Anne Balsamo

Speaker: Tamiko Thiel, Artist

Time: Wednesday, November 18, 6-8 pm
Location: Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90036

NOTE: The off-campus location for this seminar. If you a an IMD student who needs a ride to the Goethe-Institut, contact Professor Anne Balsamo.

Tamiko Thiel will discuss the creation of Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall that she created with collaborator Teresa Reuter. This interactive 3D virtual reality art work investigates the impact of the Berlin Wall, which divided West and East Berlin during the Cold War from August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989. A digital reconstruction of a segment of the dismantled Berlin Wall and its surrounding neighborhoods creates a place of rememberance that users can explore in order to to experience and reflect on this historical time.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles is staging the installation from November 20-December 3, 2009.

Official Opening: Thursday November 19, 6-9pm
Exhibit: November 20 - December 3, 2009

Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90036, USA
http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/los/kue/en4872732v.htm

For images from this interactive 3D installation on the Berlin Wall see:
http://www.virtuelle-mauer-berlin.de/english/devFiles/screenshots.htm

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaker: Sha Xin Wei, Topological Media Lab, Concordia University

Time: Wednesday, November 11, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Professor Sha Xin Wei holds a Canadian Research Chair in Media Arts and Sciences; He is also an Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science At Concordia University in Montreal. The Topological Media Lab (TML) is a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. His talk will present examples of research/art projects that have been developed at the TML over the past decade. These projects include the TGarden responsive environment, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, and softwear gestural sound instruments.

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Speaker: Mark Bolas, Associate Professor, Interactive Media Division, SCA

Time: Wednesday, November 4, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Please join us at the IMD seminar this week for a presentation by IMD Professor Mark Bolas. He also serves as the director of Graphics Lab at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Professor Bolas' research explores perception, agency, and intelligence; he creates virtual environments that are designed to engage one’s perception and cognition to create a visceral memory of the experience. His work has been exhibited in many venues including six Emerging Technology exhibits at Siggraph. In 1988, Bolas co-founded Fakespace Inc. with Ian McDowall and Eric Lorimer to build instrumentation for research labs to explore virtual reality.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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)

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.

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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.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Speakers: Jamie Antonisse, Paul Bellezza, Jenova Chen, Matt Korba, Jesse Vigil
And Others TBA...

Time: Wednesday, September 30, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Please join us at the IMD seminar this week for a panel discussion featuring IMD Alumni Jamie Antonisse, Paul Bellezza, Jenova Chen, Matt Korba, and Jesse Vigil. They will also be participating in IndieCade that runs from October 1-4, 2009 in Culver City. IndieCade is supports and showcases the work of international independent game designers.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaker: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, University of California, Santa Cruz

Time: Wednesday, September 23, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? This week Professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin will be speaking about his new book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Comptuer Games, and Software Studies (MIT, 2009). Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential. HE suggests that it is the authors and artists with knowledge of these processes who will use the expressive potential of computation to define the future of fiction and games. He also explores how computational processes themselves express meanings through distinctive designs, histories, and intellectual kinships that may not be visible to audiences. Wardrip-Fruin looks at "expressive processing" by examining specific works of digital media ranging from the simulated therapist Eliza and the first major story-generation system Tale-Spin to the complex city-planning game SimCity. Digital media, he contends, offer particularly intelligible examples of things we need to understand about software in general; if we understand, for instance, the capabilities and histories of artificial intelligence techniques in the context of a computer game, we can use that understanding to judge the use of similar techniques in such higher-stakes social contexts as surveillance.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

OPEN HOUSE
School of Cinematic Arts
IMD Co-Design Lab

Time: Wednesday, September 16, 6-8 pm

Location: Digital Collaboratory Annex
(aka Flower Street)
509 W. 29th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089

The IMD seminar this week will be an Open House at the IMD Co-Design Lab and the IMD Thesis Space. The program for the evening will include brief presentations by 3rd year IMD students about their thesis projects. Research faculty member, Perry Hoberman will also describe new research efforts in stereoscopic cinema and in immersive narrative. He will present a brief demo of Oblong Industry's G-Speak system.

The building is located behind the Panda Express parking lot between Figueroa Street and Flower Street. Enter through the parking lot door. There will be a sign on the side walk in front of the building.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaker: Anne Balsamo, Professor in IMD and Annenberg School of Communication
Time: Wednesday, September 9, 6-8 pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

The seminar speaker this week is Anne Balsamo who is a professor in the Interactive Media Division and the Annenberg School of Communication. Professor Balsamo will provide a preview of her forthcoming transmedia book project called: Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. The transmedia elements she will discuss include an interactive documentary of the 4th UN Conference on Women (China, 1995), an interactive museum exhibition on experiments in the future of reading, and examples of interactive wall books. This work provides the context for new research efforts on the future of museums and libraries in a digital age.

Posted by Anne Balsamo at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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).

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