My Pecha-Kucha talk as part of Brighton Digital Festival is online. It was a night for creative makers, designers and artists to talk about how they use digital technology to inform, inspire and create their work. The Pecha-Kucha format gave each presenter six minutes and 40 seconds to share 20 visual images each held for 20 seconds on a screen.

Happy New Year!

January begins with collaboration with dance artist Genevieve Maxwell as part of The Movement and Meaning Lab PAL grant we have received. The bursary goes towards exploratory research on a new project “Falling Through Myself”. Our research will focus on the phenomenal possibilities of immersive and body responsive technology and develops out of unusual experiences of falling that we share, having both fallen and broken parts of our backs in the past.

This initial research leads on to a more developed performance/installation for showing during the ASSC16 Conference this July. Our project is funded by Arts Council England and I’ll be blogging the development process.

Image: R&D with dance artist Rachel Alexander

NO PLACE is a digital film experience that explores real and virtual spaces, commissioned by Brighton’s White Night Festival.  The performance was installed within Brighton’s iconic Modernist apartment block Embassy Court during the festival in October 2011.

The audience is led through the 11-storey residential building wearing video headsets.  Immersive visuals, multi-sensory effects and binaural soundscapes play with the participants’ sense of their own bodies within constructed environments and work together to question how we feel a place to be REAL.

Created with the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, NO PLACE challenges the architecture of your experience.

You can see more documentation of this project, including photos of the night and comments from our visitors, at the No Place website.

Animation was by David Packer, Emma Wakely, Abbie Stanton and myself (full credits for the project are on the Vimeo page).  You can also see photos on our Flickr group.

Brightonart have edited together a great video of the whole show, fireworks and all, here.

And I’ll leave you with a picture of the 20, 000 strong crowd watching!

Just a quick post // Will flesh this one out when I’m back in the UK

***********************************************************************

NO PLACE is a hybrid performance using immersive animation to be installed inside Brighton’s iconic apartment block, Embassy Court, during the White Night Festival. The project is documented on the NO PLACE site.

Inspired by techniques used in neuroscience experiments such as the “rubber hand” illusion, participants wear immersive video headsets and encounter environments that play with their sensations of vertigo and flight. The modernist apartment block is transformed into the setting for an interactive multimedia experience featuring live actors, video headsets and sound design.

Is our sense of self located in the owned body? How do we feel a place to be REAL? NO PLACE – the title a literal translation of Thomas More’s term “utopia” – challenges assumptions about real and possible worlds whilst being a vertiginous, exhilarating and entirely unusual experience for participants.

NO PLACE has been commissioned by White Night Brighton and Hove: a city-wide festival themed on “Utopia” that runs through the night on the 29th October. Development of the project engages with contemporary research into conscious presence, in collaboration with the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex.

For more about the wider research, visit my research page. I’ll be talking about NO PLACE and other artists making work that play with the notion of the self as a virtual model at Warwick’s Virtual Futures conference in June.

Images above created by Kate Genevieve & Abbie Stanton from Chroma Collective.

Extract from the encephalo//graphic animation in performance at Ropetackle Arts.

An animated meditation on the different ways we experience, and visualise our experience, of music. The animation combines illustrations of brain cells by early 20th century Spanish neuroscientist Ramon y Cajal, with electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded from the collaborators, when playing and listening to the specially composed music.

The animation was projected as Richard Durrant created music with a ukulele and kaoss pad from behind the screen. The collaborators were illuminated from behind gauze at the points in the film that their electroencephalographic (EEG) data was visualised, so that their actual heads became part of the animation.

This performance was created in collaboration with neuroscientist Anil Seth for the Arts of Life Science programme at Ropetackle.

