Riders Have Spoken

Riders Have Spoken Replay Demo at Creator Workshop

2009-03-19T20:03:00.009Z

Members of the Creator Workshop exploring the Riders Have Spoken Replay Tom, Ben, Helen, Sally Jane and Giles. Alan and Duncan inside a sphere with Adrian looking on. Alan inside another sphere. Adrian shows Neil the Rider Spoke Replay. Set up of the 3D display powerwall and motion capture cameras Stephane moving inside the Replay
Videos from the Rider Spoke Replay

Ideas for Riders Have Spoken Immersive Environment Replay

2008-12-17T14:46:00.012Z

The following images are ideas for different layer scenes in the Riders Have Spoken replay environment. The layer creates different ways of using the archive, Layer One allows the viewer to interact with the shphere shapes discovering there sound files and as a sound installation. Layer Two provides a transitory stage where the viewer experiences fragments of photographic reality and drawn perspective spaces the music will remind players of the original of cycling with the music playing searching for the next place to hide. Layer Three is the archive layer where the viewer can listen to all the archive material or leave a message of their own.
LAYER ONE
The Intial scene is a drawn room with floating spheres. Came from bike wheels and heads and inside heads.....
Drawn space came from earlier experiments showing too much detail closing down the space and also influenced by Blast Theorys graphic interface, made me think of the painting of Philip Guston. So the first space white and black visually simple with a babble of voices from the archive which if you get nearer to a sphere you would hear clearer.
LAYER TWO
If you choose to bury your head in the sphere you enter another layer this space is also drawn but with some photographic fragments. The sound in all these spaces is the music Blast Theory has us riding along with the music by blanket.
LAYER THREE
Reached through traveling through to the vanishing point of layer two or for example down a pothole. These spaces would be the archive rooms. The idea would be the user could click on the recording number on the walls to hear the recorded voice.Other archive rooms would include the user being able to leave an answer to one of Blast Theorys questions and write a message on the wall.

Brighton Visit for Rider Spoke Monday 24th November 2008

2008-12-17T14:28:00.004Z

Notes: finally get to have a go at Rider Spoke in Brighton around the Portslade area.
Weather was dry but really chilly, borrowed a bike from Blast Theory, liked the mike and earphone set up, very unobtrusive, realised once I started bike was to low for me so it was a bit uncomfortable to cycle. Didn't cycle very far followed map that showed where others had 'hidden'. Funny thing was that the cycling seemed the least important thing of the whole event. Music by Blanket really atmospheric fitted well with the dramatic sunset, made me feel outside of everyday as did the questions. Wasn't sure how much I was acting differently to someone who hadn't heard stuff from archive, found it problem to find places where I felt I could leave messages, felt a bit self-conscious answering some the questions, but some I found I gave more info than I meant getting really caught up in the moment, really forgot to notice world around me at those moments eg not noticing car trying to park where I had stopped to record. I think the cold meant the battery on my screen started beeping saying it was running low so I didn't listen to as many recording as maybe I would like. Geographical Place became less important than head space and discovering others head space. Overall I found the experience intimate, cold, lonely, melancholy.

Ghost Bikes

2008-10-07T18:28:00.001+01:00

Just read about this site with google earth map marking deaths of people on bikes.
http://www.ghostbikes.org/

University of Reading Workshop cont Power Wall demos

2008-09-15T01:45:00.010+01:00

Below are images and video clips from demos using the power wall. The images look a bit blurred as they are for viewing in stereo. We had a good discussion and lots of helpful responses to the demos suggesting what to do next, unfortunatly my camera battery ran out half way so I didn't record the discussion.

From my note book, sound of the voices were really powerful and made the navigation much more intuitive. Really enjoyed seeing feltip drawings mapped on the objects will use this more. Also maps made from bike tracks worked well.

People often got lost navigating request for a panic button to restore oringnal/starting view point. I really enjoyed the physicality of sticking your head in the sphere and being immersed in the sound of one voice and the cacophony slowly growing as you moved outside it.

Discussion about route planing Duncan was concerned that the viewer need to have some route /path to follow, what form would it take could it be done using rankings, could the view rank the sound. Navigation needs to be slower design moments where view would want to dwell in one place. Fixed paths with selected viewpoints could be followed?Personally I like randomness too....

Could there be some kind of task the viewer must achieve, detection, discovery. What controls limits do we set. How much sense should it make. As Jonathan said " they are all design choices" We want to let the view write virtual graffiti on the wall, leaving their mark, they could also leave a recording?

The use of layering is important the idea of finding your in a layer you didn't know exsited. The layers could move from minimal info for the view to being able to access the whole archive. I thought the three could be abstract soundscape, journey through image scape and a landscape created by the archive data. Alan mention 3D GPS maping would like to find out more. Could put links to web based stuff Duncan is creating?

University of Reading Workshop cont Exploring Rider Spoke Research in a different context

2008-09-15T01:27:00.004+01:00

Drew When we were in Nottingham I talked with Duncan and Alan about their interest in documenting the experiences of cyclists that was our stake in this project there’s been some developments which might open doors for some new stuff With Future Sonic we’ve started a campaign to have a car free day in Manchester based on the Bogotá model where they shut 70 miles of road and 1.5million people came to the city

Gabriella Exeter is having a carfree day

Drew Really are you shutting all the streets? There’s been one of sorts in Manchester since 1999 but it was very minimal just handing round a few leaflets and closing down one road that no one goes down anyway basically after the Olympics the Uk cycle team is based in Manchester so we can say with only a slight smirk that Manchester is the centre of the cycling world wide and also they are introducing the congestion charge so transport is front page news at the moment in Manchester

Gabriella one thing I grew up with in Italy in the 1970s because of the economic crisis as a scheme called the alternative number plate scheme on alternative Sundays if the car number plate ended odd or even you could not enter the city that Sunday

Kate What happens if you have two cars?

Gabriella as you can imagine a lot of Italians would have cars with alternate number plates or just the number plates!

