Perry Hoberman

BRIGADE PARADE
Animated Experiments in Non-Theatrical Socialization
May 2nd - May 13th

Friday, May 2th, 1-5 PM
Saturday, May 3rd, 8-11 PM opening
Sunday, May 4th, 1-5 PM
Friday, May 9th, 1-5 PM
Friday, May 9th, 8-11PM opening
Saturday, May 10th, 8-11PM opening
Sunday, May 11th, 1-5 PM

Sea and Space Explorations
4755 York Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90042
www.seandspace.org
Tel.: 323-445-4015. email: info@seaandspace.org

Through this series animation is presented as a political and personal act of expression. The works presented stress animation as a fertile terrain for experimentation and activism. The screening location and tactics are dependent upon the subjects and issues dealt with within the films produced allowing installation (gallery and outside locations) to become the primary presentation methodology instead of the festival model. The intent of presenting in an alternative model being to experience a greater sense of agency in determining how our films are to be made visible, to communicate with a different public, and to encourage discussion during the presentation process which the festival model does not foster.

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April 14 • 10:40 a.m. - 11:40 a.m.
Las Vegas Convention Center Content Theater - Content Central

Today’s top 3-D filmmakers discuss how to design and compose in 3-D, the creative and technical constraints and opportunities the medium presents, scripts best suited to 3-D realization and how to use 3-D to expand storytelling.

Powered by Real D 3D

• Peter Anderson, ASC, 3-D DP and VFX Supervisor
• Eric Brevig, Director, "Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D"
• Phil 'Captain 3D' McNally, Global Stereoscopic Supervisor, DreamWorks Animation
• Vince Pace, CEO & Founder, PACE, Burbank, CA
• Sean Phillips, Director/DP, MacLeod Productions
• Rick Rothschild, Executive Show Director & SVP, Walt Disney Imagineering
• Moderator: Perry Hoberman, Associate Research Professor, USC, School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Division

link

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Disney Says Pixar Movies Will Be 3-D

NEW YORK (AP) - The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday its Pixar animation studio will commit to 3-D by releasing all of it movies in the format beginning with "Up" next year.

Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter made the announcement in New York at a presentation of Disney's upcoming lineup of animated movies.

Box office figures have shown that the enveloping feel of 3-D can attract two to three times more moviegoers who are willing to pay as much as $3 more per ticket, analysts said.

Link

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The Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a leader in convenience retailing, is open. We sell everything you need before you take a road trip through the fourth dimension: time-machine fuel, cans of mastodon meat, and souvenir T-shirts. All proceeds from the store go to 826LA's free student programs. Visit us at 1714 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90026. Throughout April, we're open Monday through Friday from 2:30 to 6:00, and from 11:00 till 3:00 on Saturdays. We'll be open longer next month.

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Monday March 24, 1-5PM, RZC201 (ZML) Introduction to the Unity 3D Game Engine

Instructor: Perry Hoberman

An introduction to Unity, a multiplatform game development tool. While primarily designed for the production of games, Unity is an appropriate development tool for any project that incorporates navigable three-dimensional space. Unity has a fully integrated editor, a highly optimized graphics pipeline (for both DirectX and OpenGL), an advanced shader system, a physics engine, scripting (JavaScript and C#), terrain maps, shadows, networking, etc. The Unity IDE runs on Mac OS X only, but projects can be published for both Mac OS X or Windows, either as standalones or web-based applications.

Please RSVP to Perry Hoberman to reserve your spot (hoberman at bway dot net) today. Space is limited.

Monday Workshops @ IMD is a series of weekly workshops in tools, skills and techniques for interactive media. The workshops are intensive and hands-on introductions to various topics, designed to get you up to speed quickly.

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Project: Critical Commons

Project Description:

Critical Commons is a blogging, social networking and tagging platform specially designed to promote the "fair use" of copyrighted material in support of learning. The project will engage and organize academic communities to articulate their needs, models and ethical principles of fair use. The project aims to promote a strong, legally viable and expanding conception of fair use, especially in support of learning.

Project Leadership: Steve Anderson, Media Arts and Practice, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Project Collaborators: Holly Willis, Institute for Multimedia Literacy, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Congratulations Steve & Holly!!!

Competition Winners (Steve's project is in the Knowledge-Networking category)

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Announcing the first Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest

Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology is organizing a new digital media conference in Berkeley, CA which will take place on June 3, 2008 as part of the UC Berkeley Spring New Media Festival. As part of that conference, Leonardo would like to invite students to submit projects that blend the arts and the sciences.

The board of Leonardo/ISAST will select ten significant projects by students. Five of them will be exhibited at the closing event of the conference. The other five will receive an honorary mention. All ten will be given recognition in the journal Leonardo.

