FOR PROFESSIONALS

NEW MEDIA WORKGROUP REPORT 2014

Workgroup 1: Zachary Lieberman and Molmol KuoSchool of Poetic Computationhttp://sfpc.io

‘There is no Citizen Kane of media art yet’

What is poetry? How do you teach it? How did Zachary Lieberman and Molmol Kuo use prototyping in their design process? How do you work with artists? And where are they going?

“Somebody said poetry is putting the right words in the right order”, said Zachary Lieberman. In other words: there is an aspect of selection, ordering and economy to it, but apart from that you can go almost anywhere with it. That element of searching for form and possibilities is present throughout the projects produced by Liebermann and Molmol Kuo and the School for Poetic Computation in general.

Was there any significant progress in the field over the last fifteen years? Definitely, said Lieberman. “But don’t forget it’s still in its infancy. Using a pc to make art is relatively new. In the same way film from the turn of the previous century was really interested in the form and magic of film and in understanding what the medium could do. There is no Citizen Kane of media art yet. We’re just exploring, like Meliès. There’s no real language yet. And I really like those disconnected loose moments.”

Still there is progress. “The earliest things that we made we’re impossibly hard to make. To make the same things now would be much easier. The quality and scale is also completely different. A lot of the time the projects are about simple question: are you present? Are you moving? And I think we recently started to ask better questions. But listen, just go back to Ars Electronica in the nineties and look at the trajectory since then. There is definitely progression.”

Do they know where they are going? Some projects are free floating. Some are commissioned. The self-driven projects were interesting to them because they’re driven by collaboration. The ones based on commission are interesting because the artist is selling an idea even before the thing itself exists. “That’s where we build a lot of demo’s”, said Kuo.

The ultimate aim of every project for children, said Liebermann, was to create astonishment. The open mouth phenomenon as someone called it. A Japanese grandmother that once came to one his projects put it another way. She came up to him and said ‘you’re giving the children good dreams’. “The project at Cinekid is about taking a small movement and making it large. But does it work for every child? No. Sometimes I see the children get that. That’s what it’s about. The underlying idea is about feeling. That is kind of a fundamental thing we do.”

Kuo: “The whole point of the Google commissioned talking shoes was to encourage people to walk around more and make them do with their body what they wouldn’t usually do. For Google the goal was different. For us in the end it’s more about whether you can make an object come to life. And what does it mean to breathe life into something?”

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“I really believe that everything should move. Tables, house. But is that necessary? I’m not sure. The question for me is: what do you experience? I hope it is something that you cannot experience otherwise. Being in the moment.”

Workgroup 2: Oculus RiftMax Rheiner: How to design for the Oculus Rift?http://www.wired.com/2014/08/oculus-rift-birdly-fly/

‘People need to experience the crash’

We’re on the verge of integrating virtual reality into many digital experiences. Max Rheiner and his team at Zurich University of the Arts developed Birdly, a full body flight simulator and virtual reality machine that lets the player fly like a bird. What were their experiences building it and using the Oculus Rift VR-glasses?

“Seeing is not believing”, said Rheiner. “Don’t believe everything you hear. You have to experience Birdly yourself. Looking at someone using the machine doesn’t capture it.”

The goal was to create a full body experience. For Rheiner recent decades focused too much on visual and auditory experience. The other senses have been neglected. The project started when a Birdlife heritage foundation organised an exhibition about the fascination of flight. Could the team come up with something? Rheiner saw the chance to create a full body exploration. They did some preliminary research, even touched upon Icarus and Da Vinci and other stuff of legends when it comes to flying, but were mostly tantalised by dreams, said Rheiner. “Because we wanted to know what a bird sees. So we went back into ourselves and looked at our dreams. Some people really do fly in dreams. They’re soring through the air.”

Then came the simulations. The team built a platform and found out very quickly that the

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human body not build to dive for long. “That was a major concern: whether humans would be able to fly like this at all. But regardless, we went on.” It turned out to be crucial that the user could use his arms. Flapping the wings gives speed and altitude. With the hands one can go up and down.

In terms of the landscape people fly over, first crude virtual blocks were used and then woods were programmed. But they quickly abandoned this because they were more interested in a cityscape. Interestingly, that created immediate fear of heights in some people. That wasn’t present in the woodland landscape. Another interesting finding was that when people crashed into buildings and there was no feedback from the machine, some people felt sick. Their bodies needed to experience the impact of the crash.

Another small but important detail. The machine is slightly tilted to reduce the strain on the neck. If you fly like superman with your head thrown back, said Rheiner, “you’ll need a super chiropractor.”

Now it’s just a question of perfecting the machine. Wind feedback was installed. “That was crucial. It really gives you the feeling that you’re moving. We attached it to the board because a bird is always flying forward. Not like a dragonfly. We also added sound: just the sound of the wind, that changes when depending on speed. We also designed olfactory feedback, but the problem is the different scents get stuck in the tubes. So we want to separate them.”

In the near future, the team will intensify the body feedback, said Rheiner: thermo or biofeedback. And story wise: there will be an adventure of sorts added to create a more engaging experience.

Cinekid for ProfessionalsApps for Children Seminar Report 2014

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