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October 31, 2005
October 27, 2005
College education via iTunes
SiliconBeat: Your college education via iTunes
Speaking of Stanford, the university has announced an agreement with Apple to produce free podcasts of lectures, student music, play-by-play of its football games and more. There's already a ton of content in the iTunes store, including lectures from the Technology Ventures Program. (Note: You apparently can't access the Stanford content directly from the iTunes store. You have go through the Stanford iTunes site first.) Educators in many places have embraced podcasting to make their lectures, etc. more easily accessible. But Stanford's inititaive seems the most ambitious. It's also seems to be a smart move by Apple, especially given Yahoo's attempt to cultivate an audience for its music service among Stanford students.(Thanks to colleague Jessie Seyfer for the pointer.)
October 25, 2005
IMD Forum Speaker for 10/26/05: Seamus Blackley
A May 2005 picture of Seamus Blackley at his desk at CAA.(photo by Justin Hall)
Title: "The Ugly Truth: Art, Games,& Innovation"
Speaker: Seamus Blackley
Time: Wednesday, October 26, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
3131 South Figueroa Blvd./2nd Floor
Bio from the E3 2005:
Seamus Blackley is an agent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), a talent and literary agency based in Beverly Hills, Calif. Blackley's role is to help guide and execute CAA's strategy for representing video game creators in a full-service manner - securing and negotiating deals with game publishers, with film and television studios, and with networks, and building and servicing client development companies to give game designers greater creative and financial control. The top-selling game designer joined Microsoft in 1999 and piloted the creation of the Xbox game platform. While at Microsoft, the former physicist and DreamWorks Interactive executive producer wrote the initial proposal for Xbox, assembled and led the team behind the technical design and philosophy for the platform, and established and nurtured support for Xbox within the game development community worldwide.
Full bio on wikipedia:
October 19, 2005
Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things"
Bruce Sterling's SIGGRAPH'04 keynote speech on "Spimes" is just out in expanded form from MIT Press on Peter Lunenfeld's MediaWorks Pamphlet series:
Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.
October 17, 2005
IMD Forum Speaker for 10/19/05: Joi Ito
Speaker: Joi Ito
Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
3131 South Figueroa Blvd./2nd Floor
Joichi Ito is General Manager of International Operations for Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) which indexes and monitors blogs and the Chairman of Six Apart Japan (http://www.sixapart.jp) the weblog software company. He is on the board of Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org), a non-profit organization which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. He is a board member of Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002. He has served and continues to serve on numerous Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching "The Sharing Economy" as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.
The wikipedia article gives a good summary of his many interests.
Joi is also the promulgator of the Hecklebot school of backchannel with various versions of the device now in use: View image. Another image. Also see a prescient article by by JHall.
[Definitely can't take credit for the excellent Joi mash-up image and embarassed to say it's true author is currently unkown to us. But indicators appear to lead back to Fred's House - Gene, is this your masterpiece? ]
UPDATE: Mystery Solved - the mashup author is indeed Gene Becker.
Costikyan on the need to create new game styles
A recent presentation by Greg Costikyan on the "need to create new game styles" given at the Future Play conference at Michigan State Univ. is available on his Games * Design * Art * Culture site here.
(Thanks to Jim Rowson for the BoingBoing pointer)
Mobisodes
One of the new mobisodes in development from an update on the growing mobisode industry in today's NY Times:
The MTV Networks division of Viacom is developing "Samurai Love God," an animated series that will be introduced on mobile telephones in February. It has described the series as "Austin Powers meets Akira Kurosawa," referring to the popular film character and the Japanese director.
October 11, 2005
IMD Forum Speaker for 10/12/05: Andreas Kratky
Title: Database Art
Speaker: Andreas Kratky
Time: Wednesday, October 12, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
3131 South Figueroa Blvd./2nd Floor
Abstract: Databases are the most common device to handle the permanently growing flood of information. This system for the organization of data can be diverted from its normal goal to achieve maximum efficiency for creative uses. Artistic and idiosyncratic ordering structures allow us to create dynamic and recombinant structures to support a multitude of different approaches to narrative forms. The possibility to create multilayered and associative experiences makes this approach fascinating and universal. The experimental field ranges from a tightly crafted narrative to the point where narrative breaks away and forms an aleatoric pathway.
Andreas Kratky will show some examples from his recent work exploring the concepts of database as an artistic device. Among other examples he will show excerpts from the award-winning DVD-Rom “Bleeding Through – Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986” and “Soft Cinema” published this year by MIT Press.
UPDATE: Backchannel log here: Download file
October 7, 2005
2005 Ig Noble Award for Literature
One of the many well deserved Ig Noble awards given out yesterday at Harvard under the auspices of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR):
LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.
Independent Games Festival 2006
:: Last Call for 2006 Independent Games Festival Submissions
Deadlines are drawing to a close for submissions to the 2006 Independent Games Festival (IGF), held in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Honoring innovation in videogames created by independent game developers and students, the event continues to grow and prosper--and the prizes just keep getting bigger. The event, which is slated for March 20-24, 2006 in San Jose, CA, is offering a $20,000 Grand Prize for the best game. As proof that there's no slowing down in the game development industry, the event has added a new modding competition, and mods can now be submitted for Valve's Half Life 2, BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, Epic Games's Unreal Tournament 2004, and id Software's Doom 3. The extra incentive is that there's a total of $10,000 in prize money for the best original modifications.
This year, more than $45,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to IGF competition winners for innovation in five areas: Visual Arts, Audio, Game Design, Technical Excellence, and Best Web Browser Game. Main competition finalists are eligible for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and Audience Award. The IGF also plans to recognize 10 games for Student Showcase, including a new category for games created using middleware.
Deadlines for submissions to the modding competition are October 10, 2005; student submissions are due November 15, 2005. Visit www.igf.com for rules, deadlines and entry forms.
October 4, 2005
Hinokio
October 3, 2005
IMD Forum Speaker for 10/5/05: Kenyatta Cheese & Justin Hall
Title: Portable Video Workshop
Featuring Kenyatta Cheese with Justin Hall
Time: Wednesday, October 5, 6-9pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
3131 South Figueroa Blvd./2nd Floor
Devices like mobile phones and portable media players make it possible to have our media follow us wherever we’d like. But as the devices change, does the content change with it? What does it mean to view media outside the home or office, and how do we as content producers prepare for this new medium? The historic USC School of Cinema-Television is a fantastic place to launch a coordinated assessment of this new small screen medium.
Media activist Kenyatta Cheese leads this first in a series of USC- based workshops exploring the potential for portable video. Through hands-on sessions in the Fall of 2005, students and faculty will have a chance to learn how to capture, edit, compress and publish video from their laptops to the internet, and onto portable video devices including mobile phones and the Sony PSP.
Bring your laptop and copyright-free video clips! And RSVP here in the comments or to justin at bud dot com. Future workshops will not take place during 511 - they'll be announced on this Portable Video research page below:
http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/portablevideo/
UPDATE: Backchannel log here: Download file
Yackpack
First podcasting, now asynchronous "yacking":
YackPack is a new way to stay connected with a group of friends, family or work colleagues. YackPack conveys the nuances of spoken language, leading to better communication, stronger friendships, and more group unity. In a nutshell, YackPack is simple voice messaging for groups.
YackPack (via Technology Review)