Continue reading "Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest" »

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AmautaLab
3820 Willat Avenue, Culver City, CA 90232
January 25, 2008 7:00pm on

Artist and author Mark Stephen Meadows presents a one-night event in Los Angeles that unveils "avatars" - the online representation of a person. The exhibit features one dozen portraits - both photographic and interactive - of avatars in Second Life, the online virtual world where people are building an alternative city that, like Los Angeles itself, is based on media and a life of leisure, automation, and wealth.

These photographs and installations each portray avatars as the inner hero of their real-life user. Psychological mirrors and self-portraits in their own right, the avatar is fast becoming as important to popular culture as mainstream celebrities. As of 2008 there are almost one billion registerd avatars, and over 30 million in virtual worlds. This exhibit explores why avatars are becoming so popular, and pokes at the reasons why they can be so dangerous.

In addition to the portraits, Meadows will also be releasing his new book, "I, Avatar; The Culture and Consequences of Having A Second Life" from which some of these portraits were taken.

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Announcing a series of lectures by Barbara Maria Stafford, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

The first lecture will take place on January 28, 2008 at 5:30 p.m. at Hedco Neuroscience Building (HNB) Auditorium.

Link

Mon 1/28 5:30pm Skeletal Figures: The Emotional Intuition of Form
Tues 1/29 5:30pm Cold Intimacy/Hot Entanglement: Meaning in Combinations
Thur 1/31 5:30pm Motor Mirroring: Recognition as the Performance of Other Minds
Mon 2/4 5:30pm Inner Sky: Cave Vision and the Landscape of Sensory Deprivation
Tues 2/5 5:30pm The Miscellaneous Subject: Episodic Personhood from Mosaic to Bar Code
Thurs 2/7 5:30pm The Long Conscious Look: Towards a Pedagogy of Attentiveness

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Discover 3D the world of fine art stereography

19 January – 16 February 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday 19th January, 7:00 – 10:30pm

Black Maria Gallery
3137 Glendale Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90039
Tuesday – Saturday, 12pm until 6pm (or by appointment)

Curated by Ray Zone.
with Heather Lowe, Abe Fagenson, Perry Hoberman, Claudia Kunin, Franklin Londin, Larry Ferguson, Boris Starosta, Terry Wilson, Levon Parian and Ray Zone.

Curated by 3D artist and writer Ray Zone, the Discover 3D exhibition features a wide-ranging array of stereoscopic images viewed with many different techniques. Among the unique 3D formats presented are View-Master, large-scale wall mounted stereographs and anaglyphs as well as classic formats from visual history that use the conventional stereoscope. Several of the artists create work so that the stereo viewing device becomes an art object in itself, a wall-mounted or freestanding sculpture through which the 3D image is perceived. Other works make a “site-specific” use of the Black Maria Gallery environment to create a stereographic viewing zone.

Black Maria Gallery | 3137 Glendale Blvd | Los Angeles CA 90039 | 323.660.9393 | blackmariagallery.com | info@blackmariagallery.com

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Come see the final presentations of the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts. Each research team will present their work in a ten minute overview on Wednesday December 12th, starting at 6pm in Lucas 108.

Following the presentations, there will be an Xmas party in Lucas 201 (one floor above the seminar room), starting at about 8pm.

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Tuesday 11 December 2007, 7pm - 8pm, FREE
Gin Wong Conference Center, Harris Hall 101
School of Architecture, University of Southern California
The event will start promptly at 7pm. Light food will be served from 6pm.
Please RSVP to general@ladesigntech.org

The Los Angeles Design Technology Forum is pleased to announce the seventh lecture in a series of monthly events focusing on the intersection of Design and Information Technology.

Chuck Hoberman: Transformable and Adaptable Buildings

Chuck Hoberman is the founder of Hoberman Associates, a multidisciplinary practice that is developing designs and technologies relating to transformability - the capacity to change size, shape and function. His clients range across sectors that include consumer products, medical instruments, deployable shelters and space structures.

Link

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8pm Tuesday night at Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre. Tickets - $10

"Monumentally influential director Zbigniew Rybczynski joins us in person for this very special retrospective of his brilliant, original films. It’s impossible to contemplate the consistently imaginative technical and narrative feats of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze without Rybczynski’s legacy, which includes visionary music videos for Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, and John Lennon, in addition to countless eye-popping innovations in pixilation, optical printing, and animation. His ubiquitous early-80s spots for MTV will likely incite ecstatic convulsions of nostalgia."

Amazing stuff, and a rare event. Not to be missed.

By the way, Cinefamily is the new operator of the Silent Movie Theatre and their programming is incredible. This month alone they have series devoted to Jan Svankmajer, Cults, Amnesia Noir, Korean Cinema, Toho Studios and much more.

