New links added on the left

Check them out, pretty interesting. :-)

Video links on interactive installation

Recommended by the algorithm of youtube.

Multi Touch Music Wall


nextfest interactive video wall


Interactive display - experiments


Interactive LED Panels: New version, white LEDs, fucky music...


interactive dancing floor


Lenovo - water wall projection


Volume at the Victoria and Albert Museum


UVA vs. The Chemical Brothers


Not related to the topic, I came across another Video by Chemical Brother a few year ago while working for a movie company in HK. Chemical Brothers feat K-OS - Get Yourself High.

Top 10 search results on "interactive & installation" (March 26, 2009)

1. D Silent and Non-Interactive Install
This chapter describes the silent and non-interactive installation of Oracle Developer Suite.
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/docs/o/dl/core/install/appdx_d.htm

2. Interactive Installation Prototype


3. Adobe Interactive Installation


4. UnitedVisualArtists " Interactive Installation Prototype
http://www.uva.co.uk/archives/32
Video the same as of 2. above, so this is the official site.

5. Xex Grp. - Installation Archive
http://www.xex.hk/blog/?cat=12
Group of six who specializes in different aspects of talent in creation. Xex Grp. creates things that have never been made. X-ex means creation on non-existence.

It seems like a group from Hong Kong. Cool...

6. SM3117 Interactive Installation and Physical Computing
http://sweb.cityu.edu.hk/sm3117/index.htm

Well, getting back to SCM, City University of Hong Kong... a pleasant surprise!!
It is an undergraduate syllabus with lot of useful information. However, this course is not offered this semester, and not listed on the list of programs offered...
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/scm/program/courses_all.htm

7. Interactive Installation Decorating Design
http://www.alibaba.com/product-free/103289728/Interactive_Installation_Decorating_Design.html
A listings of a company, Morn Associates Designers, based in Hong Kong.

Description below...
Morn Associates is a Hong Kong based design consultancy offering full creative design services to both local and international clients across a range of industries. We seek to develop long-term relationships with our business partners, built on mutual trust and respect. Morn Associates brings to you the wondrous of both Interaction Design and Visual Communication Design that allows you to experience the fine blend of design and communication. Apart from the creative process of finding a unique design solution, we offer services in various disciplines including: Interaction Design -User-centred Design -Interface Design -Service Design -User Experience Design -Interactive Installation Visual Communication Design -Advertising -Corporate Identity - Website Design - Packaging Design - Presentation For more details, please visit: mornassociates.com

3 in a role are happening in Hong Kong, how peculiar...

8. Adobe Interactive Installation - AOL Video
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/adobe-interactive-installation/4122151632
The same video as of 3.

9. Deccan Herald - Interactive installation
http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Jul112008/metro2008071078057.asp
An news article Friday, July 11, 2008, on Metrolife, a newspaper of Karnataka, India.
Raheema Begum's interactive installation titled Reconnaissance with dance and spoken words as its components, is being held at Samukha Gallery till July 15...

Further search on Raheema Begum
Find her blog http://www.indiblogger.in/blogger/1067/
Her profile http://profiles.tigweb.org/Raheema
Her resume http://raahi.wordpress.com/about/resume/
Her recent work http://www.javamuseum.org/2007/a_and_b/?page_id=6

10. UnitedVisualArtists " News (The same group as of 4.)
http://www.uva.co.uk/2006/03/17/interactive-installation-prototype

There are many events listed...
1. OFFF 2009 , the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creative Culture...
http://www.offf.ws/

2. UCLA - Digital Media Arts Lecture Series.
The UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts (DMA)
http://dma.ucla.edu/events/lectures.php
United Visual Artists
Lecture
February 10, 2009, 6:00 pm

United Visual Artists is a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performace and responsive installation. Research and development is a core part of their process - enabling them to constantly explore new fields.