Drew Its very ambitious and would cost the council hundreds of pounds in principal but we are having a good shot at doing it we would like to trial things that could be introduced such as park and cycle schemes for example
Let me introduce Chris he is interested in the urban experience and urban planning at our Lab in Lancaster there is a lot of interest in urban design, technology and everyday creativity. We are going to apply to the EPSRC for a bit of pump priming money to work around the car free day so basically the aim is to do some evaluation before during and after and we were also talking about some longer memory stuff when people have had time to absorb and reflect on the experience So that creates a space to do lots of stuff, artistic interventions, one thing we'll be doing is putting a call out for artists people like the Royal Society Arts are interested in partnering they have 27000 members a lot of them in Manchester interested in social change through art a small fraction of them do autonomous interventions in streets, there’s this scheme called neighbours day where you can apply for a £200 pound grant to come into the city and have a picnic with your neighbours. Clearly there is opportunities to do research stuff how could some of the technologies developed be used to document cyclists experiences and inform urban planning. Cabe are also pitching to a number of cities to develop climate change awareness festivals if Manchester support it that would happen a few weeks after the car free festival and if any documentation from the car free day could be processed in time Cabe would be very interested in using it they are planning to work with about 200 schools so there would an opportunity to get lots of people involved.
We are very interested in have a conversation about this whether its of interest to people here to take this work into this other context and I do include Blast Theory here you know there’s a big space for artistic work, if it went through it’s a good argument to take to fenders also with a specific focus on replay of documentation could a power wall or cave be useful for this kind of context maybe not trying to be immersive but show the information in an accessible way

Gabriella mentioned UCL has done a lot of works around Euston Station to inform urban planning there is also a history of using CAVE for urban planning

Chris yes there has been work done at the Virtual environments lab at the University of Salford using the CAVE mapping the Blackcountry Leon is also very interested in that participatory process so there’s another layer of potential there involving cyclists and to be part of the decision making process

Gabriella I’m quite interested in the idea of cycling as a performance one of the things that emerged from the Rider spoke questionnaires was that people were interested in taking part because of the performative nature of the event they were describing themselves as characters in a movie they were performers on the bike and Rider Spoke created a frame for that

Alan somewhere there was an entire cycling culture group set up in the 1990s lots of people were interested in cycling performance in the 19th and turn of the 20 century lots of people were obsessed with uni cyclists etc

Julianne Blast Theory have been very interested in location based performance using the bicycle to move through that space

Gabrielle riding a bike gives you a very different mapping of the city compared to walking

Julianne There’s a cycling work in the Folkestone triennial that uses GPS to trigger audio it’s the most hilarious work because you have these huge speaker strapped onto the handle bars of the bike so as you cycle your knees hit the speakers then there’s the kit on the back that weighs about 10 kilos it was so clunky and because you were so laden with technology and you had this noise blaring out of the speaker you became an amusement for the people of Folkestone. SO that became quite performative

Drew I think the idea of performance is very relevant if your doing an event your closing the streets you want to alter people’s perception experiences of the street.

Created in collaboration between Folkestone Academy year 7 pupils and Kaffe Matthews, the Marvelo project is a sound collage made for bicycles to be performed by visitors to the Triennial. The Marvelo group explored routes of Folkestone, mapping personal histories within the context of the town. New sound pieces have been scored from their stories and encounters and from marking and drawing on local maps, all of which replace notes written on a traditional musical stave. The resulting 'opera' is to be experienced by cycling on specially adapted bikes housing a GPS tracking system, computer and two speakers. The cycling participants become performers of the opera and passers-by accidental audience members.

Notes from Rider Spoke Workshop 11.09.08 University of Reading AM

2008-09-15T00:35:00.007+01:00

Present at the workshop were Adrian, Kate, Gabriella, Julianne, Jonathan, Duncan, Alan, Drew and Chris.

We started with an update from Gabriella, Jonathan and Duncan whose brief was to create an archive of Rider Spoke for research purposes. Gabriella explained that she decided to base her work on an archive for museums and other interactive centres such as ZKM Ars electronica Gabriella consulted with them to find out what would be the optimum requirements for an archive for researchers and users would be and compiled the list below which she circulated to the Rider Spoke research group.(see next post below)

Gabriella I showed the list to Peter Hulton (Exeter Digital Archives) one of the largest collections of performance archives in the UK he has been documenting performance for 30years through various means primarily video she said she showed him the list, he smiled a lot and said that it was completely unusable for the point of a user because there is too much information what you need are paths to allow the user to get a sense of an original experience, however he said first of all archives should declare themselves in other words they should not pretend to be neutral ‘this was the event’.. no, they should say this was the event as seen by me Gabriella Giannachi scholar in performance studies as opposed to a scholar in management systems or computer science etc. You also need to declare the kind of budget you have to create the archive, it should allow for seeing different things at the same time then he drew a sort of bicycle or atomic structure and he drew two or three of them at the same time where the centre should not be a core about the work but something you can navigate from, and Kate also came up with similar looking structures, in my final consultation with Clare ....? from the Watershed who said I should talk to Angela Piccini who works at Bristol university on archiving performance work they had over the last 10 years used a similar visual model for navigation this was for something webased so that’s were I got to, then we had a meeting in London .

Jonathan So on Monday Gabriella myself and Alan met at the British Library and took on board the initial plan that Gabriella had suggested….. the need to share audio and video files. Gabriella also mentioned that she had had some feedback from Matt he suggested different paths that could be followed.
Our idea of a kind of intelligent documentation is currently at a stage of tagging up, meta tagging, the content of the archive so we are currently looking at tagging the video files, tagging the cyclist journeys.

Gabriella Showing an example website http://www.veogeo.com/
She said when she spoke to Matt about paths, overlaying a series of maps, you could experience it through the overlay and each map would tell you something different about the journey and you navigate these maps and create further meanings. The video shows one of the cyclist’s journey and a graphic of the journey laid over a google earth map with a marker representing the person on the bike. As you move the marker round the journey the video camera shows the driver view of the route.
We decided that we would work with Peter’s ethnography’s in order to refine the amount of material we have to deal with. We decided to work with three ethnography’s with video, which adds to the documentation. So we are working with ethnography’s of 2 men and 1 women with very different behaviours with the game, so by using different layers over each other we can see the similarities and differences by creating a set of filters, or that a certain age group did a certain thing, so the journeys will probably be in different colours that can be read separately or together, you could move backwards and forwards and discover the tags.

Jonathan, A cyclist journey is an hour in Rider Spoke, I was thinking about having a set of tags to segment it every 3mins. There is a basic 3-part structure to the Rider Spoke event the induction, the journey and some kind of close down.

Gabriella we also decided we would come from different disciplines e.g. Jonathan would create tags from his disciplines perspective and I would create tags from mine. Which would probably lead to the tags being less structured than every 3mins.

Jonathan yes a lot will depend on the action.

Duncan what format the tags would take, would it be text appearing as you roll over the map, how many simultaneous bubbles would you have? If you have too many bubbles it could be distracting from the map.

Gabriella Possibly you could have one visualisation where you see all the bubbles, and you could see differences between myself and Jonathan, I might put 15 tags in one minute if it was a fantastic minute that tells me many different things about the performance from my disciplinary point of view.

Jonathan This raises the issue of how structured it is, whether one uses an ontology and a system to segment it or whether the archive declares itself for want of a better phrase with user generated tags, the clustering of tags and granularity of detail.

Gabriella The other thing we discussed was what you would see if you do see the video is not the players experience but is Peter seeing the players experience. We should declare that that what we see here is Peters, the ethnographers, vision of Rider Spoke so from my point of view of performance studies it would be very interesting to have some one to interview Peter and add his tags. So you have the ethnographers report the ethnographers documents the actual rides but then you could take the video out and just listen to the sound and then you would get closer to what somebody experienced in terms of replay. So you have different possibilities of visualising different perspectives of Rider Spoke. We also wondered whether the user generated stuff could go as far as a blog under each tag allowing further comments but then we decided it could create an overload of information. Also with all those different layers you could navigate through the archive.

