News
Launch of Street Art Dealer | Clare Reddington | News
The crowds gathered in a disused shop in Broadmead last night for the the launch of Street Art Dealer. Street Art Dealer, a Media Sandbox supported project, takes art out of the gallery and onto the streets, bringing a new and exciting dynamic to public art using QR Codes and GeoTagging on your mobile phone. The city-wide exhibition and trail of artworks includes urban gaming from James Powderly, hidden installations from Turner Prize nominee Tomoko Takahashi, Zeus and Sebastian Lowsley-Williams. They are also giving away 100 free prints of the BEAM installation to people who register and interact with the exhibition. The Street Art Dealer exhibition is open until 31 July, visit streetartdealer.com for more details.
Media Playgrounds at Glastonbury | Clare Reddington | Altern8, News
The Village Screen at this year's Glastonbury Festival was a unique collaboration led by the Region’s 2012 Creative Programmer, Glastonbury Festival, Team South West and Relays (Legacy Trust UK programme) and including the UK’s network of Creative Programmers, screen agencies and the BBC Big Screen Live Sites team, featuring Pervasive Media Studio Resident Tarim with his Instant Graffiti which was developed as a Media Sandbox 2008 commissioned project.
Tarim creates Media Playgrounds- installations which people can both play with and build new and different places to play in. Designed around a system called PTTP (Power To The People) that gives people the ability to play using many
sorts of gadgets; mobile phones, laptops, WiImotes and public access kiosks as well as the ability to create new games which work with existing playgrounds. Current areas of development include Instant Graffiti, an Etch-a-Sketch style projection on to both buildings and screens which people can draw with using a mobile connection or create new single-player and multi-player experiences.
For more information on Tarim's Media Playgrounds click here.
Streetartdealer Needs Your Walls! | Clare Reddington | NewsA call for walls from the people of Bristol…
Bristol more than anywhere in the country has a history of art on its streets and a corresponding community ownership of them. Streetartdealer will use new technologies to connect those that view these works, with those that produce them. Streetartdealer will host a city wide exhibition of street artworks. For the Bristol launch, we will also showcase several uses of QR technology to interact, exchange and direct the public from the gallery to journeys around the city on a treasure hunt of art on the streets.
We are asking the general public to host a work on their wall. (walls must ajoin public space)
If you have a wall to lend, please email us on: walls@streetartdealer.com
Leon, Calum, Jono & Lucie.
Jools Holland launches HMC Sandbox project | Clare Reddington | News
A room full gathered at Rich Mix today for the launch of Visual Voice Pro, part of HMC Interactive and Drake Music’s Media Sandbox project. Mike Cobb of HMC kicked off the event introducing the software, a project they have had on the back burner for a while:
“Visual Voice Pro is an immersive sound to light environment for communication and cognitive development. By combining sound with visual responses, the software enables participants to realize the power and importance of their own contributions and helps to build cognitive and social skills, as well as self confidence. The different graphic settings range from bold energetic shapes to gentle calming scenes.”
Media Sandbox funding has enabled HMC to secure new partnerships and to concentrate on intensive R&D meaning that the first iteration is now at distribution stage with 10% of all profits from this boxed software going to Drake Music.
Mike invited Jools Holland, a patron of Drake Music, on to the stage to play the piano and demonstrate some of its capabilities. A private Jools Holland gig is a pretty good way to start the week and despite it being Monday morning, he managed to warm up the assembled music and software journos, creating a range of scribbly and mesmerizing patterns and inviting the audience to join in.
Jools was then interviewed about the potential benefits of the project. He described some of the creative and therapeutic possibilities of the software, both for people who have experience in making music and those who do not. I then jumped in to ask him why he thought schemes like Media Sandbox are important: “It is vital that government funding supports projects which encourage creativity. Visual Voice Pro enables disabled children to create music where they may not have been able to before, it really brings people together.”
Jools finished with more hearty support, saying he would be using it in his own gigs to illustrate the range of sounds produced by his singers and musicians.