3. Chorus.

http://www.operanorth.co.uk/events/united-visual-artists-chorus/

Commissioned by Opera North Projects
Private View February 5th 18.00
The Harewood Assembly Rooms, Leeds

To celebrate the opening of the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, Opera North Projects have commissioned United Visual Artists to create a site specific response. ‘Chorus’ is an array of pendulums of light and sound, suspended from the ceiling of the auditorium. The concept arose from the search a simple and unifying relationship between light and opera. Each pendulum has unique score, an individual ‘voice’ which can be heard when moving through the paths of light, but together they form a chorus of light and sound. Structured through three distinct phases the sound is created by Mira Calix from abstracted live recordings with Opera North musicians.

A random search yield 7-8 different results, 3 of them related to the same group. Surprisingly the top most relevant result is the most irrelevant to what I'm trying to study.

May be I should do the same search every 3 months and see if the result is any different. Or try a different search engine / a different phase next month / idea run dry.

Frothy TV (part 2)

Frothy TV: Opportunities for Industry Innovation in Hard Times


Second lecture by Dr. Abigail De Kosnik, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. First lecture here.

"Frothy", adj, full of or covered with a mass of small bubbles.

Frothy TV, an era of experimenting new ideas, new forms, and yet meaning lot of failures, a time for radical changes. A few remaining successful cases will eventually developed into dominant models in the future.

1. Mobile TV and a few different types of programming tailor-made for the small screen.

• Broadcast/ Live streaming
• Catastrophe TV (e.g. Breaking news, major sports events)
• "Snack TV": short programming
• "Talking Head" (news, sports, financial market analysis)
• Reality & Frictional
  
• "Webisodes", exclusively made promotional programming (LOST : Missing Pieces Episode 1)

2. Timeshifted Content and Interactive TV on Mobile TV, allow viewers to interact directly to the content of programming

• Shopping
  
• Recording & broadcasting photo / video / sound contents by the viewer
• Sampling content, link to purchase site
  
• Responds to programming, such as rating, mood, comments.

3. Global Format Trade
"National adaptation [is] the point where the global meets the local."-Albert Moran

Adaptation of successful foreign programmings into a local market by paying licensing fees. For example, game shows like "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and the list of adaptations globally.

4. Transmedia: case study Trueblood
An American TV series about vampire, produced by HBO. A cross media campaign was used.

In True Blood, which is set in a small town in North Louisiana, vampires have integrated in society and share the same living space as humans thanks to the invention of synthetic blood, which is sold as “True Blood”. Vampires, however, are treated as second-class citizens...

http://americanvampireleague.com/

http://fellowshipofthesun.org/

True Blood Ad on TV Decoder

More details can be found on Trueblood (wikipedia)

5. Product Placement

Fridays Night Lights, a TV series of NBC, a story about American high-school football. Some of the main characters were written as employees of a sponsor, Applebees restaurant.

6. Experiential Marketing with interactive games.

Rockband, a video game company host a contest, the winning group would be performing live in a concert.

GPJ Creates 'Experiences' in Beijing

Bank of China as the official sponsor of badminton, the Beijing Olympics 2008.

Using blue-screen technology, visitors could hold a badminton racket and see themselves playing a virtual game against the Chinese team for two minutes each.

7. User-generated / grassroots Content

Low-budget productions shown on youtube with tremendous number of hits, some even turn into commercial success.

Case Studies:

1. "Here It Goes Again", performed by OK go, won a Grammy Award for "Best Short-Form Music Video" in 2007.

2. MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU

3. Apple Mac Music Video


4. The Killer Chow Yun Fat John Woo Danny Lee Tsui Hark Fan Vid



As seen in many occasions in history in difficult times, such as Spring and Autumn Period in ancient China, there were the time of Hundred Schools of Thought, emerged as the golden age of philosophical systems, including Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, Mohism and such. Also, in the early 20th century with WWI & WWII, The art world experienced the development of new styles and explorations such as expressionism, Dadaism, cubism, de stijl, abstract expressionism and surrealism. In difficult time, people are starving or losing their homes; however, they are forced to examine the conditions and come up with drastic ways to reform. It's also a time for new ideas to flourish and blossom, when oppuntunites are favorable to those who challenge the norm.