Adrian How would you do that, what sort of access to the archive?

Jonathan With the tags

Adrian Is there some kind of control to the archive that could allow us access to the data?

Jonathan How do you mean in terms of access points?

Adrian Yeah different access points to be able to put queries into the data base.

Gabriella Because Matt doesn’t want it public, so from our point of view as a prototype it would depend on Duncan giving you access to the data base on the web.

Adrian One of the thing we were discussing was thee idea of being able to access the archive without necessarily knowing what the archive data is in a sense to be able to hard code it into our application.

Gabriella One thing that may be interesting is that you have this map overlayed with a similar journey by Kate in the CAVE so you’re including a replay of a journey that never existed, pure simulation on top of the ethnographers reading of the original player journey. Which would bring up all sorts unexpected meanings and coincidences. Ideally you should be able to mash up this different things.

Julianne What criteria are you using to select the journeys?

Gabriella We are using the ethnographies by Peter they have very idiosyncratic different and typical behaviours it is interesting behaviour

Drew was all focused on the ethnography or could it be more generalised to include having cameras on all the users?

Gabriella yes we are using what we have, we don’t have any players that used there own cameras. Ideally you would insert the documentation within the experience. One thing we talked with Julianne about was in a sense this archive starts after the work where as in a sense the archive should start before the work.We start with the ethnography, as we don’t have many other forms of documentation. If Blast Theory were thinking of doing Rider Spoke again we could look in to generating more.

Julianne It would probably be really useful to do it again based on what you’ve been working on so far…..we are going to do it in Budapest that’s in October and were also doing a mini version at Port Slade in October 08.

Jonathan so we are doing the ethnography tagging the video pulling in a few audio files so lots of interesting representational issues tags how many tags what kind of tags vocabularies user generated material a few other issues were with the sharing and the accesses of the archive and for research purposes what actions are allowed are they allowed to edit annotate etc

Kate Would it be a website?

Gabriella I think that’s what we are working with at the moment but this is just to create the basic archive but then the issue of replay…we were talking earlier about the issue of using ‘Replay Tools’ Duncan….to use the google maps within ‘Replay’ and see if that works and if not …..the ‘Replay Tools are something that MRL has developed. Which allow you to create these complex juxtapositions of visual files sound files very interesting from a performance documentation point of view ….I think Steve hoped we might use it ….

Alan It’s free to down load its quite window heavy …..Its in development it’s probably quicker to go another route

Duncan it might be the case to have it as the underlying mechanism …

Gabriella Yes we talked about not reinventing the wheel.One thing that is important to Blast Theory and to me is that one must never confuse the viewer that they are witnessing anything of the original or that what they see is the artwork one must always declare this is an archive. So that the original work is not exploded into the archive in a way it shouldn’t be

Julianne there is a difference between it being a sort of documentation of the work and somehow trying to replicate the experience So do you think it’s a combination of both or do you think they are quite separate?

Gabriella good documentation wil,l to some extent, attempt to replay or reconstruct an original, but this is true for any documentation, performance work or indeed a lot of art work. A lot of conceptual work is only really graspable through its documentation, for example the art work consists of someone being shot at, you only see it in its documentation. To then talk about replay is one step away from that, but the relationship between the artwork the documentation and now the replay is something that has been written about and practiced a lot at least since the 60s where you no longer have original scripts that allow you to restage plays. In this case your dealing with the experience of every player being completely subjective and unique so you have to declare which player you choose
We came to the conclusion you are never replaying the original quite
It is a reconstruction of the event whatever that might be
But you can skirt around it in that wheel way and the more layers you have may be you see something maybe not

And the pleasure is trying to understand what happened through all these layers, it’s like a detective story

Kate I can see several links in the way you’ve been thinking about the archive and how we’ve been developing our ideas. For me there have been two strands developing, the idea of using Second Life as a site for replay and creating an immersive virtual model. We have also been thinking about the use of tags and how they exist as 3d objects, been playing around with text, and also having problems with the amount of material, how do we choose what to use. I’ve thought about using different focus points from looking at satellite image using google earth maps to using pot holes cracks and bike tread tracks

Jonathan Is there one aspect of the journey that would lend itself to Second Life representation? Is there one time point on the journey that might lend itself to a blow up?

Kate Yes one of the ideas was to have holes you could fall into a pothole or drain and end up in a totally abstract space, which could be the sound of someone talking. It was the idea that many of the recordings have a certain drama, seem a step away from everyday life, talking about something sad, travelling through that. Then in other environments there would be all 300 sound files so depending on your position you could hear a cacophony of voices or get really close to one voice that fills the soundscape. This was thinking about how to contrast the public and the private part of Rider Spoke.
I the try out model the sounds are contained in dark blobs in a very plain space your imagination creates the visual environment. I quite often chose recording with wind, seagulls in the background, breathlessness to help build the sounds cape.

Gabriella A colleague of mine did something similar in Second Life when you approached an object your avatar would be animated and you would start to dance this extraordinary duet I remember feeling really peculiar as you build up an sort of identity with you avatar your control is taken away you become part of something else
When I listened to Rider Spoke not so much when I cycled but when I just listened I felt compelled that I had to sit through this endless extremely emotional confessions it felt like I was trapped inside this other persons emotional structure so much so that everyone I know had to stop listening at some point finding it too much.

Kate So I’m torn between the idea of simulated replay in Second Life using photos and maps from google earth making it highly visual but also really liking the idea of a soundscape where the voices are accesses by proximity and the visuals are in your imagination.Also we keep discussing the sort of hardware we could use for example using a real bike or handle bars. I would like the navigation to be as intuitive and as physical as we could get it.

Gabriella we had discussed navigating through sounds at an earlier meeting my experience of sound had not be that great in CAVE

Adrian the demo we have prepared using the powerwall was working well and the sound gave a real sense of space. It is really important to get the tracking and the positioning set up accurately.

Gabriella the only successful one she had experienced was Corolla where you move and you hear the bees, I heard that it was harder to use words but may be the systems have changed now?

Kate bringing the archive element into the replay through the use of layers, the idea of being able to mine down through the virtual model, so the top surface level might be minimal but you would have the option to dig deeper and accesses much more of the archive material. How do we create a journey or give the participant the choice that they may go a bit further into the model?

Alan using the rankings that had already been done to construct the layers so the clips became more successful the deeper you were prepared to go into the archive model.

Kate Yes the idea that Rider Spoke gave you commands as pointed out by Gabriella, to move, to pause, to listen, to speak, to take those commands as the starting point and use the questions that Blast Theory gave the participants. Some responses let you know the question in their answers but others don’t, you could have those at the start so it creates that friction of interest

Jonathan it does raise the issue about interpretation it all comes up with the representation of the archive whose interpreting the archive

Gabriella well it can’t be neutral so it must be declared Matt was interested in letting the riders grade the responses

Chris said the idea of whose perspective, of sound and of the visual I wonder and I realise this is very difficult to do, but what about the other senses of smell, touch and taste?

