Steve Anderson http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/ en-us Copyright 2009 Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:52:30 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=3.31 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Mobile media week at UCLA mobile.png
UCLA's mobile media series continues tomorrow and through the weekend with some very cool speakers, symposia and workshops. On Thursday 11/12 Area/Code's Kevin Slavin will be speaking at 6:00PM, followed by a day-long symposium on Friday 11/13 organized by Casey Reas featuring luminaries including Slavin, Julian Bleecker, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, Robin Hunicke, John Underkoffler, Erkki Huhtamo, Machiko Kusahara and many more! Saturday 11/14 is devoted to a series of low-cost workshops on using Python, Arduino, and the iPhone SDK.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/11/mobile_media_week_at_ucla.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/11/mobile_media_week_at_ucla.html Events Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:52:30 -0800 Jordan Weisman at UCLA tomorrow 6:00PM jordan_weisman.jpg
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."

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/11/jordan_weisman_at_ucla_tomorro.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/11/jordan_weisman_at_ucla_tomorro.html Events Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:02:34 -0800 Jonathan Harris at UCLA Tuesday 10/27 @ 6:00PM jonathanHarris.jpg
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."

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/jonathan_harris_at_ucla_tuesda.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/jonathan_harris_at_ucla_tuesda.html Events Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:56:59 -0800 IKEA as ARG ikeaGraffitti.jpg
The IKEA company just issued this unusually recondite solicitation for counter-intelligence agents to document potential weaknesses and points of resistance in their pursuit of world domination of the home furnishings market. IMD students - especially those enrolled in CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design - may want to take this opportunity to analyze an IKEA retail outlet in terms of its deployment of world-building strategies and its production of scripted spaces. What really is the difference between an IKEA store and a theme park?

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/ikea_as_arg.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/ikea_as_arg.html Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:35:21 -0800 Nowcasting continues Saturday 10/17 at UCLA nowcasting.png
The Nowcasting conference on Design Theory and the Digital Humanities, organized by Peter Lunenfeld of the Design|Media Arts program at UCLA continues tomorrow with presentations by Julia Lupton, Benjamin Bratton, Todd Presner and Lunenfeld himself, followed by a roundtable discussion concluding with a response by Lorraine Wild of Cal Arts. Today's conference was an eclectic array of talks by designers and theorists in and around the digital humanities and even included some real-live academic controversy around the role of technology, design, culture and affect as scholarship takes a computational turn. Complete schedule here and below.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/nowcasting_continues_saturday.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/nowcasting_continues_saturday.html Events Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:00:15 -0800 In Memoriam: Anne Friedberg With great sadness, iMAP mourns the untimely death of its founding faculty member Anne Friedberg. Anne’s passing comes as a hard blow to the iMAP program, which was conceived and launched on her initiative and vision in 2007, but it is equally a loss for the field of media studies as a whole. At the time of her cancer diagnosis a little over a year ago, Anne was the Chair of USC’s program in Critical Studies, President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a few months from being honored as an Academy Film scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to produce a work of digital scholarship on Slavko Vorkapich. Her exhaustively researched book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft appeared the year before from MIT Press, followed soon after by a companion digital media project The Virtual Window Interactive, created in collaboration with designer Erik Loyer. The completion of these two projects coincided with Anne’s conception and inauguration of the iMAP program and it’s hard to imagine that her experience translating nearly a decade of research and written scholarship into an interactive, media-rich form did not contribute to her thinking about iMAP and the potentials of exploring emerging modes of scholarship. Anne helped select and mentor two cohorts of iMAP students but more importantly she served as the program’s intellectual center of gravity, challenging students and faculty alike to pursue the highest levels of scholarly rigor even as we seek new modes of creative expression. We have missed her guidance for the past year and will continue to feel her absence profoundly and in ways that are impossible to articulate in the years ahead.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/in_memoriam_anne_friedberg.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/in_memoriam_anne_friedberg.html Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:44:45 -0800 Real Time Live! Live Cinema Performance and Workshops with Mia Makela makela_2.jpg
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



]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/real_time_live_live_cinema_per.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/real_time_live_live_cinema_per.html Events Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:39:21 -0800 Graduate Student workshop Friday 10/2 korsakow.jpg
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.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/graduate_student_workshop_frid.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/10/graduate_student_workshop_frid.html Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:27:29 -0800 Emergence in CTIN 532 Thursday 9/29 emergence_2lg.jpg
This Thursday in CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design, Casey Alt and Patrick Jagoda of Duke University will be Skyping in for a guest presentation on their project (created with Tim Lenoir) Emergence. Still in the alpha stages, Emergence is a MMOG that invites players to rebuild a post-apocalyptic, BSG-esque world along axes of diplomatic, economic and social dynamics. All are welcome to join us for the remote presentation, Thursday 9/29 roughly 12:00-1:00 in the ZML.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/emergence_in_ctin_532_thursday.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/emergence_in_ctin_532_thursday.html Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:38:49 -0800 DIY zine workshop: Make Feminist Media! grrlzines_ani.gif
Do It Yourself, Do It Together: Make Feminist Media brings together Jessica Hoffmann and Daria Yudacufski, the co-founders and co-editors of the LA-based magazine make/shift, who will talk about the state of feminist publishing. Afterward, participants will join representatives of the San Diego-based collective Grrrl Zines A Go-Go for a picnic lunch and hands-on zine-making workshop outdoors on the patio at the IML. Presented by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in collaboration with Gender Studies and Visions and Voices: The USC Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Friday, September 25
Presentation: 11:00 – noon, Kerckhoff Hall
Picnic: 12:30 – 1:00 p.m., IML Patio
Workshop: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., IML Patio

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/diy_zine_workshop_make_feminis.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/diy_zine_workshop_make_feminis.html Events Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:27:59 -0800 Can we use gaming and virtual experiences to report the news? nonnyTalk.jpg
Nonny de la Peña will talk about “immersive journalism,” a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. She will discuss how these platforms might offer audiences an immersive experience that can compliment and extend reports in traditional media such as television, radio, print or online journals and blogs. She will also discuss her plans to prototype several journalism stories using this form of spatial narrative this year at USC.

