image by Elspeth Nicholson
All things digital, all things to play with!
Have fun in our immersive digital playground and be amazed at the new delights on offer. This play space for all ages will be a place to experience the latest gaming releases, including gaming demos from this years Next Level Dundee and Dare to be Digital.
Digital Park – Bar One, Abertay Student Centre
8-14 November 2010, 10am – 6pm
Lisa Ure
A focus on rhythm, repetition, digitisation and sequencing alongside the complexities of perception are fundamental elements that recur throughout my work in all its forms. By revisiting old techniques alongside what some would call ‘obsolete technologies’, I am keen to explore, then, literalise the mechanics behind the resolved image
Boris Petrovsky You&Me-isms
You&Me-isms is a ideosyncratic cyberpunk communication machine with very distinct features: 440 neon characters have been woven into a 50-square-meter, multi-layered carpet that for users becomes a playable interactive matrix of illuminated signs. Via SMS, Twitter and special input terminals, users can enter messages of up to 160 characters and read them as each character lights up sequentially in the matrix.
The internet reacts to each user message with a reply. Messages appear to materialize in the neon tubes, before they disappear again like apparitions. Yet the information isn’t lost: the messages are stored on the project website where they may be read, rated and played back virtually in a simulation or in the matrix itself.
There are unpredictable, strange things going on in the matrix: while processing, the matrix behaves ideosyncraticly. McLuhan’s “the medium is the message“ appears, when the machine interfers independently in common communication processes. So seen, it is an “anti-communication machine“.
“You&Me-isms“ becomes the artwork of the user. The visitors’ expectations and ascriptions of meaning are thrown back on them and into their perceptual, conceptual and theoretical apparatuses. As users, their activities are not only an integral part of the process but also a conditio sine qua non.
Dare to be Digital
Dare to be Digital is a video games development competition for extremely talented students at Universities and Colleges of Art. Teams of 5 students, usually a mix of artists, programmers and audio, assemble in a development hothouse for 10 weeks (Monday 7th June to Tuesday 17th August 2010) to develop a prototype video game, receiving daily support and weekly training sessions from industry specialists.
Ewan Sinclair and Emma Tolmie Modified Knights: Crusaders of the Cosmic Forge
Elspeth NicholsonAutomation
This body of work is a series of photographic images that aim to question society’s dependence on modern technology in the 21st Century. Technology has become an extension of our selves and we live in an age where we have the ability to communicate to the other side of the world in a matter of seconds, but have advances in communication technology helped us to socially interact with far greater ease or are we in fact regressing into our own private worlds? Has it begun to dull our senses and make us oblivious to the world around us or has it opened us up to experience things that were previously unseen or out of bounds?
Next Level Dundee
An arts collaboration event for students and non-professional creatives. A brief will be delivered in advance of the event and teams can work on concepts and pre-production ahead of time. Any response is valid, whether it’s a game, film, series of artworks, a comic, a website or web narrative or amalgamation of these- anything creative that fits the brief! Next Level Dundee is intended for anyone who has not yet secured work in the creative industries. The event will provide a platform for individuals to work on group projects that would otherwise be too difficult to complete on their own and also use the work as a future portfolio piece.
Sinead Bracken Dunfermline Retail Park, B&Q
Hannah Maclure Centre, level 3
My practice investigates the rhythms and patterns that occur in various environments. How spaces are designed to guide, co-ordinate & to some extent control public movement. These observations take on the form of performances, animations, maps & structures. ‘Dunfermline Retail Park, B&Q’ illustrates the movement of cars in a car park. Both pieces portray the exact movement of each space over a ten-minute period. While the methods to create these two pieces are similar, the aesthetics and movements are very different.
Joanna Kane 11-12 November
Cloud People’ looks at identity and networks in the age of cloud computing. Joanna Kane’s work often draws on both visually based historical research and related investigations in new media. She has captured information and images relating to personal identity, generating a portrait combining abstract mapping of data streams with composite photographic imagery. Giving visual form to the shifting nature of contemporary digital identity, Cloud People holds up a mirror that allows us to contemplate increasingly personal thoughts, intentions, and desires that have become downloadable, traceable and inerasable.
Screening Booth
Baschz & Selcontronlfreak – Masterpiece 2.0
Matthew Cameron Feet for Hands, 3 min 19 sec, Meta, 17 min 43 sec
Ian Forbes – The Accidental Tourist (have)
Scott Davidson – Collect Consume 6:37mins
Baschz & Selcontronlfreak
Masterpiece 2.0 is a social media art project by Baschz and Selfcontrolfreak and the first ever unique painting made with a Web 2.0 approach. In the summer and fall of 2009 a multilayered canvas and animation was created which could be influenced and followed by website visitors online 24 hours a day. Six weeks long and through actions like Introduce Object, Shirt ‘Em and Cameo Appearance website visitors could interact with leading character Selfcontrolfreak
Each sent in gesture added a new animated interaction as they were painted layer-by-layer into the growing animating canvas by Baschz. Every new layer was photographed seperately and together with the other frames created the stop motion animating canvas, leaving the end canvas consisting of well over 100 different painted layers. http://masterpiece20.com/
Ian Forbes
The Accidental Tourist is a witty four-minute film with a sting in the tail. The story is set in a seedy local bar, unchanged since the 1970s, in an unnamed town in the east of Scotland. It is about language, accent and understanding – or misunderstanding. It is also about prejudice and false expectation, and many of us will recognise ourselves in one or more of the characters. This is a highly crafted piece of work, with sumptuous Rembrandtesque cinematography, clever if understated visual effects and tight direction that sets exactly the right pace for the mood of the narrative.
Matthew Cameron
Feet for Hands, 3 min 19 sec
Feet for Hands is a comedy short which explores one absurd question; how would a person cope upon waking up to find that their feet had swapped places with their hands?
Meta, 17 min 43 sec
Meta is a dark science fiction story that focuses on the nature of addiction and questions of the self. Mark is an addict. His body wastes away while his brain is jacked into dangerous underground gaming networks. When he discivers his last link to the real world, Grace, in a coma hooked up to a new machine, he must search the dream worlds of the Metaverse to rescue her. The deeper Mark pushes himself into these virtual worlds, the more he runs the risk of losing himself completely.
Scott Davidson
The film follows the insane collecting habits of a man named Bothan Spynet. It is about the mass collection that one man named Bothan Spynet has accumulated over the last 26 years. He has over 3000 pairs of sneakers and also the largest private collection of Futura 2000 art in the world.