Alan I guess there are two ways you can represent the story being told or the environment they are telling it in. Because there are two or three things going on at once here being asked to do something the persons experience and the story that’s created of the whole thing it creates this bizarre space with all this different perspectives

Kate We did think about some other sensory material we discussed whether the participant in the virtual space could leave a fingerprint or write some sort of virtual graffiti on the wall of the model.
Adrian they could also leave an audio message.

Kate We still don’t know whether to include a bike reflecting Matts desire to keep away from Jeffery Shaw’s territory so I’ve gone away from that idea but if you were on a bike you would get a very physical sensory experience.

Chris Smell would really be able to transport you to another environment for example the smell of a meadow etc

Adrian Smells are quite hard to contain and are also expensive to work with its easy to work with one smell but to work with a range of smell brings up a lot of issues

Alan asked would you have multiple participants or just one.

Adrian said well in the CAVE you really only have one because of the corners you get distortions if your not the person wearing the tracking device. This is less of a problem with the powerwall.

Alan something that came out of Rider Spoke was that it was very isolating for the participant

Kate Like a two wheeled confessional

Alan Yes

Adrian yes well ideally the cave is a solo activity really …

Alan said if there were 3or 4 people in with you the feelings would be less in tense your more likely to put barriers up if invited to participate.The other stuff that has recently be release by the lab is Bio sensing stuff so there are videos of the way people saw the world

Gabriella is it in Rider Spoke

Alan Yes

Gabriella Do you think it would be better using those than Peters?

Alan Peters is good because he’s asking questions too

Gabriella ok

Alan You see the riders face

Drew so you also said there’s some bio data?

Gabriella So it might be interesting to use 2 by Peter and one with bio data

Alan I have to find out if they give permission to let anyone except the lab see it

Drew A fruitful way to look at this could be what could we do if we did do this again? I guess for this project it is time limited, but its only a pilot project isn’t it I don’t see any reason why there could not be valid outcomes based on it being staged again using biodata getting permissions that would seem to me to be a good starting point etc

Kate So would there be a camera on the wheel of the bike for example

Alan We did have that but it was too dark

It’s interesting it brings allsorts of issues up

Gabriella in another project I decided I would take a photo every time I received an sms message but then I had to make the decision of what to photo, where I’m looking, the prettiest/ ugliest etc So whose gaze are we using when we rerun Rider Spoke?

Drew asked what is the aim of this? Is it for audiences is it for researchers the answer to the question would determine whose gaze views to use

Gabriella I don’t think the project has stated what the overall aim is we are all coming at it from different perspectives from my perspective it is to create something which allows me as a scholar to see the work even if I missed it originally so for my students people at ZKM or people in 30 years time and I know this issue is hugely topical at the moment in ZKM in particular are trying to reconstruct for archival purposes works which are only 20 or 30 years old and they can’t because the artist can’t remember how they did it and they are desperate and investing a lot of money into this problem how do you document or archive interactive which is distributed and takes place over a long period of time where the experience is subjective so for me that’s my agenda

Jonathan From my perspective I can tell you what I think or thought I was doing is making it available to two audiences there’s a research audience primarily performance studies but also making it accessible other researchers and the other audience is for previous players to come back and replay the experience Matt has said that some participants commented that they only got to listen to a small selection of audio files when they took part and would like to go back and hear more, and annotate them, and discuss there experiences Every thing we are talking about at the moment fits with those two audiences for me

Kate We are interested in both side there’s the creative layer, the archive but also could we draw people in who never experienced Rider Spoke before not researchers but people fresh to the whole thing?

Drew so there is a third audience seeing it almost as a new piece?

Gabriella Not as a new piece for Blast Theory but as a new piece of documentation

Drew Yes

Gabriella If the archive is not designed by Blast Theory its not Blast Theory’s work

Well there isn’t one yet but they might involved at some point?

Kate I don’t see why they archive and the replay have to be separate

Gabriella Some artists are very possessive about their archives others let others into them and let others do as they wish

Julianne I think from Blast Theory’s perspective because of our relationship with MRL making the material available for research it has certainly raised issues for us in terms of how we deal with archive and documentation of an event because generally it happens afterwards to a greater degree especially the more complex archiving process. I think a key issue from this project is that we don’t have permission from the audience to use their material which is something I think we will address in future events and make the audience aware their answers and responses could be used for those purposes, but then how would that change what they might say its an interesting One thing that I’m particularly interested in which doesn’t seem to have come up through the study are issues of consent, privacy and I would be interested in talking more about that is that a separate project that could evolve out of this or is it relevant to your research.

Who owns the stuff?

Julianne Yes what is privacy how does it challenge privacy who is the author? As Gabriella has talked about its very much you have to declare the archive, then where or who is the author, does authorship matter in this case? Perhaps there are other questions that we can tease out later

Gabriella Research archive that declares itself as an archive, there the author does matter obviously people are going to much more interested reading what Matt says in 20years time than what I said about it probably. To simply merge our voices given how many disciplines we have around the table I can imagine somebody would be interested in seeing what does someone in HCI say and what does someone in art versus someone in management say, if you merge all the voices you loose that

Drew You’ve also got the academic authorship you’ve also got the IP the artistic work as an entity in its own right and the extent to which the cyclists as authors Blast Theory become the authors in some sense

Alan Blast Theory have created the structure the bones but not the voices so although there might be some input the people have read that and put there own input on it so I guess they are the authors of that work where as the event is slightly different Its like me writing a review of a painting

Gabriella where this is where we talked about layer where you could have the Blast Theory Structure Layer which allows you to have their questions then you could have overlayered the input they gave the journey they took the ethnographers input which is the videoing of the journey in the structure Blast Theory created and you can separate them so that from a declaring yourself point of view Now obviously permission is a separate matter you should have permission from those replayers if this was a public archive

Adrian You can’t really separated it like that because when the data has gone from the collected messages Blast Theory would have edited the material you two have gone through the data, each level the data gets filtered so you don’t get the distinct views

Gabriella so what you have to say for example is that in the archive we use 360 data selected by Kate

Kate I choose ones where they didn’t say there names

Julianne and Blast Theory have been very selective about what they have kept because it’s somehow what they want to make Rider Spoke an artwork.

Kate Yes and the questions and the way they are asked are so particular it has a lot of control of the audience’s responses

Alan don’t forget everything is there, there are thousands of things that aren’t ranked

Adrian so actually everything is in the archive?

