Jordan Weisman at UCLA tomorrow 6:00PM
UCLA Design|Media Arts' Mobile Media Lecture Series continues tomorrow at 6:00PM with expanded storyteller and ARG designer Jordan Weisman. From the UCLA website: "Jordan has been the creative force behind a number of entertainment companies, including his newest venture, Smith & Tinker (connected toys), FASA Corporation (roleplaying games), Virtual World Entertainment (networked virtual reality entertainment) acquired by the Disney Family, FASA Interactive (PC games, including the MechWarrior franchise) acquired by Microsoft, WizKids (collectible games) acquired by Topps Inc., and 42 Entertainment (alternate reality gaming). During his career, Jordan has created some of the largest and longest-lasting franchises in the gaming industry, including BattleTech/MechWarrior, Shadowrun and Crimson Skies."
IMD Forum for 10/28/09: Gonzalo Frasca
Speaker: Gonzalo Frasca, Co-Founder and CCO, Powerful Robot Games
Time: Wednesday, October 28, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Title: Play like you mean it! Videogames & Rhetoric
Please join us for a talk by Gonzalo Frasca, who is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Powerful Robot Games. His talk will describe a framework for understanding how play and games convey ideas through the use of rhetoric rather than rules.
Gonzalo Frasca is a game developer, researcher and entrepreneur, who lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. He co-founded the studio, Powerful Robot Games, in 2002 to build both commercial and experimental games. Their game for Cartoon Network reached over 13 million player accounts. They described it as "our biggest gaming success in our history".
One of their most popular indie projects is Newsgaming.com, a project mixing journalism with videogames. It received the Knight Foundation News Games Lifetime Achievement Award at the Games for Change 2009 conference.
Jonathan Harris at UCLA Tuesday 10/27 @ 6:00PM
Computational designer Jonathan Harris will present a talk titled "Escaping Aesthetic Alcatraz: Re-imagining the Architecture of our Online Homes" as part of UCLA's Mobile Media Lecture Series this Tuesday October 27 at 6:00 pm in the Broad Art Center.
"Jonathan Harris makes projects that re-imagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule (with Yahoo!) to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean (with a warm hat). He is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, which continuously measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis, and has made other projects about online dating, modern mythology, anonymity, news, and language."
War Photographer
Warning. Nepotism ahead.
Muse Games is holding a contest to find a new, interesting game concept. The winner of the contest receives money and a publishing deal. Most of the stuff there is akin to "You're on a boat and you can go off sweet jumps." Now, that can be fun, but it ain't new. Vincent Diamante and I have an idea that is so sweet that it's sick. So nice that it's nasty.
You are an embedded photojournalist with the most powerful weapon of all: the truth. The pictures you take become resources that can be sold, used to blackmail your enemies, and curry favor in a world where everybody but you is trained to use a gun.
The most current build--a fully playable core mechanic demo--is living on the competition page. Please, so that I can finally be a real adult (Vince doesn't have this problem), go to the IMMUNITY competition website to play and vote for "War Photographer".
Regardless of the competition outcome, this will be an ongoing project. If you're interested in following its development, new iterations will be posted on my main blog roughly twice a month.
IMD Forum for 10/21/09: 3rd Year Thesis Student Presentations
Speakers: Lulu Cao, Ala' Diab, Bryan Jaycox, Cynthia Nie, Taiyoung Ryu, Nahil Sharkasi, Peter Van Dyke, and Brandi Wilcox,
Time: Wednesday, October 21, 6-8 pm
Location: The IMD Co-Design Lab (aka Flower Street Lab)
School of Cinematic Arts
Digital Collaboratory Annex
501 29th Street
Please join us at the IMD seminar this week for presentations and demonstrations by the IMD 3rd year Thesis students. The students will present for the 1st hour, and then run simultaneous demos during the second hour. Professor Mark Bolas will serve as facilitator for the evening.
