Kieran Nolan

The Random Album Cover Game has been around the last year, but I had a go at it a couple of days ago.

Not sure what genre it'd fit into exactly... possibly folk meets downtempo meets dnb...

I was over in London recently to check out a couple of talks that were taking place as part of Onedotzero's Adventures in Motion festival. First up was a presentation about digital means of creating music, controlling music and creating musical controllers by Tinker.it. Afterwards a number of music related Arduino and Processing projects were shown, including a granular synth and the Brokenspiel, which plays a sequence of notes generated from a barcode or magnetic card's unique id number.

Then later on that evening was This Happened #6, where the audience learned all about the creative processes behind four unique tech art projects. These were Touched Echo by Markus Kison, Audience by rAndom International and Chris O'Shea, Troika's 'Cloud' and the responsive installation at Covent Garden by United Visual Artists. One thing that was striking about all these was the ammount of time put into planning and pre-visualisation, leaving little or no room for error when the final product was delivered. Also they were made in very tight timeframes, Cloud for instance was nine months from initial idea to the final installation.

In the lobby of the BFI there was a project I really liked called Doodle Earth, which basically encourages people to draw. An animated map dotted with buildings and moving vehicles is projected onto a blank wall and people are encouraged to fill in the blanks with coloured markers. I drew this dragon head thing burning the building in the projection (someone added the 'Cheese' speech bubble and 'JAFC rules...' messages later on). All the art meets technology stuff is great but this really suceeds at creating a fun, collaborative user experience in a fairly lo-tech way. It's good to draw!

I was over in Sweden last month attending 7workshops7 organised by 1scale1, a research lab based in Malmö city. The workshops were all about interaction design and prototyping with open source hardware and software tools, mainly arduino, processing , reacTIVision, PD and some PCB design in Eagle as well. We also built a 'Smapler'. A lot of ground was covered in the two weeks and I headed back home with a new bag of tricks and fresh inspiration.

Below is a work in progress shot from my 'Alternative Displays' project, it's a 4 x 4 grid of square electromagnets. These are controlled by an Arduino and a Djuicer (a custom circuit designed especially for the workshop by 1scale1). A framed sheet of perspex goes on top of these and it contains a layer of industrial printer toner. When the magnets are switched on the the metal fibres stand up and you see a 'pixel' in the dust. Thanks to Mattias, Tony and David at 1scale1 for all their help making this. Next step is to have custom animations appear in the dust and have it respond to some external inputs.

This week Dundalk IT's department of Music & Creative media held it's fifth annual multimedia exhibition. On display were interactive projects from the 3rd and 4th year multimedia degree students. The teams did a great job, their imagination and hard work really paying off with a innovative and varied selection of work. Here's some info on the projects that were on display:

Anomie
An experimental art piece showing the journey of an amnesiac from a healthy state of mind to a state of uncertainty. Through a route of non-linear interactivity, the user helps guide the character to the reason of his ill health and the incident that caused it.

M.A.M.M.Y.
M.A.M.M.Y. (mass audience multimedia-media yeah) is a social networking site for the creative students of DKIT, where they can communicate, collaborate and display their work. It uses bluetooth to beam recently uploaded content to students mobile phones.

R.E.A.C.H.
The R.E.A.C.H. (Routine Education for Autistic Children at Home) team produced an e-learning CD-ROM for autistic children to show them how to get ready for school in the morning. Their research found that autistic children are visual thinkers so it uses a cartoon based approach to effectively communicate it's message.

Delirium
Delerium generates a visual representation of the current mood of the user using music and colour. The users temperature is recorded and inputted into the computer, at which point images and a piece of music appears and floats around the walls of the room. Questions appear onscreen that the user answers, after which these answers are compared and contrasted with the temperature reading.

The Land Of Luna
An exploratory game aimed at 8 to 9 year old girls. The game is from a first person perspective. The user plays the character of Lana who is transported to the world inside her snow globe, where she must collect a series of objects in different levels to save her friend Noah. There is no time limit on the game, so as to encourage the user to explore the world and interact with the characters.

Reuben Chinaski
An interactive exploratory autobiography for the digital age. We see the main character, Reuben Chinaski, on his deathbed. He is too weak to write his own biography so instead he tells the user about the ups and downs of his life. The user is free to explore parts of Reuben's life in a non-linear fashion by selecting various objects in the room and letting Reuben explain what the object means to him through filmed narrated memories.

Seven Deadly Sins
Purge your soul of the seven deadly sins by engaging with this interactive experience. Memorize sound sequences inside the confession box while hit with some far out imagery.

Tactical Control Force
'Watch tomorrow's news today", in TCF you control a live newsfeed by taking place in a series of games. The outcome of these tests shapes the narrative. A real adrenaline rush as you try to avert a national emergency in real time. The installation for this piece is a sort of survival bunker / command post, which helps intensify the atmosphere further.

Zeppelin's Universe
This game's target audience is kids in a public waiting room who are feeling restless. The main character, Mikey, goes into a dream state where he meets Zeppelin the Wizard. He has four tasks to accomplish to allow him to return to reality, or else he will be trapped in Zeppelin's Universe forever.

These Muji fold-up speakers are really innovative. You can pack them flat in your laptop bag or whatever and then unfold them when needed. Of course cardboard speakers are not that durable and they might or might not be audiophile quality... but still, a neat concept - link