Gabriella In performance studies, not in new media which has a different approach, in performance studies you sit down with the artist and ask what they want to see so they might say I want this move with my shoulder that I learnt in Kerala etc So we film it in that way so that is one kind of archive but that in itself is You can use part of that performative knowledge with Blast Theory’s work the induction part is very performative talking to people in a very prepared way not improvising so that is quite a theatrical moment which then goes into a more new media type of work which is subjective where it is the player that creates the content or there are bystanders that just happen to be there particularly with the voyeur question your looking at what the player sees of course you can never get permission from that. So in other words when your talking for instance at ZKM there are different kinds of interactive works and Blast theory’s work is one of the most complex of all to archive because it’s a hybrid its not just an interaction it uses performance, its not just a game

Julianne also because it is so dispersed and how do you capture that

Gabriella the question of why the choice of Blast Theory is not only because they work with MRL but also because if we can solve those questions then we can solve those problems then we can solve lots of problems of the management of information in general.

Kate Going back to what Gabriella said about how you would start a certain kind of archive the thing that’s odd about this research is that Matt has said he’s happy for us to do as we will as long as its not public facing so Blast Theory haven’t let us know what they wish to keep as an archive

Gabriella they want to see what we do

Kate Yes it is a bit like being in one of their games

Gabriella yes but it is a prototype we are in a very privileged position, if you were doing the real thing you might not discover anything new because your so busy trying to do what you have to do in the time and the money. It’s a good platform to explore.

Notes on the creation of an archive for Rider Spoke By G. Giannachi

2008-09-15T00:21:00.005+01:00

Our task is the construction of a research archive that could be shared by multiple researchers from different backgrounds.

Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007) is a mobile interactive performance work for cyclists. Participants explore a city on cycles and engage in a game of hide and seek in which they record and hide personal stories at chosen locations and then find and listen to others’ stories in turn. Rider Spoke has so far been performed three times – at the Barbican in London in 2007 and subsequently in Athens and Brighton in 2008. More than 700 participants have taken part in these performances and all of their audio files and associated interactions have been captured. There is also a set of video recordings of participants taking part and an initial project documentary video.

As the most likely users of an archive of a Blast Theory work are festival organisers and museum curators, I researched the kind of data required by archivists at ZKM, Ars Electronica, and V2. This led me to the following list of metadata for a possible REPLAY archive design to support research for Rider Spoke.

TITLE

PRACTITIONER
bio
PARTNER
Bio

VENUE
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
ADDITIONAL DATES
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS

DESCRIPTION
TYPE (e.g., interactive, hybrid)

ARTIST VIDEO
RELEVANT PROGRAMMES (hardware, software, applications, operating system)
EXAMPLES OF USER INTERACTION (self-documentations generated by users and documentations generated by ethnographers, performance studies academics and professional photographers/filmmakers/videomakers)
EXAMPLES OF LOGS
EXAMPLES OF MAPS
VIDEO RECORDINGS
AUDIO RECORDINGS

(Physiological Data)

DIAGRAMS
TRANSCRIPTS
(googlemaps)
GPS data
R&D PROCESS
IMPLEMENTATION FINDINGS

EVALUATION
PRINCIPAL REVIEWS
RELEVANT ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
INTERVIEWS

DOCUMENTS
Storyboards
Materials given to players
Materials given to operators
BLAST THEORY IMAGES
USER GENERATED REVIEWS/BLOGS/IMAGES/VIDEOS

FUNDERER
SPONSORS

KEYWORDS
USER GENERATED KEYWORDS
COPYRIGHT
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESTAGING
Search facilities
Tags linking all the above

I showed these data to the Creator team, Peter Tolmie (MRL ethnographer) and Peter Hulton (Exeter Digital Archives) and had the following feedback.

Peter Tolmie felt that although the list seemed quite exhaustive, it is only by researching the work that we will know what should ultimately go into such as archive.

Peter Hulton felt the piece was a very good model to research new archiving techniques as it is in many ways un-archivable. His specific feedback was as follows:

Archives should not pretend neutrality but declare themselves. They should state:
Point of view, i.e., they should incorporate the theory or conceptual framework that has generated them
As they can never match an original event, they should be structured as satellites to it. Each satellite should determine its own approach and declare it.
Satellites should be distinct from one another
Archives should disclose tools, methodologies and intent of documentation. For example a still photo is its own phenomenon and can never equal the original event.
Archives should be living archives and incorporate the past into the present into the future.
Viewers of archives are echoes of the original event and should be able to roam freely within the documentation and create their own trajectories of interpretation.

At the top of this post is a model of the satellite archival system we discussed.

More specifically Peter Hulton suggested that we looked at 6 billion others (http://www.6billionothers.org/index_en.php) as a model to document participants’ statements about their experience after the event by means of a simple 10 minute interview, framing head only, talking straight to camera. These could then be juxtaposed against ethnographies, documentations and other records.

These could be setup in a more immersive environment generating an installation. Navigating through the display may allow viewers to see an enlarged moving image of a given participant on a second wall. Participants could then listen to that participant’s answers while watching their journey replayed in the installation. New questions could be devised for the archive user asking them, for instance, whether they believed the participant’s answers were truthful; how they felt about it or why they thought a participant may have chosen a particular site to make a confession. Participants may also be asked to rate the effectiveness of the replayed journey and to predict the behaviour of participants by stating what they think someone might for instance answer to the question on a party that went a bit mad. Finally participants might be asked to make their own confessions in the aftermath of listening to the ‘original’ ones.

In terms of the overall archive structure, given the data available and the museum/festival requirements for metadata, a possible initial design for a Rider Spoke research archive may be as follows (images are just indicative):

When I showed the list of metadata to Matt Adams (Blast Theory) he noted:

It’s important that archives declare their own rationale also in terms of costs and technologies, i.e. archives should indicate their own constraints
It would be interesting to include a series of drawings of various interface possibilities; whiteboard photos; documents pertaining to the structure of the work; drafts of questions that show refinement (particularly showing how poetic sentences ere refined in terms of usability)

This would suggest a reconfiguration of the metadata as indicated beneath:

Development
R&D PROCESS
RELEVANT PROGRAMMES (hardware, software, applications, operating system)
DOCUMENTS
Drawings
Whiteboard photos
Storyboards
Questions drafts
DIAGRAMS
IMPLEMENTATION
GPS data
FINDINGS

Interface/HCI
EXAMPLES OF USER INTERACTION
VIDEO RECORDINGS
AUDIO RECORDINGS
(Physiological Data)
EXAMPLES OF LOGS
TRANSCRIPTS
EXAMPLES OF MAPS
Venue
VENUE
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
ADDITIONAL DATES
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
Users/blogs
USER GENERATED REVIEWS/BLOGS/IMAGES/
VIDEOS
USER GENERATED KEYWORDS
(googlemaps)

Rider Spoke details
TITLE
PRACTITIONER (bio)
PARTNER (Bio)
DESCRIPTION
TYPE (e.g., interactive, hybrid)
FUNDERER
SPONSORS
KEYWORDS
COPYRIGHT
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESTAGING
META-ARCHIVE DECLARATIONS
Orchestration
Materials given to players
Materials given to operators
PHOTOS
Replay and user generated archives
CREATIVE ARCHIVES
For example SL/CAVE archive etc
TRACKING of USE

Ethnography/Documentation
EVALUATION
PRINCIPAL REVIEWS
RELEVANT ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
INTERVIEWS
Artist video
BLAST THEORY VIDEO and IMAGES

Search facilities and tags linking all the above could be included. Windows could be opened simultaneously allowing users to engage with more than one field simultaneously. For example a user might be able to look at the Blast Theory video while also reading an IPerG report. Or, they might be able to scroll down maps while reading a review and listening to some audio recordings.

