and it resonated with me enough that I want to share it.  Maybe this perspective I describe isn’t just about being a female artist, but my suspicion is we especially need to hear it, at a certain moment in our creative lives, especially those that work in traditionally masculine-dominated media.

On 3/23/08 11:16 AM, Karen* wrote:

Dude, can I ask you a question? I have to update my
website to list my projects, but I feel so critical
of everything I've ever done, I don't want to put
anything up. But that's stupid.  But I still feel
that way.  :)
On 3/23/08 12:47 PM, Heather wrote:

I'm actually going through the same thing because
i'm working on this artists talk that i have to give
in a week at my symposium, where i'm supposed to be
"an artist."  It's like, why the heck would anyone
be impressed by X?  (For example, a quickly thrown-
together DS game concept demo using badly-edited
photos of cupcakes and auto parts that I pulled off
the web?)

I think you/me/we/women just have to do some things
(and this may just be various ways of saying the same
thing over and over, plus I'm ranting):
  1. Realize that the quality is there, regardless
    of our perception of it
  2. Practice getting over our self-criticism to see
    what is good from an objective perspective
  3. Know what to highlight and what to ignore
  4. Spin Spin Spin
  5. Realize people WANT to think it's good, to be
    impressed, to look up to us/someone.  So don't
    do anything to disavow them of that desire.
  6. There's always the hidden insecurity behind the
    scenes, with everyone. So it's there. Who cares.
  7. Talk about what is interesting about the work,
    from a completely external perspective.  If you
    were seeing this stuff for the first time, what
    would be interesting about it to you?
On 3/23/08 3:12 PM, Karen wrote:

Oh my god this email is awesome. THANK YOU. I needed this.
I wish this wasn't so hard!

Yeah, that Heather Kelley writes some decent stuff sometimes.  I should listen to her more often.

* All names (except mine) have been changed.

GameSpaces

The keynote lecture I gave at the FMX conference in Stuttgart last month introduced a concept I call “GameSpaces.” Drawing from the best design patterns of tech startup incubators, indie game jams, unconferences, and hackspaces, GameSpaces are a thoroughly un-radical call for indie game developers to collaborate with local and regional entities (governments, bureaus, indie developers in other fields) and build permanent creative spaces in the places where they live.   Here’s my presentation slides, with narrative notes.

PDF – 14.4 mb (no video)

Keynote – 25.2 mb (with video)

PPT – 24.6 mb (with video)