There will be a large contingent of Australians too. Compared to Europe, Australia and Singapore are practically next door.

What I am looking forward to are the discussions by new media networks and platforms for collaboration between arts and other fields of inquiry. It is not that art has the sole role of making work about social worries, environment or addressing aesthetics, but it is disenginious to say that it has none.

One project that inspires me is Luminous Green, initiated by Fo.am. It asks what are the possibilities and realities of using technology and know-how to envision a luminous green future rather than a dull grey one(this article is interesting on a factor 4-10fold reduce in the use of resources.

I will be talking about locative games in my paper Location! Location? Location!! (10am Nanyang Technological University B1-3 27th July 2008) These are games/experiences that have a sense of place, may use technology like GPS, mobile phones), what it promises and what the reality is.

This activity is supported by the National Lotterry through the Arts Council England Grant for the Arts (hence the logo).

Jennifer Sheridan talked about the pooch.

The pooch/(now bigdog interactive) are into extreme prototyping, one day minimal time and cost. They also like to inhabit the social space of the festival, this bring with it constraints and challenges, of making their products portable, selfpowered and able to withstand the harsh environment (portability,heat, noise).
They make adult sized swings as interfaces for their works, and have a deep interest in re)search, having a background in interaction and theatre studies.
They describe their work as digital live art, the intersection of live art, computing and hci. Interested in non-talk based uses of technology as embodies in highly portable systems for example the uPoi, a ball on a string that has a multi input accelerometer built into it. This influences layered sound and visuals
A major concern of theirs is the women are abandoning engineering and technology, they are not making outside of fashion design. The other concern is that kids don’t know about working/programming the the smaller, cheaper, ubiquitous computers that are in everything. What options for computing and kids is there?

About this point I had the idea that “we are here because none of us know of what we are”. This idea of hybridity is coming up over and over again, the categories are made for us by other people.

One of their first works was to tune railings to make the tune “girl from ipanema” when one struck it with a stick.
Another work took over the pedestrian bridge across the liffey bridge, mounting friction sensors in the surface so as people walked across it triggered sounds.
A central tenet is that the work is for the public, and it must be legible to the public. There should not need to be a piece of text to explain it. In fact this led Andrew to realise he was being an inverted snob, by refusing to put a bit of text for those that actually wanted to understand the technology.
The artworks are unlocked by play, so it is usually children that work it out first. Technology does not lead their work, it is the idea. They are getting away from the new material fantasy, but they are not low-tech, they will push the technology to realise the idea.
Greyworld is based around a small studio of four full-time workers and intentionally small. For Andrew, the  issue of growing too much is the work becomes managing people rather than projects. Its his life and he wants to work with his clever/smart friends. The idea is that they can do outside work, as long as they do it onsite. This means they are ready for it when an interesting phonecall comes through.

First up was Bengt Sjolen(Stockholm)(http://www.automata.se/people/bengt/). He talked about a number of his works including one utilizing a servo-controlled citroen rearvision mirrors (Picture house at Belsay Hall, Northumberland) that used reflection to make a pixelated picture.
An elegant piece was the wifi camera – a single pixel camera that builds up images over a 20 min period of the local wifi environment.
The elephant phone connecting two distant elephant house, allowing the elephants to talk to each other.
One of the take home messages was that time is not money, money is time. So the few months he is working on other people projects buys him the time to make his own(http://www.automata.se/).
He placed an emphasis on peer production networks, in that the network became the artist. This network is sited at Teenageengineering(http://www.teenageengineering.com/), where Bengt and a number of others run their commercial operations(eg http://www.elektron.se).

This is full of useful tech like cnc machine and laser cutters etc. Not coming from a design or manufacturing background I found his brief description of small scale fabrication of circuitboards interesting eg the cnc machine can be used to cut circuit boards, place solder paste and pick and place components, then into the oven.

One of the questions that was directed at Bengt was why if there was software that was off the shelf that could drive his cnc machine, why he chose to code in python.
This gets to the heart of being a tooluser vs a tool maker.
A generic software needs to be generalised, and is often not open to modification. A bespoke software can be built to do what its maker wants.
Bengt mentioned that the process of making the tool slowed him down and thus errors werent made later in the process but as part of the development of the tool. This slight slowdown was preferable to an error at the production level.

This also brings into the debate, should new media artists know how to code? Are the simplified tools that are being provided to us (ie Arduino, Processing) a help or hindrance?
Are we asking for it to be too easy, and losing some of the nuances? This issue came up at the SketchingInteractions and SpacePlacePace events at Culturelab in the previous week.
My take is that the opensource tools arduino and processing allow a gentler introduction to the complexities of microcontrollers and programming than a full blown avr programming suite. At this stage I am not likely to do a 4 year engineering course.

Image via Wikipedia

I was at Mashed08 in Alexandra Palace . There is a good mix of hardware and software hackers, but I like the hardware ones best. It’s a bit like working with children ands animals. It should not be done in 24hrs unless you are really experienced. I spent too much time on a prototype when i should have spent time on the sketch, A learning experience, but I did dip into using python to talk to Arduino , and that was a valuable lesson.

So it became more than the text, of course it was always going to be, we are all waiting for the serendipity of connection with our environment and our fellows.

Photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sctv/sets/72157605657658132/