Media Interaction Lab

Being located near Linz, we of course enjoy the Ars Electronica Festival each year! The topic of this year’s festival was “A NEW CULTURAL ECONOMY – The Limits of Intellectual Property”, dealing with the freedom of information and copyright protection, big profit-making opportunities and the vision of an open knowledge-based society. We did not actively participate in the festival program this year, but here are some impressions and pictures from the festival.

CyberArts  (OK Offene Kulturhaus Oberösterreich)

I finally had the chance to play with the levelHead cubes from Julian Oliver. Based on marker tracking, a 3D room is augmented on a cube that works as the interface to guide a virtual character through rooms. By tilting the cube, the user can control the walking direction of the character. The technology is used for a spatial memory game with the goal to walk from the starting room through the architecture of 3 different cubes to the destination room. Definitely one of the nicest pieces I’ve seen on this year’s festival!

Optical Tone from Mutoh Tsutomu gives you the chance to interactively control the colors of the light-source by their position in space.  They already showed it at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles, but it was nice to see it again, and people really like to play with it!

touched echo  by Markus Kison is a minimal medial intervention in public space. Resting your elbows on the swinging balustrades lets you hear the sound of an air raid over Dresden back in 1945. The sound of airplanes and explosions is transmitted through the arm directly into the inner ear. The technology is not new, but it has not been used in this context before. And it’s also nice to watch people leaning on the railing with their fingers in their ears.

Samplingpong from Jörg Niehage is an interactive sound installation simply placed on a table. Different objects that create sounds can be triggered by moving with a top-projected curser over their position. Short sound loops of the objects are played and can be combined by accessing several objects one after the other.

And finally, the well known but still impressive reactable. The tangible tabletop interface for the collaborative electronic music instrument was one of the main visitor attractions in the CyberArts exhibition. In addition to their tangible input devices, they integrated basic multi-touch functionality into the reacTIVision software that allows changing parameters of detected objects and play/mute sound sources.

The tracking is very stable and accurate enough to even access small interface element, really good job! Unfortunately, the team had bad luck during their “Digital Musics in Concert” performance, something in their synthesizer software went wrong and resulted in an ear-killing end of the show.

Hybrid Ego (Kunstuniversität Linz)

Together with the University of Tokyo, the campus showed around 25 projects from the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies (III), Graduate School of Information Science and Technology and Graduate School of Engineering. The topics of the projects were all dealing with a kind of altered ego by the technologies.

“Optical Camouflage” showed a technology that makes anyone and anything wearing a special cloth seem to be transparent. As the retro-reflective material reflects light precisely according to the angle of incidence, an image projected onto the material merges the projected image with the background and viewers at specific location perceive a transparent material. Produces also very nice results if you take a picture with a flash.

“structured creature” is a flexible space structure that wriggles slowly, repeating rising and collapsing. The main part is made of a material that has a memory about its initial state. This structure is called “tensegrity”, which is invented by Buckminster Fuller in 1950’s. By changing the tension of this material, the linked tensional components act as artificial muscles and hold the structure together until it totally loses its tension and collapses.

And then, of course, another interactive table, this time the Tablescape Plus. Tiny screens placed upright on the table are used to interact with the table, by changing their position, users can create small scenarios. For example, when the screens are placed side-by-side, the images on the respective screens react to one another. When the user puts the screen beside a bench, the character image moves to sit on it.

Event, Concerts & Performances

Of course there have been lots of different things going on at night, enough performances and events to keep you awake!

Zachary Lieberman and Theo Watson, originators of openFrameworks, an open source, C++ toolkit for artists and creative technologists, were transforming the 1st floor of the Brucknerhaus into an experimental laboratory: the OF lab. A bunch of programmers joint to work on small projects inspired by 4 word inputs from other festival visitors that were produced during the festival. Very nice work in progress with lots of innovative ideas! Also the setting inside the Brucknerhaus was cool!

Robert Praxmarer and Reinhold Bidner from the artist collective 1n0ut are working on video and interactive art projects. They were part of the “Sonorous Embodiment” concert in the Brucknerhaus, doing a visualization of Edgar Varése’s “Amèriques” performed by Bruckner Orchester Linz / Dennis Russell Davies. This was definitely one of the better concert visualizations I’ve seen recently! I liked the visual style and also the combination of music and visuals seemed to work out for me.

So if you should have missed Ars Electronica Festival 2008, come to Linz next year!