Second Life Student Developers Group Presentation
Second Life Student Developers Group Presentation: Interactive Multimedia Classroom in SL
When: Friday, October 16, 2009 : 1:30pm to 3:30pm
Location: University Park Campus, BRI 202
Audience: Faculty, Staff & Students
Sponsored By: Center for Scholarly Technology
Contact: Tomo Isoyama, (213) 821-1336
E-mail: slsdg@usc.edu
Web Site: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~slsdg
RSVP: slsdg@usc.edu
LA Tech Week , 10/22/09
This year's annual L.A. County Technology Week is featuring a panel discussion on the video game industry in L.A. The panel will be moderated by WIRED senior editor, Chris Baker, and will feature Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany( and IMD alum), Alex Hastings of Insomniac Games, Amir Rahimi of EA (he worked with Steven Spielberg on their Boom Blox games), Chris Hewish of Dreamworks animation and a "yet to be named" panelist from Infinity Ward, makers of the "Call of Duty" series of games. There will also be an interactive exhibit area where attendees can play the games produced by our panelists' game studios.
They have given us a bunch of special student discount codes. Students who register online by the 17th using the code will be given a $70 discount on the $85 ticket price (need to show valid student I.D. when you arrive at the event and receive your passes). Tickets include attendance to all panel discussions, a buffet luncheon and our keynote speaker. I have cards with the details and the discount code - will hand out at seminar and leave rest at IMD front(back) desk.
IMD Forum for10/7/09: Julia Heyward
Speaker: Julia Heyward, independent artist
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 7, 6-8 pm
Location: Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
3131 S Figueroa Street (entrance on W 32nd St)
Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML), Room 201
Julia Heyward is currently working on a large scale triptych entitled collectively Nothing Random Access Memory. Part One: Miracles in Reverse, an interactive DVD-ROM, has been shown as a multimedia performance and an installation. Part Two: Points of View is an interactive installation of ‘faux windows.’ Part Three: The Gabriel Frequency is an installation as an electronic oracle. Nothing RAM looks at the nature and evolution of consciousness through our collective and subjective memories, mythologies and scientific theories. Nothing RAM is performative at times and ambient at others, but consistently travels between the personal and the global with a kind of slippery Jungian spirit, dipping reflexively into the collective unconscious, quantum theory, animism, neuroarcheology, science fiction and history. These quantum leaps find connections between the intentions of "local" crimes such as child abuse and "global" organized crimes such as war.
Real Time Live! Live Cinema Performance and Workshops with Mia Makela
Real Time Live presents acclaimed media artist Mia Makela (aka Solu), one of several international visual innovators dedicated to live cinema, an emerging artform in which moving images and sounds are mixed live, and cinema becomes a performative event unfolding in real time. Makela’s work has been described as “a dark delirium of images, a disintegrated vision on a complex world - a digital version of William Blake's poetry,” and her style ranges from minimal abstractions to multilayered compositions following a dreamlike narrative journey. Don't miss this rare opportunity to see Makela's live performance and learn to create your own live cinema experience! RSVP requested for workshop participants.
Workshops: October 9 and Saturday, October 10, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
Location: IML Blue Lab, 746 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles
Performance: October 10, 2009, 8:30 p.m.
Location: SCA 112, George Lucas Building, 900 W. 34th Street, Los Angeles
Presented by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy
Graduate Student workshop Friday 10/2
The Future of Digital Scholarship workshop series for graduate students offers an overview of digital scholarship, digital humanities and new directions in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, with a lab component designed to unite theory and practice. This month's hands-on workshop will introduce students to the newly released Version 5 of the Korsakow System, a user-friendly software applicationfor creating nonlinear, database narratives, documentaries and works of scholarship. This free, open source software will be demonstrated, and attendees will design and assemble their own K-Films. The workshop begins at 1:00PM at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at 746 W. Adams Blvd.
Perry Hoberman @ Unknown Theatre Thursday 9/24
I'm the opener, going on around 10:30pm. Come hear some new & old songs about data, desperation, driving and death!
LIQUID: a new play by Brenda Varda
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. I did the Media Design for this play. It's an ecological fable about global warming, rising oceans, genetic alterations that turn human beings into fish, a tsunami, contemporary piracy, terrorism, oil spills, corporate espionage, etc. It's hilarious and VERY entertaining. And the LA Weekly says "Perry Hoberman's video and visuals are creatively delightful--and downright scary in other places."
It runs Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays (at 8) and Sundays (at 6) thru October 3rd (just three more weekends!)