It is my recommendation that within the satellite structure proposed by Peter Hulton the archive designers identify a series of paths or individual journeys. Subsequent users may identify other paths.

As a set of initial paths that might be interesting to explore could include:

Relationship between question design and participant behaviour
Licence to confess/to cycle – sense of being in a ‘film’, ‘hyperaware’ (see questionnaires) or, in Matt Adam’s words, in a ‘mini pilgrimage’ (frame analysis development)
Rating system
Confessions are like mementos (see Mauss), a ‘gift’ (poison) so listening to logs is ‘contaminating’ = we become witnesses/bearers to the confession that was made (this could be explored through replay)
Palimpsest quality of piece print/tattoo mark/choice of location site; investigation of the semiotics of both actual and digital locations. The only evidence of the presence of others here is in space: identities come to coincide with spaces, and spaces with their WIFI fingerprints. Matt Adams commented on the interesting possibilities emerging from overlaying Cartesian and WIFI landscapes, the former being ‘fixed’, the latter being ‘unstable’. See also piece dynamics orientation/vs/disorientation
Matt Adams suggested an analysis of how participants behaved in the hour – how they fluctuated in and out of answering vs listening – how they relied on clues left by others
Matt Adams suggested a taxonomy of promises – an analysis of the structural order of the sentences in which a promise was made
Relationship between documentation & ethnography and event of art
Evidence of social expansion (including being ‘hyperaware’)

Jonathan Foster also noted that we should be assigning an index term to each audio file (derived from a simple controlled vocabulary based on the question set).

Teaching Fraser Fonda to Ride a Bike

2008-09-10T18:47:00.003+01:00

Having problems with the code to animate my Second Life avatar to ride its bike any thoughts?

This is the code from SL

default
{
state_entry()
{
llSetSitText("Ride");
llSitTarget(<0.6,>, ZERO_ROTATION);
llSetCameraEyeOffset(<-5.0, 0.0, 2.0>);
llSetCameraAtOffset(<3.0,>);
llSetVehicleFlags(-1);
llSetVehicleType(VEHICLE_TYPE_CAR);
llSetVehicleFlags(VEHICLE_FLAG_NO_FLY_UP VEHICLE_FLAG_LIMIT_ROLL_ONLY);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_ANGULAR_DEFLECTION_EFFICIENCY, 0.2);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_LINEAR_DEFLECTION_EFFICIENCY, 0.80);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_ANGULAR_DEFLECTION_TIMESCALE, 0.10);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_LINEAR_DEFLECTION_TIMESCALE, 0.10);

llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_LINEAR_MOTOR_TIMESCALE, 1.0);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_LINEAR_MOTOR_DECAY_TIMESCALE, 0.2);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_TIMESCALE, 0.1);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_ANGULAR_MOTOR_DECAY_TIMESCALE, 0.5);

llSetVehicleVectorParam(VEHICLE_LINEAR_FRICTION_TIMESCALE, <1000.0,>);
llSetVehicleVectorParam(VEHICLE_ANGULAR_FRICTION_TIMESCALE, <10.0,>);

llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_VERTICAL_ATTRACTION_EFFICIENCY, 0.50);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_VERTICAL_ATTRACTION_TIMESCALE, 0.50);

llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_BANKING_EFFICIENCY, 0.99);
llSetVehicleFloatParam(VEHICLE_BANKING_TIMESCALE, 0.01);
}

changed(integer change)
{
if (change & CHANGED_LINK)
{
key agent = llAvatarOnSitTarget();
if (agent)
{
if (agent != llGetOwner())
{
llSay(0, "You aren't the owner");
llUnSit(agent);
llPushObject(agent, <0,0,100>, ZERO_VECTOR, FALSE);
}
else
{
llSetStatus(STATUS_PHYSICS, TRUE);
llRequestPermissions(agent, PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION PERMISSION_TAKE_CONTROLS);
}
}
else
{
llSetStatus(STATUS_PHYSICS, FALSE);
llReleaseControls();
llStopAnimation("motorcycle_sit");
}
}

}

run_time_permissions(integer perm)
{
if (perm)
{
llStartAnimation("motorcycle_sit");
llTakeControls(CONTROL_FWD CONTROL_BACK CONTROL_RIGHT CONTROL_LEFT CONTROL_ROT_RIGHT CONTROL_ROT_LEFT, TRUE, FALSE);
}
}
control(key id, integer level, integer edge)
{ vector angular_motor;

More thoughts and models

2008-09-08T01:16:00.013+01:00

Been trying to make models similar to the Second Life underpass idea using 3Dstudio exporting to VRML, hopefully they will have sound attached.
Keep thinking about question of what or who is the replay for and where my interest sit. I'm interested in the archive as the base for replay. Thinking about Borges story of the Library of Babel, http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html where all books that could be written exist, even a book that would tell you when you are going to die. Thought about how the questions asked led to intimate stories. So started to build a version of the library of babel. Would like to embed sound files into the map. Participate needs to leave a print or mark to trigger sound.

Created some 3d text thinking about sounds in the space. Also asked Adrian if the participant could write a message on the walls while in the cave.....
Borges describes the rooms in the library as hexagonal
Wanted to have some kind of channels shoots you could fall fly cycle through thinking of Alice in Wonderland. Alter perspective. Wanted sound of text which participant falls through.

Based on the bike I made in Second Life heres one made in 3d studio to be exported into vrml.

The texture below is made from a bike tyre track cast in PVA translucent and skin like.

2008-08-07T22:16:00.003+01:00

Saw this today, could imagine this for the replay

Lines of data, as architecture?

2008-08-07T21:28:00.010+01:00

Sydney Nolan drawing.....thinking about different ways of building a data structure. Lines to follow story line, routes, diagrams, information.

Thought about wheel as maze..... Marks from the bike tracks.
Thought about travelling through the data as a tightrope walk, to escape the use of the bicycle.

Thought of bike wheel as wheel of fortune/roulette wheel. Wondered whether a Wii could be hooked up to a bike found this http://gaming.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=11583

Thinking about the fingerprinting that marked the space out used maps from google earth.

Thumb prints bit like gradient lines.

Sketches from Sketchbook

2008-08-07T21:18:00.006+01:00

Tried to think about what the shap the replay could be wanted to think about a link back to the archive. Thought about Tags from the participants recordings, creating the shape of the replay. Thought about taking a route from a map thinking about recordings at the junctions and how tagged words in the recordings could link them.

