Tag Archives: events

Speaker: Erik Loyer

Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: “Seeking eloquence in interactive space”

From Chris Crawford to Richard Nixon, Ella Fitzgerald to James Joyce, a look at the practice of eloquence and its relationship to interactive design.

Erik Loyer, Creative Director for Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular and founder of the design studio Song New Creative, is a designer and media artist whose work explores the ways in which digital interactivity enables human eloquence. His award-winning, internationally-exhibited works include The Lair of the Marrow Monkey, one of the first websites to be added to the permanent collection of a major art museum, Chroma, a web serial about the racial politics of virtual reality, and Public Secrets, an interactive documentary on the California prison system created in collaboration with artist Sharon Daniel. Loyer’s commercial portfolio includes Clio and One Show Gold Award-winning work for Vodafone, as well as projects for Sony, BMW, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and NASA. He is an alumnus of new media pioneers Inscape and The Voyager Company, and founded the information architecture division of Razorfish in Los Angeles.

Blur + Sharpen, a screening series sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, is pleased to present Machinima Artistica. This program of artist-made machinima focuses on a full range of expression, from the elegiac force of Phil Solomon and Mark Lapore’s haunting Untitled (for David Gatten) to a range of politically motivated critiques of violence and war, explorations of virtual being, and kinetic, abstract pieces that completely transform game worlds into spaces of awe and beauty. This is machinima like you’ve never seen it before! Curated by Holly Willis.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007 : 7:00pm to 8:00pm

Robert Zemeckis Center’s Ron Howard Theater

Free and open to the public

Speaker: Toni Dove

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

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Registration is now open for:

24/7: A DIY VIDEO SUMMIT

February 8-10, 2008

School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Conference web site: http://www.video24-7.org

Blog: http://diy.video24-7.org

Spaces are limited for attendance at the academic panels and the workshops. The video screenings are free and open to the public. Please help us spread the word about this event.

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved around do-it-yourself (DIY) video: artists, audiences, technology providers, academics, policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional, artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

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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.

(image caption: “Field-Works” ongoing project, by Masaki Fujihata)

Speaker: Michael Naimark, USC Interactive Media Division

Title: Representing Earth

Representing Earth, actual places at actual moments, presents a unique challenge. Unlike fantasy places like Second Life and video games, Earth has a “ground truth” frame of reference, indexed by latitude, longitude, altitude, and time. Hence all potential Earth models cross correlate with each other into a singular Earth model.

Recently several new Earth model applications have appeared. Some are more photo-realistic (Google Street View, Microsoft PhotoSynth, EveryScape), some are more interactive (Google Earth, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo Maps), but, regardless of the hype, none are really “like being there.” The arts community, which instinctively understands that artifacts can be good things, has produced several alternative Earth models (e.g., Art+Com, Shaw, Fujihata).

We’ll take a critical look at these applications and examples, discuss a framework for conceptualizing (and feeling comfortable with) these new forms of representation, and speculate about their future.

We’ll also introduce a new IMD project, in collaboration with ICT and supported by a research award from Google, called “Viewfinder”. Viewfinder is designed as a fast, lean project to seamlessly “Flickrize” Google Earth.

A workshop on the Viewfinder project will take place next Monday 5 November 1-5pm in the ZML. Team members from both IMD and ICT will be there.

Image from rikomatic.com

Speakers: Peggy Weil & Nonny de la Peña

Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: “Heinous Corpus in the Multiverse”

Exposing practices and conditions in Guantanamo Prison by integrating

documentary footage and coordinated events in an installation in

Second Life, an online environment. We are providing a virtual,

accessible version of Guantanamo, in contrast to the real, but

inaccessible U.S. prison camp.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/IML/182/211/123

Bios:

Nonny de la Peña, writer, documentary filmmaker and journalist, has

consistently produced work across a variety of media probing

constitutional, social and human rights issues. Her journalistic work

has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Texas

Monthly, Premiere Magazine, Buzz Magazine and La Familia de Hoy. Her

most recent film, Unconstitutional, focused on civil liberties issues

post 9/11 including Guantánamo Bay. De la Peña’s films have

appeared in worldwide theatrical release, broadcast on Sundance

Channel, BBC, CourtTV, and Al Jazeera, and have been shown at dozens

of film festivals including the Toronto Film Festival, South by

Southwest, Melbourne Film Festival and the Edinburgh Festival. She is

currently developing Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantanamo

Prison in Second Life.

Peggy Weil, Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at USC

School of Cinematic Arts, is a digital media artist and designer

focusing on interactive design as immersive experience for perceptual

and civic engagement. She’s produced interactive projects for The

Voyager Company, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, Von Holtzbrinck and

Ravensberger Interactive, and was awarded the MILIA D’OR in Cannes in

1998. She was creative producer/designer for USC’s Institute for

Creative Technology E.L.E.C.T. project, a role playing game to train

officers in bi-laterial negotiation skills. She acted as producer/ designer

for The Redistricting Game, a USC Annenberg Center sponsored project

to increase voter awareness about redistricting, and is currently developing

Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantanamo

Prison in Second Life.

Speakers: 3rd Year MFA students (and IMD Faculty)

Location: IMD Thesis studio @ 555 w. 23rd Street (at Figueroa)

This week’s CTIN 511 seminar will be held at the IMD’s Student Thesis Studio Spaces located at 555 W. 23rd Street starting at 6pm. The 555 class will be presenting prototype sketches which physically embody, test and communicate a subset of their project’s technical and experiential goals. This is the first year we are having a ‘Sneak-Peek’ – you can read more about each project on the IMD wiki under Proposals & Committees.

Speakers: Dennis Wixon & August de los Reyes, Microsoft Game Studios

Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: “Making Emotions Work for You – Revolutionizing the way Emotions are understood and Measured for Product Design. “

How can you know if that a design works? Do users see the design the way you intended it? Can user research and design partner to make to provide useful answers? We say Yes and we can “prove” it. We present a brief overview of the current approaches to product design. We introduce a classic but innovative theory of human emotion that has simple and practical implications for both design and research. We show how this approach is reflected in many consumer products. We take this framework and show how it was used to guide the research work on the most successful game in history. The aim is to change the way you think about creating an engaging design, user research, and human emotion.

BIOS:

Dennis Wixon directs research at Microsoft Games studios which is recognized as a leader in applied methodology. Previously, Dennis was usability manager in the Software Usability Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation, where methods such as usability engineering and contextual inquiry were developed. He co-edited a book Field Methods Case Book for Software Design with Prof. Judy Ramey of the University of Washington. Dennis holds a PhD. in social psychology from Clark University.

August de los Reyes researches emotional design as a degree candidate in the Advanced Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Also a PhD candidate in the Technical University of Delft’s Industrial Design Engineering initiative on Emotion and Design, August will be a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford beginning this fall.

This work was recently featured in Wired and is critical to our industry. Don’t miss this talk!

Hold onto your mouse ears! In an unprecedented move, Disney-ABC is inviting students in the USC School of Cinematic Arts to participate in a remix contest using selected materials from Disney-ABC television shows and online content from the website ABC.com. This is not a joke! This is a real challenge with real cash prizes for the best remixes in six categories including Music Videos, Mashups and Remix Trailers. Winners in each category will receive a cash prize and their work will appear on ABC.com. Details are still forthcoming, but a representative from the Digital Media Group at Disney-ABC will be on campus next Wednesday Oct 10th at 5:00PM in the Zemeckis Media Lab (RZC 201) to answer all your (many, many) questions and expressions of incredulity. The times they are a-changin’.