The most recent state of blogosphere from Technorati reminded me a very different sphere. Let the Force be with us. Oh, may be not.
PS: Last week was not only very busy, but also very turbulent and emotionally strained. I plan to re-start writing postings more or less regularly this week, although it won’t be easy, since I will be traveling three out of five days.
This was a a funny experience, and a bit sad too – a bunch of geeks (I know, I’ve seen them later at Ars debating pretty hardcore tech issues) was struggling with the ticket machine at a tram stop. They couldn’t realize how to buy a ticket! Some of them were from Japan, and some from Spain, but there was also one or two from Germany, so the language per se was not an issue. But the interface was – to the extent that after about five or six minutes of struggles they finally decided to get a ride without paying. Amusing!
Suzanne Lacy (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles) talks about “Terms of Engagement in Visual Art Practices”. This was a nice talk, and good mixture of good, old examples, and new kicks, up to and including Barak Obama who she ventured to present as a contemporary interactive art project.
One of the art projects in the program (Image Fulgurator, by Julius van Bismarck, Golden Nica) showed later how ‘interactive’ the Obama art project is 
But back to AE’08; this is a snapshot from the lecture by Lars Blunck (from the Department of Art History, Technical University Berlin; I didn’t find much about him on the web, and official catalog does not contain his bio). The title, “I mistrust audience participation”, was intended to be provocative for the panel on Interactive Art, but the talk was no so. The lecture was in German, and heavily academic, and basically pointed that ‘participation is not non-problematic’ (and who exactly was saying it is?)
There were a lot of interesting examples, though, exploring various dimensions of participation vs interaction vs contribution vs transformation etc etc. Interesting talk, but a heavy one; you need a written text and a marker to go trough such thickets.
This was an installation (Metamatics?) by Chris Watson (?? – the one I found on the web doesn’t look right; although he looks good, apparently they run a very interesting show at this very moment), and basically consisted of a flexible tube that had to be stretched by two people to establish a visual channel between them.
Another interesting examples was this one-sight mirror toilet that allowed the ‘users’ to see what’s going, yet remaining perfectly invisible for people outside the cabin. An amazing example, yet I lost the point how exactly it was connected to the participation and interaction (it surely is linked with trust).
The blog with the title like mine can not escape the story about Superstruct, a game developed by Jane McGonigal for the Institute for the Future (I don’t know all the details, sometimes they say that that game was develop by their ‘10 year forecasting team’; in any case, GMG was involved heavily, I assume, since the game as described has all the expected features of her gameplays).
The game (quite bombastically) proclaims itself ‘the first massively multilayer forecasting game’, is open to everyone, will officially start from September 22 onward, and will last 6 weeks (and will be closely monitored by yours sincerely, Playing Future blog.
Aleks Krotoski from Guardian found an interesting indie game, Plain Sight.
“The basic rules are simple: You’re a little robot and you start with one point – that’s pretty rubbish, so you want more. To get more points you have to steal them off other players – this you do by killing them with your sword. The more points you steal the bigger, faster and generally better you are.
“However the points only count toward your final score if you blow yourself up. The more you take out, the higher your banked score.”
I sense a very interesting zen-like quality which this game could produce, or trigger, in people’s souls.
Just been to the Nation Island in SL, apparently designed to mimic the world of the Terry Pratchett’s latest book, Nation. There was nobody there as yet, but tomorrow it may become very crowdy since this is the place where the author will be doing signing his new volume.
Lentos Art Museum in the night, on a way back from the show. A few very nice locals lifted me up (or rather down, from the hill), right to the middle of the city (thank you, guys!).
And then while waiting the Vygotskian web-cast, I was invited by Tim Gorree (aka Digistar Brouwer), head of Nokia’s activities in Second Life, to have a look at their new holodecks, enabling truly immersive and photorealistic experience.
And very photorealistic it was!
Few more pictures, of both ‘exteriors’ and ‘interiors’ can be seen here.
Meanwhile, while processing my pictures and records from AE08, I was dragged into SL by a friend of mine who told me that UC San Diego agreed (very kind of them, thank you) to SLcast the Second (lol) Congress of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (ISCAR) – more info, including SLurls can be found here.
The SCAR is considered one of the leading research bodies in the areas of both general Vygotskian theory of development and the Theory of Activity specifically (though themselves they describe it rather vaguely as studying “social, cultural and historical dimensions of human practices where the context, or environment, is seen as of paramount importance“).
We didn’t the stream in SL though (as yet), either because it was too early, or because the streaming itself was not functioning properly (I found that it start commenting only from the browser, but from SL viewer. We’ll see later, may be the e-weather will be better.