More pics in our flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mediasandbox
Snacks, Aardvarks and ideas: media sandbox update event | Clare Reddington | News30 people gathered in the studio tonight to share ideas, progress, tapas and beer at a Media Sandbox event. Designed to update the community on how projects are getting on, the event also served as an opportunity to extract knowledge from the gathered crowd of innovation, web, TV, mobile and social media people.
"Mobile networks were actually built originally to carry voice. People forget this" Sam Machin, Orange
Nomos Media kicked off with an overview of how their AudioEnable mobile podcasting platform is progressing (so far easier than they expected). They are using the .NET compact framework for development, initially just for Windows Mobile as it is the schools' platform of choice. Having cracked basic functionality with a test device, the next phases will include file management, compression, upload and editing functionality (potentially the more difficult bits). Richard Hull from HP Labs and Sam Machin from Orange jumped in with some technical questions around encoding and Brian Condon asked the Audioboo in the corner question. Part of the discussion was around the user need to upload recordings 'made in the field'. Could they be uploaded later? Could the application instead use telephony to dial and record straight to a server (cue Sam's brilliantly dry comment). In the wider project, Radio in Schools is still being taken up rapidly across the UK, with schools using it to create audio newsletters to parents, communicate with twin schools in India and record school plays. "We created a platform and they are running with it".
"Stunningly we have made one sale already. And they jumped through many hoops to do it"
Next came Calum Lasham from Street Art Dealer who opened with an explanation of QR codes, lamenting the lack of UK uptake in both QR and mobile micro-payments. One of the aims of this project is to spread the gallery across the city; enabling artists to sell their work directly and cut out the middleman. As QR can encode a lot more information than a normal bar code and you can lose 70% of an image and still scan it, they are perfect electronic price tags for the street. Having sold one print already, they are planning a test installation with an unmanned gallery in Broadmead, but still have many challenges around the lack of parity in scanner quality across phones (I rate Optiscan for the iPhone), trust and payment mechanisms.
At this point we took a break and I conducted some 'special' research of my own, ripping and crumpling QR codes to see just how robust they are. My very scientific study says crumpling is fine, ripping and putting back together is sometimes not and you can lose rather less than 70% and not have a chance of reading anything. But I still think they are good.
"Big brother and Crimewatch are the most success interactive TV formats ever"
When Rik Lander started the Viral Spiral Sandbox project, he proposed to investigate how the passive nature of watching TV could be combined with the many types of interaction made possible by computers and the internet. Rik discussed how many of the TV production people he had discussed his ideas with had expressed dismay at the idea of creating a live, interactive programme; outside of the rather crass output of Channel 5 quiz programmes, the two worlds rarely meet. Rather than starting from thinking about formats, Viral Spiral is looking at what may or may not work for audiences (both those who do and don't want to interact), testing studio-based games which utilise audience interaction through things like search and messaging, the project will then develop TV formats, depending on success. Rik gave an overview of their first test session (described in his blog here) and asked his Tricky interactive question of the week: is there an inverse relationship between audience participation and quality? Rik then employed the community brain with some technical questions around the search and ARG type audience tests he is planning next.
This seemed to be a good opportunity for me to try out Aardvark for the first time, a new social network which enables you to IM questions and get live answers from your network and beyond. So, I instant messaged out Rik's question "what is the standard delivery time for an SMS?" And this is the chat transcript of what came back:
17:47 Aardvark: Got it. I'll find someone in your network who knows about *consumer electronics* , and send them your question now. I'll send you an answer in a few minutes!
17:49 Jose L./25/M/Venezuela: 3 seconds, more or less.
17:50 clare reddington: Thank you. Does it depend on traffic?
17: 54 Jose: It depends on how far are you from the closest cell (antenna). the closest, the better transfer rate you'd get. Of course It is all theoretical, in practice there's more variables to consider.So there, not sure how useful Aardvark was, but a great event with lots of chatting, snacking and useful interjections. Thanks to all who attended.