UPDATE: To attract an audience, Unknown Theatre has switched to a PAY WHAT YOU CAN policy for the run of this production. (Previously, there was a $5 admission policy for USC students only, which is still available - no reservations needed, just bring your USC ID card). Or if you would like, you can still make reservations & get tickets for $15 here.
LIQUID site
UNKNOWN THEATRE site
And here are a bunch of photos of the production.
IMD Forum for 9/2/09: RESEARCH in IMD
Speakers: IMD Faculty and Students
Time: Wednesday, September 2, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
This week's seminar will feature short presentations by IMD faculty and students about current research projects.
6:00 Scott Fisher
Research in IMD
6:15 Sean Plott and Daniel Ponce
CATS Math Games
The CATS project combines research on cognitive psychology, instruction, assessment, and games to improve the learning of underperforming middle school students. The first prototype, created and tested with students this summer, teaches addition of rational numbers.
6:25 Nahil Sharkasi
Participation Nation
Participation Nation is a game for teaching American constitutional history and civics to high school students. Players can play the “Forces of Change” or the “Status Quo” in a debate over the constitutional issues that shaped the country.
6:35 Logan Olson & Diane Tucker
Intergenerational Play research
The Intergenerational Play project is a collaboration between the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, the University of Michigan School of Learning Sciences, and the GIL. The goal of the project is to discover design principles for creating engaging and intergenerational games that can promote literacy and learning.
6:45 Elizabeth Swensen & Jesse Vigil
Pathfinder
The Pathfinder project is a collaboration between the GIL and USC's Center for Higher Education Policy and Analysis. Funded by a Provost's grant, the goal of the project is to design a game to engage high school students in the college preparation and application process.
6:55 Tracy Fullerton, Todd Furmanski & Bryan Jaycox
Walden
Walden simulates the experiment in living made by Thoreau at Walden Pond in 1845-47, allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher, and cultivate through the gameplay their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there.
7:10 Peter Brinson & Kurosh Valanejad
Cat and the Coup
The Cat and the Coup is an experimental documentary game in which you play the cat of Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. On the night of August 19, 1953, a CIA-engineered coup replaces the Prime Minister, with an absolute dictatorship. As a player, you coax Mossadegh through significant events of his life by knocking objects off of shelves, scattering papers, jumping into laps, and scratching heads.
7:20 Perry Hoberman
MEPEDS
The Multi-Ethnic Pediatric Eye Disease Study (MEPEDS) is a project of the USC Department of Ophthalmology at the Doheny Eye Institute. For a pilot study, a team at IMD is developing stereoscopic 3D print, animation and interactive materials to facilitate recruitment efforts and enhance the waiting room experience.
7:30 Scott Fisher
Million Story Building Project
The Mobile and Environmental Media Lab is currently exploring location-specific mobile storytelling with a project called The Million Story Building (MSB). This research investigates the idea of ambient storytelling and how the built environment can act as a storytelling entity that engages and interacts with the people in specific spaces. Through the use of the downloadable MSB mobile phone-based application,sensor networks, and other software applications, inhabitants and visitors become immersed in an emergent, responsive environment of collaborative storytelling.
7:40 Logan Olson and Emily Duff
New research at ICT/IMD
7:50 Marientina Gotsis
Wellness Partners
This game employs known effective game mechanics from casual games and features from online social networking in order to enable players to leverage their social network to meet individual and/or group wellness goals. This study aims to advance theory and practice through the evaluation of the following key methods, measures, and outcomes.
8:00 Erin Reynolds
Humana Games
A presentation of three mobile sensor-based health game prototypes for nutrition, exercise and immunity sponsored for Humana (Trainer, Healthy Eats, and Germ Wars).
IMD Forum for 8/26/09: Curtis Wong
Speaker: Curtis Wong, Microsoft Research
Time: Wednesday, August 26, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
Title: Tuva and the whole Universe - Experiments in Interactive Media Learning
The application of Interactive Media for learning has been one of the compelling but elusive goals for the technology since its early days. In this talk I will briefly focus on the evolution of “ECR” an information architecture for learning gleaned from twenty years of developing Interactive media from interactive laserdiscs, CD-ROMs, enhanced digital television, broadband Web, Web applications and cloud services. The balance of my talk will focus on the origins, learnings, challenges, goals and aspirations behind two recent interactive media learning projects: The WorldWide Telescope and Project Tuva.
