Playpen

Monika tells me this is a great festival for student media-arts work. It looks good to me and I think I saw some work from it last year.

It’s a good opportunity because media-art work can be expensive to build and often students are overshadowed by artists with grants who can afford some kind of techno utopian vision. So, crack out those Arduino boards and Processing and submit something.

Re/Act 4th International Student Festival for Media Art

In 2008, re/act, the international student festival for digital media art, takes place for the 4th time. Art and design student from all over the world are given the opportunity to make their works known to a wide audience and to make new contacts with a network of curators, cultural policy makers, gallery owners, professors, students, and the media.

re/act’s competition addresses students of artistic study programs. An international panel of experts will select the world’s best works from all entries.

Awards go to works from the following disciplines:

• Video Art
• Interactive Art
• Live video & performance
• Game Art

The deadline is February 1st 2008 and the submission form is downloadable from the re/act website.

[tags]interactive, media-art, festival, student, competition[/tags]

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Jon Kolko’s article, Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Life lessons from consulting to academia, and back again over at Core77, was a particularly pertinent read for me. As someone who still operates between both academia and consulting (and working as a journalist) I find myself alternately frustrated and relieved by both sides of the fence.

Kolko breaks down several myths of academia and consulting, one of which being the amount of work (or not) that academics do.

On paper, two thirds of the year as vacation seems like a dream come true, and I suppose it actually is for a number of people. But upon reflecting on my five years of teaching, I realized that I was working harder, longer, and on more things than ever before. Between mentoring students, writing papers, grading papers, structuring classes, attending presentations and lectures, traveling for conferences, sitting on committees, and—oh, right, teaching classes—I was approaching the seventy or eighty hour work weeks that I was used to from my previous life as a software designer.

Now, it’s true that in every institution there are some academics who basically scam the system and are “dead inside” as Kolko describes. But there are a equal numbers of those that work very hard indeed, care about the students and their education as well as trying to build up departments, etc.

The difference is that it’s much harder to fire the slackers in academia (and that includes the students).

I’ve worked equally hard in the commercial world, but it is more bursty and less relentlessly grinding. Also, teaching takes it out of you if you do it properly. If you don’t believe me, try standing and painstakingly explaining how you do what you do to out loud for eight hours. Plenty of great, talented people are completely exhausted from writing and giving a one-hour talk. Once.

The best thing about Kolko’s article is that it highlights what both sides can learn from each other. Too often academics believe those working commercially are intellectually inferior sell-outs. Designers and consultants working commercially think academics are talentless eggheads. Yet if the commercial world had some of the ethics and rigour of academia and the academic world had some of the zest and speed of commercial decision making things would be much better all round.

It’s one of the reasons I like to do both.

[tags]academia, education, teaching, Core77, Kolko, design, consulting[/tags]

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Here’s something nothing to do with interactivity, quite a bit to do with play. It’s Christmas after all.

I still find this funny for some unexplainable reason.

(Thanks to Branden at Automata Studios for this - he used it to explain how to pronounce their name).

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Iain posted posted a link to Dear Rockers, a website that encourages you to repent your music-stealing sins and send $5 direct to the musicians who have made an impact on your life but for whose music you haven’t paid. It’s interesting that record companies have got themselves into a position to be so hated.

But it then sent me off looking for the chap behind the site, Darren Barefoot, who, it turns out, is the same guy behind Get A First Life, which lampoons that other life. For all my rants on Second Life I had seen and forgotten about Get A First Life. It’s quite an amusing one-page gag, but actually Darren’s more detailed breakdown of his critique of SL is worth reading.

[tags]SecondLife, FirstLife, crackunit, dearrockers[/tags]

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Greyworld have unveiled their project, Monument to the Unknown Artist. Andrew Shoben showed me the maquette of it in Geryworld’s studio early last year and I was really wondering how and if they were actually going to make it.

You really need to take a look at the video on their site to see it in action, but basically it looks like a statue but is, in fact, a robot that can mimic your stance. It’s installed by the Tate Modern, so if you’re in town go and strike a pose.

UPDATE: There is an accompanying microsite for the project with many more images and info.

[tags]art, interactive, greyworld, installation[/tags]

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My mate Nik Roope has been busily working up another smart idea to brighten up the lack of imagination in the marketplace again. This time it’s the Plumen Project.

Based on the same principles as the Hulger range and the Hulgerisation project, the simple, but smart, idea is to make low-energy bulbs that actually look cool. Not only is it a playful way to re-think an existing product, but it’s also a really great idea to entice people to switch.

The prototype (pictured) is looking pretty snazzy already, but go check out the site for some of the other ideas waiting in the wings.

[tags]sustainability, hulger, nikroope, plumen, design, play[/tags]

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I meant to post this last week but was travelling and forgot. Take a look at the never-ending web page that Poke designed for the Orange Unlimited campaign “Good Things Should Never End”. Iain also posted some secrets about the site - goodies are hidden therein.

Lovely, silly animations by Rex and some smart little interactive toys too. Infuriatingly it really does seem to never end too - I keep trying to chase my scrollbar to the bottom but the fun just keeps coming.

Apart from it being a fantastic, playful time-waster it’s also perfectly aligned with the message. Nice.

[tags]animation, marketing, illustration, Poke, play, interactivity[/tags]

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