event icon mscapeFest07

mscape event poster

Event Description

A two-day conference stuffed with tonnes of exciting workshops and speakers + the Mediascape in the Dark Challenge. The event was well attended and judging from some of the feedback it was a great success. There was a really exciting mix of people from many different organisational and geographical backgrounds. In terms of geography we had good representation from The Netherlands, Spain, Northern Ireland, Slovenia, the United States and Canada. In terms of organisations we had a splendid mix of lecturers, students, independent artists, small businesses and charities. Thank you everyone, for making it happen!

Below you will find most of the slides, photos and added documentation. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you want to add anything to this mscapefest07@mscapers.com

All best wishes for 2008 from the mscape Team!

Event Details

Hosted by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol (UK)

For photos of the event check out the mscape group on flickr. If you have any photos of the event, please tag them 'mscape' and put them on flickr.

The videos of the talks will go live in the new year and also a video of the mediascape in the dark challenge. (scroll down for more details on that).

Notes from the Workshops

Beyond GPS - Notes (PDF)
Pervasive Gaming - Notes (PDF)
Experience Design Guidelines - Notes (PDF)
mscape Experience Design Guidelines (PDF)

Slides from the Speakers

Teri Rueb - Slides (PDF)
Jon Dovey - Slides (PDF)
Jon Dovey - Experiencing Mobile and Located Media (PDF)
Aileen Peirce - Slides (PDF)
Jon Williams - Slides (PDF)
Richard Hull - Slides (PDF)

Monday 3 December:

Workshop Topics:

Pervasive Gaming - HUDSON

facilitated by:
Ana Kronschnabl (Fluffy Logic), Stuart Griffin (Fluffy Logic), Ben Clayton (HP Labs)

Experience Design Guidelines - CABOT STAGE
facilitated by:
Jo Reid (HP Labs), Constance Fleuriot (Featherhouse)

Beyond GPS - sensors - BONAVISTA
facilitated by:
Richard Hull (HP Labs), Tom Melamed (HP Labs)

How to build a Community - CABOT REAR
facilitated by:
Phil Stenton (HP Labs), Patrick Goddi (HP Labs)

Producing Audio for Mediascapes - CASPIAN
facilitated by:
Duncan Speakman (kleindesign), Armin Elsaesser

Tuesday 4 December:

(videos of the talks of this day will be uploaded in the new year)

09.30 - 09.45 Welcome by Phil Stenton
09.45 - 10.30 Teri Rueb
Associate professor in the Graduate Department of Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design
10.30 - 11.15 Steve Coast
Founder and Chairman of the OpenStreetMap Foundation
11.15 - 11.30 break
11.30 - 12.15 Jon Dovey
Head of Research at the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television at the University of Bristol
12.15 - 13.00 Aileen Peirce
Exhibition Project Manager, Historic Royal Palaces
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 14.45 Hazel Grian & Jon Williams
Creative Director of Licorice Film and Licorice Media & Game Developer at Licorice Media
14.45 - 15.15 Richard Hull - HP Labs Bristol
15.15 - 15.45 Afternoon tea break
15.45 - 17.00 Discussion
(If booked: Coach leaves at 17.30)

Challenge: Mediascape in the Dark (evening of 3 December)

The video of the evening event will be uploaded in the new year...keep checking!

Many brave souls even ventured out in to the cold night air to try the “Mediascapes in the Dark”. These were mediascapes that were created in response to our call for mscapers to create a short piece specifically for the event. Six people rose to the challenge :


“Itinarium” created a Musical Labyrinth in which you had to follow the music of three well known composers.

Duncan and Kerry Deacon uploaded their work in progress piece called This burdened voice which is a sketch for a locative video poem.

A group from the BBC Natural History unit created a piece called Nightlife : World in a Square which takes you on an audio expedition across four continents.

Matt Green created a Cyclo -Phone which transforms a circular segment of the city into a sonic cyclone. This giant instrument will audibly alter in pitch and temperament in reaction to an arced path.

And then from the mscape team Tom and Richard, who are more accustomed to developing and testing mscape rather than being end users, created a game and a ghost walk.

Noughts and Crosses is a familiar game that you play out on the real world against a clock and,

Drowned is the sad tale of Tess who drowned over 400 years ago and has been stuck ever since. Are you the one who can finally help her?


Time constraints meant that most people could do little more than sample a few of the mediascapes. We also underestimated the number of people for whom this would be their “first ever mediascape experience” and so in future events we will think about allowing more time and access to devices so that the mediascapes can be savoured rather than nibbled!