Kept thinking about this video and the linking of tagged photos.

22nd July 2008 Sykpe conversation notes with Blast Theory, Matt and Julianne in Brighton, Adrian in Reading and Kate in London

2008-07-23T18:26:00.001+01:00

We started the conversation with Adrian describing the equipment available at Reading talking about the Power wall and the CAVE at that point my Skype connection broke so I missed a bit.

Matt The moment you went was when I asked you what your interests are and then you went silent and I was beginning to think that maybe I had upset you!

Kate Hah Hah ….yeah..ok I got involved working with Adrian through using VRML and made some work using the CAVE and 3d modelling working with a composer and a dancer and also through a public art project where he built some 3d text for me for a memorial wall for the Bartonwall project. I also have been doing quite a lot of work in Second Life and been talking with Adrain about trying to integrate the two sides of my interests in virtual worlds the immersive CAVE and the immersion of a online virtual world. So when we read the proposal Steve had written I could see links between the proposal ideas and my own interests. I got all excited about Jeffery Shaws work Legible City, I thought that would be an interesting interface between the body and the virtual world for a replay of two other artists work, so that was some of the stuff that got me excited about working on the project.

Matt Yeah Jeffery Shaws work was something we discussed in the making of Rider Spoke we were very careful not to stray into the same terrain because the work is so well known and that work it’s a wonderful piece we love it, it’s the obvious reference. From our point of view Yes obviously were are very thrilled and excited that people are interested in Rider Spoke and that there are things there of value and interest.. er.. Kate something that I’m sure your aware of is that it is very important for us that our work it is public facing and that engages directly with the general audience we see the creator project providing an obstacle, an opportunity to do something which is more private and therefore providing more room for experimentation, more playful, engaging with the research goal and as such we don’t have very strong feelings about what might be done, the one essential thing for us is that it is not public facing it would all be private for research purposes, then obviously if later down the track if there’s something that we are all excited about or we think should be shown publicly then we would have that discussion a that stage.

Kate Yes that was one of the questions that keep coming up, the idea of it being replayed.
Who were we replaying it for, was it for the people who had already done it or is it for someone who’d never been there?

Matt Exactly and obviously when we come to engage with the project more directly than we are able to at the moment that would be exactly the kind of question that we would want to examine. Our aspiration is that we will make some kind of interactive archival project within the Creator project that would have ultimately have some kind of public showing but that is quite along way down the track and what we are aware of is this is a research project with research goals. Our first priority is to ensure that we fitting in nicely with what the research agenda is and various researchers who are engaged with the research project and what they are hoping to achieve. But you know Kate, you in particular, you are an artist, and I presume your work is made for the general public, how do you feel about engaging on this project under the understanding that it is not going to be public facing?

Kate I don’t think its been an issue for me, I got into it in terms of wanting to find out more about developing a link between different virtual worlds, but also I’m interested in the idea of collaboration as well. So I didn’t see it as a way to get publicity, that’s not how I saw it, so for me it’s not a problem. I have to admit when I read the project I thought, oh god that’s a way I’ve never worked before, working on another artists work, on something that’s so established, especially when we were in the workshop at MRL it felt a bit awkward say things and wondering how it would fit in.

Matt I guess were all in the same boat in that respect aren’t we? It’s a fairly unusual, if not an unprecedented set of collaborators, the breadth of disciplines and institutions that all come together to face particular kinds of research questions, the flip side is that by keeping it private it gives us a lot more freedom for us to follow our own interests and passions

Kate And see what happens …

Matt Exactly we will all learn as we go won’t we……

Kate I’m working in some other collaborative groups I’m interested in the dynamics of working within them I guess that’s one of the main reasons I enjoy it, I don’t feel that it has to serve my ‘art ego’……

Matt Yeah

Kate I’m more curious to explore how to work with all these different strands.

Matt Right

Adrian I think that’s something that applies to the whole creative field certainly its something that the Troubadour Projects have picked up on wanting to measure how we interact with each other.

Julianne My guess is that the first phase is very much about the research, developing the partnerships and how the partners might work together, I see this project very much investigation some of those research questions that are about replaying, remixing and how do you recreate the experience.

Kate One of the things I’m thinking about having read and now heard the questions was what would happen if you were in a virtual environment and asked similar or the same questions would you get the same about of intimacy, because they are really particular the way that they are said you are kind of led to certain sorts of responses.
First I only read the answers when up in Nottingham it seemed strange the things that people told you, how intimate it was, but when I heard the questions I thought oh maybe I would have told you intimate things too…how would that be in a virtual world.

Matt Yes a lot of the focus of Rider Spoke and our work generally is how you establish a context in which people will participate in a meaningful way and I think the idea of being alone on a bicycle at night, almost certainly off the beaten track, quite possibly slightly lost, those things are all critical in terms of what we present and say and I think it would be very interesting to look at that in virtual space. I’m sure it would be very different. Peoples own safety is a very major issue, how to design spaces and peoples own awareness of their safety or lack of it, will determine what they are saying and how they behave.

Julianne Ok, do you think that’s ok, I think Matts nodding his head, do you have any more questions?

Kate Erm… well…. I suppose…as long as its kept within the research group….we can follow where we think we should go……is that right?

Matt Yes I think that’s what I would suggest……yes obviously we are very happy to continue the discussion, but on the other hand I’m very mindful of not wanting to kind of limit you, you both have your own practice, you come from different fields and you’ve both got your own trajectories and styles of working, it feels to me that would provide you the scope to be able to be very free about it. Clearly if you have questions or things you want to discuss I’d be very happy to do that.

Kate Brilliant ok

Matt And hopefully well get to meet each other

Kate Yes I wondered if it maybe part of the research project should be that I never get to meet you at all!

Matt I’m not going to make the next workshop either it’s two days before the start of the Royal Opera House project

Kate Oh yes I heard

Matt So you may joke about it now!

Kate Hah Hah I know….. but it may be the reality!

Meeting with Gabriella in Reading Monday 21st July

2008-07-23T18:08:00.000+01:00

Meet with Gabriella when she visited Reading to look at the CAVE and Powerwall. Discussed what I should ask in the meeting with Blast Theory, Gabriella focused on some really helpful points and questions.
Where do we stand in the project?
What have we got to offer:
Second Life
Power Wall
CAVE

How loyal should the achive be to the original?
What data should be in it?
In terms of the title of project REPLAY what are we replaying?
Is it for the people who have already done Rider Spoke?
Or for a audeince new to the event?
What is the original?

Oberservations the questions prompt the participants in the way they answer.
From discussing the images in Second Life Orientation and Disorientation seemed a good direction to go.
Gabriella told me the idea for the word 'Gift also meaning Poisen in German, she was talking about the need to be able to leave a message not only listen to the messages left by others was important for your sanity! and also created the exchange in the participation. Please clarify if I remember this incorrectly!