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Here's a cleaned-up version of the OCD camera example that we worked on in class.

Link

I changed/added a few features:

1. I switched from using the modifier keys to specific letter keys to change modes - there weren't enough modifier keys for all the modes. 'l' for lookaround, 't' for travel, 'f' for forklift, 'o' for orbit. Added 'z' for zoom, 'w' for walk, 's' to toggle stroke.
2. The 'a' key (for auto) toggles between automatically returning to 'lookaround' mode when you release a key, or staying in the last mode selected.
3. I added two new methods to OCDCamera.java (truck_walk and dolly_walk) so that you can walk (keeping a constant height) instead of flying (the default, in which you travel towards the lookat point, changing your height as you move).
4. I added a second (fixed) camera for two heads-up information displays. You can toggle the HUD strips with the 'r' (for readout) and 'h' (for 'help') keys. 'Readout' reports the current camera parameters, and 'Help' reports the current camera mode and settings, along with a list of keyboard shortcuts.
5. To enable the camera readout, I added some 'get' methods to OCDCamera.java.
6. I added a mouse tracking factor, which you can change using the '-' and '+' keys. The higher you set it, the more quickly the camera moves, and vice versa.

(big thanks to Kristian Linn Damkjer for his excellent OCD library.)

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Amazing story in today's LA Times.

Link

This guy - a broadcasting engineer with no degrees, no medical background whatsoever - is diagnosed with an incurable cancer. He has a brainstorm about using radio waves and bits of metal to kill cancer cells. He starts tinkering around the house with pie pans, antennas, hot dogs. And guess what? It actually works.

The story's got everything, including a Nobel-prize winning chemist who gets involved and endorses the project just before he dies of cancer.

Oh, and it turns out the process can also be used to extract hydrogen from salt water (a chemist at Penn State calls it "the most remarkable discovery in water science in the last century"), but that's just a little added bonus.

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Speaker: Toni Dove
Time: Wednesday, November 7, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Since the early 1990s, Toni Dove has produced works that redefine forms of traditional narrative through interactivity. Her pieces are embodied hybrids of film, installation art, and experimental theater, in which performers or installation participants interact with an unfolding narrative, often using minimally invasive interface technologies, such as speech recognition and motion sensing, to allow users to "perform" their on-screen avatars.

Dove will be speaking about Spectropia, a new cinema-scale interactive film/performance event that premieres at REDCAT on November 9th. Spectropia is a sci-fi hybrid featuring time travel, telepathy, and elements of film noir. Projected on multiple screens and performed as an interactive experience with the participation of audience members, Spectropia is the second of a series of interactive fictions on the unconscious of consumer economies. The first, Artificial Changelings, debuted as an interactive installation at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1998, and was featured in the groundbreaking exhibition Body Mecanique at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1999. Stephen Johnson, author of Interface Culture has praised Artificial Changelings for using "technology to advance a genuine artistic vision".

TONI DOVE / SPECTROPIA
REDCAT
Friday 11/9 and Saturday 11/10 at 8:30pm
$12/students, $15/general

Continue reading "IMD Forum for 11/7/07: Toni Dove" »

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Redefining Animation
Thursday Nov 1, 2007 • 7:00 - 9:30 pm
Davidson Conference Center, Embassy Room

Panelists include:

World-renown historians: Giannalberto Bendazzi (author of Cartoons: 100 Years of Cinema Animation, among many other titles), from Milan, and Jayne Pilling (editor of A Reader in Animation Studies, Animation: 2D and Beyond, among others), from London.

Award-winning emerging talents: digital artist and animator Greg Araya and multi-media performance animator Miwa Matreyek, both from the Los Angeles area.

Accomplished artists and educators: Kathy Smith, Christine Panushka, and Sheila Sofian, all from the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts.

These speakers will be showing examples of innovative animation and discussing the aesthetics of their personal work. Issues to be covered include the new contexts for animation and related perceptual, social, and technological issues. During the reception, you will have the opportunity to meet and talk with the panelists.

For more information and parking details related to “Redefining Animation,” visit the event’s web site.

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Here is an example of the elusive technique for cross-dissolving between two images.

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Annenberg Program for Online Communities Speaker Series presents
Judith Donath, MIT

Monday, October 8, 2007
Annenberg Room 207, 12 p.m.

From Prof. Donath: "In this talk I will discuss how avatars, social networks, and personal visualizations inspire trust - and if and when they actually indicate trustworthiness." As a member of the Social Media Group of the MIT Media Lab, professor Donath has conducted extensive research regarding the use of visual cues in online environments as a means of communication trust and credibility.

Link

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