“ECR is for Engagement | Context | Reference. It’s a simple idea: first, you hook someone—whether they’re using a CD-ROM, watching a video, or visiting a website or a museum—with a story or an object that produces an immediate emotional impact. Then, at the very moment they’re most engaged and curious, you offer them context that broadens their understanding. Finally, you provide a deep reference layer, for the people who get so intrigued that they want to know a lot more.”
Excerpted from Xconomy.com blog: “Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft’s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn”
BIO: Curtis Wong is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research focusing on interaction, media, visualization, gaming and storytelling. Curtis and his collaborators have built advanced prototypes which have influenced Microsoft products and have been featured in numerous executive keynotes on the future of computing. He also spends a portion of his time working with selected non-profit organizations to develop examples of next generation media such as his collaboration with PBS’s television series Frontline to produce The Age of AIDS on the global AIDS pandemic and the broadband enhanced documentary Commanding Heights ~ The Battle for the World Economy, winning a British Academy Award and nominated for the first interactive TV Emmy. Continued......
IndieCade in LA Times
Alex Pham has a short piece in the LA Times about the upcoming IndieCade festival, which will be October 1-4 in multiple gallery locations across Culver City.
Visible Evidence continues with James Benning Multimedia event Saturday
The Visible Evidence documentary conference continues through the weekend with several notable events in addition to an impressive, three-track array of panels and presentations devoted to all things documentary. Perhaps of greatest potential interest to the IMD community is the presentation by filmmaker James Benning on Saturday night from 8:00 to 10:00PM in SCA 108. Billed as a "Multimedia Presentation" by Benning, who is best known for his uniquely rigorous body of landscape-focused structural films, the artist will be talking about his most recent non-film project "Milwaukee to Lincoln, MT," which involved reconstructing the cabin built by Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond and the cabin occupied by Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) in the woods of Montana.
Known for his eclectic interests and fascination with notorious figures from American history (one of Benning's early films mined the personal diaries of Arthur Bremer, Nixon's would-be assassin who went on to shoot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972), Benning is one of the few artists who could pull off such a perverse, yet striking, juxtaposition without trivializing the subject through postmodern irony-mongering. Whatever happens when Benning goes on stage in SCA 108 tomorrow night, I promise you will not want to miss it.
Realtime Graphics at the Film Show
Getting into the Computer Animation Fesitival at Siggraph is a big deal. I have been involved with projects that made it in 3 times over the past 20 years - each time I held my breath while the clip played. I found it strange to be so nervous as the clips were pre-recorded and I must have watched them 50 times before.
Imagine the rush when the film show started with a special emphasis on realtime computer graphics, and the first example was. . .. Flower! Yeah! Way to go thatgamecompany! I have no idea how John Edwards managed to breathe while playing the game - live of course - on stage in front of thousands.
Siggraph 2009!
IMD has multiple papers and exhibits at this year's Siggraph. Here are a few I know about:
Tracy Fullerton, Nahil Sharkasi, and Jesse Vigil of the Interactive Media Division, and Laird Malamed of Activision Blizzard, Inc. are presenting:
Designing History: The Path to Participation Nation
Andrew Jones, Magnus Lang, Graham Fyffe, Xeuming Yu, Jay Busch and Paul Debevec of USC's ICT, and Mark Bolas of IMD, and Ian McDowall of Fakespace Labs, Inc. are presenting:
Achieving Eye Contact in a One-to-Many 3D Video Teleconferencing System
In addition, the 3D Video Teleconferencing System was packed in a rental truck on Wednesday, and is being set-up in New Orleans right now. There is a very rough/early video of it in operation here.
(Thanks Paul Debevec for the photo)
Sunday Get-Together/Brainstorming Session
Greetings, all. I don't know about the rest of you, but I miss the creative fervor that pretty much filled my days just a few short weeks ago, B.S.B. (Before Summer Break). I'm working on my 491 game this summer, but it just isn't the same without other people around to bounce ideas off of and get excited with. So on Sunday I'm going to have a brainstorming session for Suits, and take the opportunity to have a little mid-summer get-together, as well. What do you say?