Sketches from Second Life

2008-07-21T00:17:00.001+01:00

Some very initial ideas:Second Life could be an interesting place to set up a replay event of Rider Spoke. If we bought an island we could build a city/environment and invite participants to cycle finding audio embedded in objects. The island could be set to only allow participants with an invitation. Its possible to control the light so it could always be dusk. I built a version that was like the box of a cave thinking about the data produced by the finger printing as a journey shape we could follow. Would like to have an immersive version of SL in the CAVE. It would be great if the journey could work in SL on a power wall and in a CAVE.

Thinking of how to show different versions of the data, thinking of the diagrams lief showed us of the fingerprinting positions. Also of the surfaces of the road potholes the city as skin, and the glow of street lights. Underpass and google maps sometimes otherworldly, changes of focus. Cluster points would act as places where the audio would be triggered and a question is answered.

Notes from Phone conversation with Gabriella

2008-07-21T00:00:00.000+01:00

What happens if?
Trace, Autobiography
This was the place someting almost happened but didn't happen.
Interweaving of realities
from the review
"Althougth I was travelling and following the consoles directions as well as paying attention to the traffic there seemed no purpose to my travel.
Actual places my own memories distant voices of absent others became interwined."
Binary choices
Pause Move
Speak Listen
Past Present
Actual Digital
Geographical Fictional
City as skin
"Place of imprints Tatoos and Scars realised by recording or replaying the memories of our past whilst rapidly moving into an uncertain future."
THE MORE YOU ANSWER THE MORE YOU CAN HEAR
Takes place dusk or darkness
Is it possible to mirror what happened. What can an immersive digital environment provide?
Different focus points and additional information creates other dimensions to event performance the possibility of the participant taking away some kind of momento?
From micro to macro. From bumps in road to visuals of the finger print data?
Important to Blast Theory Trust-Surrender, Promise or commit
Respond to a voice, Follow Experience

Gabriella summed up discussion in an email to Steve

Hi Steve

Just had a long chat with Kate and wanted to run by you where we are at thisstage.We'll be using CAVE and attempt to create a street possibly looking like theBarbican tunnel and surroundings. The street will have basic textural detail(gutters, etc). Participants will be on a bike at dusk. Changing qualities oflight will guide them through the streets and coincide with recordings.Participants will also record their own memories and be given a mementoconsisting of someone else's recording when leaving.Kate is going to discuss this with Matt next week but in the meantime it'll bereally good to have your feedback.The idea of using mementos in CAVE was successfully explored by MauriceBenayoun in World Skin http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=16The idea to use a city at dusk to discover traces of something that happened inthe past was successfully explored by Forced Entertainment inhttp://www.forcedentertainment.com/?lid=370We look forward to hearing what you think -best

Liveness and Replay Questions and thoughts from Creator workshop?

2008-07-20T23:38:00.000+01:00

Is it documenting an experience?
Creating a new experience?
Reframe Reuse
Sensory experience
Sound is the bases of the archive.
How do you create a valuable archive
Use new tools to document
How does the context work
What is the prototyp interface?
Cyclists city secrets
Follow someone and describe them
The voice in your ear says think of a party where it all got a bit out of control
Wifi finger prints
A graph built into a mesh
Visualising the map of interaction
People really opened up
Sometimes they took on the role of a journalist
Conversation-Collaboration
Forms of collaborative text
Reuse of the archive
How do others approach the data
City Wide Experiences
Don't try to illustrate the real
Layered, Maps, Sounds, Darkness
What is the level of engagement needed for the participant coming fresh to the work.

Riders Have Spoken: an artist-led practical exploration of recording and replaying live, distributed and interactive experiences

2008-07-20T23:26:00.000+01:00

Team: Steve Benford, Alan Chamberlain, Duncan Rowland (Nottingham); Gabriella Giannachi (Exeter), Matt Adams, Julianne Pierce (Blast Theory), Jonathan Foster (Sheffield), Adrian Haffegee, Kate Allen (Reading)

The relationship between liveness and recording is critical to many creative industries including performance, music, live art, theatre, new media, photography and animation. Live experiences are often recorded, recordings are embedded into live experiences, and there are well established techniques and technologies for doing this. However, the move towards more distributed, mobile, mixed reality, intermedial, interactive, and social experiences challenges the nature of recording and replaying due to:
the highly dispersed nature of participants, being distributed across a mixture of real and virtual spaces
the integration of multiple media with physical places, artefacts and actors
the involvement of the public as active participants who contribute to the content of the experience
the interleaving of different modes of time so that recordings are replayed as part of the live experience
Recording these new experiences in a way that captures their ‘live’ character is extremely difficult. The most common approach is to produce a video documentary. However, such documentaries typically focus on just one or two participants and present a linear and often much shortened account of their experience. We need new ways of recording and replaying complex, non-linear, multi-participant experiences.
The proposed project
We will explore the challenges involved in recording and replaying distributed interactive experiences so as to enable new creative practices and also better support interdisciplinary research. We will address the following questions:
what are the potential creative uses of record and replay and what requirements do they raise?
what are the potential research uses of record and replay and what requirements do they raise?
what technical challenges arise from new forms of record and replay and how might we address them?
what artistic, business and social (e.g., legal and ethical) challenges must be met in this area?
Technical issues include: how do we capture media from mobile and distributed participants? how do we upload and share this? how can we generate appropriate metadata so that multiple recordings can be searched, accessed and inter-related? how can different forms of recording be synchronised, composited and replayed? what new temporal models and mechanisms are required to enable us to flexibly mix recorded and live events within ongoing experiences? and how can ‘intelligent’ documentations and archives be created that can themselves grow and change according to their usage? In turn, artistic, business and social questions include: how can we understand and manage issues of consent, privacy and rights? what new business models will arise from the future uptake of record and replay techniques? And how can different researchers collaborate around common data?
We believe that it is best to explore these issues through a practice-led approach in which an interdisciplinary group of practitioners and researchers undertakes a series of workshops and prototyping activities. We will take an existing artistic project and explore how it might be archived, studied and extended through the use of record and replay. We are therefore an example of an ‘artist-led, reflective’ practice project within the overall Creator framework.Our example work is Rider Spoke from Blast Theory, a mobile interactive performance work for cyclists. Participants explore a city on cycles and engage in a game of hide and seek in which they record and hide personal stories at chosen locations and then find and listen to others’ stories in turn. Rider Spoke has already been performed three times – at the Barbican in London in 2007 and subsequently in Athens and Brighton in 2008. More than 700 participants have taken part in these performances and all of their audio files and associated interactions have been captured. There is also a set of video recordings of participants taking part and an initial project documentary video. Thus, Rider Spoke provides a relatively rich set of existing materials with which we can immediately begin to explore replay and archiving issues in a practical way. However, further performances of Rider Spoke are likely to take place in Autumn 2008, raising the possibility of trying out new forms of recording in practice too.