Snowflakes, an interactive performance / installation with iPhones

A performance / installation by Dr. Masayuki Akamatsu, a researcher and professor of IAMAS, an influential media arts institute in Japan.

Using an array of Apple iPhones preloaded with an application and a simple WiFi network, each iPhone became an audio-visual generation instrument, interactive soundscape and imagescape for the installation artwork.

Audiences were seated around the set-up of the first session and those seated close to the installation were able to touch and interacted with the installation by touching any one of the iPhones on the table.



iPhones were mounted onto the glass wall inside the room for the second session. Audiences could walk freely and interacted with the installation.



These iPhones were controlled by an application Max/MSP on a laptop.



For more of Dr. Masayuki Akamatsu's info and work, please visit the following sites.
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~aka/
http://www.akamatsu.org/

Global Video On Demand (part 1)

GVOD (Global Video on Demand): Audience-Driven Television and the Industry's Next Phase


A two-part lecture series by Dr. Abigail De Kosnik, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies.

The guest first introduced a reference, Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU Press, 2007).
http://www.amazon.com/Television-Will-be-Revolutionized/dp/0814752209/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237768716&sr=8-1

Dr. Abigail De Kosnik described the 3 phases of television:

• Network Era (Early 1950s - Mid 1980s)
• Multichannel Transition (Mid 1980s - Mid 2000s)
• Post Network Era (Mid 2000s - present)

Network Era is the phase of national broadcast televisions, such as ABC, NBC and CBS in the US. It's free to the audience and programs are paid by commercials.

Multichannel Transition is characterized by the improvement in technologies, such as the introduction of VCRs (video cassette recorders), remote controls, emerges of channels on cable / satellite TVs, examples are CNN, HBO, MTV, ESPN and a lot more.

Post Network Era can be described as 40% of Millennials (age 12-25) use 5 to 8 technologies such as laptop, cell phone, i pod along with conventional TV, sometime simultaneously at anytime of the day. However, 40% bloomers (age 45-64) stay with watching TV every evening only. However, for Millennails, TV viewing time has not dimished, despite expansion in time spent using the internet. *Base on a 2006 study cited by Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ANC Television.

"The world as we knew it is over." Les Moonves, President of CBS Network (2003). Click the photo on the top of page.

New technologies let viewers choose among programs produced in any decade, produced by professional and amateurs, watch programs on demand, view programs on TV sets, computer screen or portable devices. Viewers are actively making selections, instead of passively waiting for whatever coming on next.

The additional mode of viewed television programs had moved from Broadcast to Broadband. The rise of YouTube and other online portals distribute new kinds of contents. Surprisingly, download availablity has not cannibilized the broadcast audience; there has been no audience loss in broadcating since advent of internet TV.

It is an interesting phenomenon, although Hong Kong has not quite fully developed the multichannel phase as in the US, subscription rate of cable TV is relatively low. The Post Network Era has arrived as we speak. As viewers are effectively using multiple devices to consume TV programming and spend more time viewing them. I am curious how much time would be reserved say for exercise or reading for the average Millennials.

And how does watching TV relate to "interactivity"? Since technologies allowed viewers to actively select what they are going to see in their limited time, audiences are accustomed to the increasing sense / power of control. Media in the form of publishing, such as broadcast TV or newspaper, are becoming venerable to obsoleteness. There are changes needed to be made.

How Television may evolve in the future? Would a culturally different city such as Hong Kong be different than the US? What revenues will the new Television bring and the difficulties faced by the television industry? Stay tuned for part 2...

A few references

1. New media : a critical introduction
http://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Introduction-Jon-Dovey/dp/0415431603/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236861310&sr=8-1

2. Digital currents : art in the electronic age
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Currents-Art-Electronic-Age/dp/0415307813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236861489&sr=8-1

3. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion
http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Art-Illusion-Immersion-Leonardo/dp/0262572230/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236861680&sr=8-1