If you were not able to make the event remember you can still try out the mediascapes either on the tester or you can move them to an open pedestrianised area near you and try them out there. Some of the location specific references will not work but you can get an idea of what they are like. You could of course even customise them to suit your own neighbourhood and then upload the result! Just first remember to check the terms of the license given to the particular mediascape.

If you have any queries please e-mail: mscapefest07@mscapers.com

Biographies

Teri Rueb

Teri Tueb is a landscape artist whose work engages digital, architectural and traditional media and modes of production. Her large-scale responsive environments and location-aware installations explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body, and sonic and acoustic space. She has created GPS-based interactive installations since 1996 and has received numerous grants and commissions from institutions including The Banff Center for the Arts, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the LEF Foundation, Artslink, Turbulence.org, the Akademie der Kunste, and various State Arts Councils. Rueb has lectured and presented her work worldwide at venues including ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Transmediale, ResFest, Consciousness Reframed, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, Mobile Music Workshop, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Bell Laboratories, Interval Research and IRCAM. Her work has been featured and reviewed in diverse publications including Thames and Hudson's World of Art series "Digital Art" edited by Christiane Paul, "Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology", (Ed. Wilson, MIT Press) and “Second Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (Eds. Harrigan and Wardrip Fruin, MIT Press). Rueb holds degrees from New York University / Tisch School of the Arts / ITP and a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University. She is an Associate Professor of Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Rueb is also pursuing doctoral research at Harvard Graduate School of Design and is founder and principal of Open Air Studio, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hazel Grian

Director of Licorice Film and Media, Hazel Grian has worked as a director, writer and performer in film, animation, radio and street theatre and has been hailed as a ‘funny film-making genius’ by The Simpson’s creator Matt Groening. In the past few years Hazel has increasingly concentrated on multi-platform entertainment and along with Jonathan Williams, created the successful Alternate Reality Game Meigeist, which in early 2007 was avidly followed by an on-line community of tens of thousands worldwide. Meigeist was the result of a six month placement with HP Labs funded by Arts Council England and was the start of a very productive relationship. In partnership with HP, Hazel and Jonathan are currently developing a large scale Mediascape with Alternate Reality Game elements to be launched in early 2008. Hazel is also currently a story and script writer for KateModern the successful interactive drama from the creators of hit series LonelyGirl15 and hosted by Bebo.

Jon Williams

Jon graduated from UWE in 2006 with a first class degree in Time based media, shortly after graduating he won UWE’s Roger Cranshaw award for the most ‘original creative student’ graduating in 2006 across all art disciplines. Since then he has worked with Hazel Grain (Licorice film) on a number of pervasive gaming  projects, including co-creating the Meigeist Alternative reality game and developing gaming content for HP’s mediascape technology (for example Timehole.) He has also worked as a freelance motion graphic designer, developing online promotional content for feature film, band promos and individual companies. Jon is passionate about playing and making high quality visual and sonic interactive experiences, and is likely to get very grumpy with anyone who claims games are just for children!

Aileen Peirce

Aileen joined Historic Royal Palaces as an Exhibition Project Manager in 2005 and has managed the re-presentation of the Medieval Palace, the recently opened Prisoners of the Tower experience and is now managing the Fortress project at the Tower of London. Aileen is also responsible for new interpretation technology and recently worked with Hewlett Packard to develop a prisoner escape themed game which was trialled at the Tower in 2006.

Originally a Medieval History graduate, Aileen spent nine years working as a fund manager and equity analyst in Edinburgh and London, specialising in global oil and gas. In 2004 she decided to leave the investment world to make a career out of her passion for history and joined HRP after completing an MA at UCL.

Jon Dovey

Jon Dovey was a film maker and video artist before becoming an academic. He worked principally in documentary and experimental video, co founding original scratch artists Gorilla Tapes in 1984. His current production research centres on rePublicof – an experiment in digital cabaret working at the intersection of dance music and art practice. Some of this work can be viewed at republicof.net. He is also working on developing user generated fictions online. Jon is also the Reader in Screen Media at the University of Bristol Dept of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television, where he teaches moving image and digital media. He is the editor of Fractal Dreams, New Media In Social Context, Lawrence And Wishart 1996, the author of Freakshows - First Person Media And Factual TV Pluto Press July 2000,  a co author of New Media - A Critical Introduction Routledge 2002 and Game Cultures, a book about Computer Games (co authored with Helen Kennedy) McGraw Hill 2006. Jon also edits ScreenWork, a DVD of screen practice from academics.

Steve Coast

Steve Coast is founder of OpenStreetMap and Cloud Made and has worked for many years on diverse heavy-lifting computing applications around open systems. Steve interned at Wolfram Research before studying computer science and then physics at UCL. He left early to pursue research and development work at universities and leading web companies prior to founding ZXV - a geo web consultancy in 2006.