Tuesday, September 15 12:00 Noon in the Annenberg School of Communications Geoff Cowan Forum, ASC 207

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/can_we_use_gaming_and_virtual.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/can_we_use_gaming_and_virtual.html Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:04:30 -0800 CTIN 532 Syllabus CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design
Fall 2009 Thursdays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Zemeckis Media Lab (RZC 201)
Instructors: Steve Anderson and Peter Brinson
Lab instructor: David Turpin
sfanders@usc.edu
213-743-1933

A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to.
-Unabomber Manifesto (104)

Prospectus
This course proceeds from the belief that the act of imagining, designing and developing fully conceived and articulated worlds represents an important step toward taking advantage of the full potentials offered by interactive media. In designing “worlds” and/or transmedial narrative environments, we imagine a palette of possibilities that extends far beyond character or story development and even the design of game mechanics or user experiences. World building allows us to imagine interlocking systems of value, action and imagination in which each element of the world we create may be redefined, reshaped or reconceived at the most basic level.
We will begin by analyzing the form and functioning of several artificially constructed “story worlds,” ranging from literature and comic books to television and video games, followed by consideration of some “real world” environments that may be considered “scripted spaces;” finally, we will consider instances of hybrid physical/virtual environments and the strategies by which they engage real world issues of history, environment, economy, ideology and/or social behavior.

The potential social impact of worlds that describe utopian or dystopian visions is vast. And while there are many genres of world design, this class encourages you to consider imagining work that is engaged in issues of relevance to the political or social world. Hence, the lab component of the course is structured around a design challenge that is at once broad and specific: Design a story world that bears a consequential relationship with the world we inhabit by taking advantage of the possibilities offered by environmental or transmedial storytelling.

We will begin by working with the 3D game engine Unity. Any platform that we might select for this design challenge would offer both strengths and drawbacks – it is up to us to figure out how it may be used most effectively and, while we will do our best to provide technical support and guidance, the primary responsibility for learning the software lies with students. For the second and third lab assignments, students will have the option of continuing to work with Unity, investigating the potential integration of Unity with other software platforms or devices (including Max/MSP and iPhones) or selecting another application altogether. Our primary goal is to broaden the range of design potentials rather than to fetishize any particular technology.

Weekly breakdown continues below...

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/ctin_532_syllabus.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/ctin_532_syllabus.html Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:00:45 -0800 The Future of SCA prezi.jpg
A few people have asked to see my presentation from the Cinematic Arts faculty retreat last weekend: five minutes on The Future of SCA (best in fullscreen mode).

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/the_future_of_sca.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/09/the_future_of_sca.html Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:10:20 -0800 Visible Evidence continues with James Benning Multimedia event Saturday benningCabinsBlog.jpg
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.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/08/visible_evidence_continues_wit.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/08/visible_evidence_continues_wit.html Events Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:52:43 -0800 New Media://Visible Evidence show opens today! leg-kick.jpg

The New Media://Visible Evidence exhibition showcases several examples of mainly Los Angeles-based documentary practice that employ disparate new media forms. The exhibition will include examples from the Web-based portraits of LA and its inhabitants produced by Juan Devis for the KCET series titled Web Stories; media artist Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, composed entirely of clips from YouTube videos; and several interactive DVD-ROM documentaries created by USC’s Labyrinth Project under the leadership of Marsha Kinder. The show also includes Erik Loyer and Sharon Daniel's interactive documentary Blood Sugar; The Iraqi Doctors Project: Research and Remix, which envisions remix as a scholarly practice and was produced by Virginia Kuhn, DJ Johnson and students in IML 340; Mobile Voices, a project created by and for day laborers using the MMS feature on cell phones; as well as several examples of database documentaries made using the Korsakow System, including Matt Soar's Almost Architecture and Florian Thalhofer's Forgotten Flags.

In addition to showcasing the projects in the School of Cinematic Arts Gallery, the exhibition will also include three lunch-time presentations during the conference, with Bookchin appearing on Friday to talk about Mass Ornament, Marsha Kinder and Scott Mahoy on Saturday to talk about the Labyrinth Project, and Katie Mills on Sunday to talk about Web Stories. We invite you to experience some of the innovative work produced in Los Angeles – the gallery showcasing the projects is located on the first floor of the Lucas Building in the School of Cinematic Arts; the lunch-time talks will take place between 1:15 and 1:45 in the gallery.

The exhibition was curated by Holly Willis and is presented by USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy in conjunction with the Visible Evidence conference.

]]> http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/08/new_mediavisible_evidence_show.html http://interactive.usc.edu/members/sanderson/2009/08/new_mediavisible_evidence_show.html Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:14:04 -0800