The film focusses on audio-visual synaesthesia, a brain condition that enables synaesthetes not only to hear sound, but also to see it. Sam gave us an insight into her working methods and the painstaking process of attempting to animate the exact visual impressions that her three interviewees had in response to the sounds used in the film. The outcome is a joyously multi-sensory affair. Sam also gave us an overview of the current landscape of artists working to communicate the brain trait of synaesthesia, including Carrie C Firman synaesthesia library, and went into her new research with Dr Jamie Ward at the University of Sussex into phantom limbs.



image: Chris Landreth Ryan


After a fascinating Q&A session we moved on to a short screening programme. Sam is interested in Chris Landreth’s idea of “psychorealism”, the idea that animation can realistically depict internal states through stylistically experimenting with representation, so it seemed fitting to start the program off with Landreth’s Oscar-winning short Ryan, which you can watch on the NFB’s website. We glimpsed the conditions of autism in Tim Webb’s A is for Autism and had a heart-breaking look at dementia in Sharon Liu’s A bit and every bit. Lauri Warsta playfully brought out the hilarious strangeness of our dream lives in her squirrel-focussed short, Traumdeutung.


To follow Sam’s animated exploration of unique brain states follow her blog and she also writes the occasional post for the wonderful moving-image resource, APEngine.


A special thanks to the Royal College of Art’s Animation Department for their assistance & all the folk at BANG.

Video documentation filmed & edited by Dominic Alves

The Dream Machine story culminated in a programme of animation, projected onto Brighton’s Marlborough House during the White Night festival.

The projections provided the dramatic conclusion to the Dream Machine story we’d built up about Marlborough House and distributed in two comics newspapers throughout Brighton.

*** You can still read these comics online on the Dream Machine website. ***

As the final chapter of the story, animators were invited to animate the dreams of the sleepers inside the building escaping onto the Brighton streets. We had octopus tentacles smashing through windows, spiders crawling out of doorways, space ships, explosions of colour and lots of sweets.

I have set up a Dream Machine Flickr pool for photos of the event.

The finale saw the doors of Marlborough House swing open and a troop of dreamers in eighteenth century bed clothes emerge into 2010.

The animation played on a rolling programme from 7pm to 3am. We were incredibly happy to have a couple of thousand people come through on the night. The public were given an opportunity to scrawl their dreams on the building front. Seb Lee Delisle created an interactive projection which took the dreams of the festival goers – texted and tweeted to us on the night – and inscribed them onto the mansion in the breaks between the animation performances. Seb has written a great blog post about his use of Processing to create this interactive projection.

The sublime music was provided by The Monroe Transfer, Armand Tansarian and Attic Sound and the sound design by Anna Bertmark. There is a full list of credits on the project on the website.

Sweet dreams…

Here is my talk on the Dream Machine project at FOTB.

It was good to get the news out about what we’ve been creating these last few weeks for the Brighton Animator’s Network: below is a little vid of our project last year that transformed of Brighton’s Unitarian Church.

Working on these big animation collaborations has made me enthusiastic about what individual practitioners can do when they group together. Have a look at the collaborations Fears of the Dark and Coalition of the Willing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ubelly/5033577368/

Here are my fellow Elevator Pitchers, skillfully sketched by UBelly. Flash Magazine has a nice blog on the session.

Here’s a few notes on sessions that particularly excited me:

Robert Hodgin

Robert Hodgin is the real deal. He has the kind of obsessive intelligence that never settles on one kind of approach to his work. This year he showed a lot of work created with Cinder and talked about how he used magnetism and reaction diffusion systems. Robert spoke with great excitement about how his experiments exploring electrostatic fields and gravitational forces have given him a greater appreciation of the forces that bind our natural world together. He is like one of the great scientists of the early 1900s, constantly responding to patterns he finds in nature. It is pretty apt that he has created a radiolarian generator to create intricate studies inspired by the illustrations of German polymath Haeckel.

He also loves Radio Lab and there is a little homage to the Radiolab episode on sound on the Flight 404 blog.

Nando Costa

Nando Costa continued with Robert’s magnetism obsession with his FOTB titles: he created this sequence using the magnetic properties of various materials. I’ve really enjoyed the output from Nando’s studio Nervo over the last few years, especially the painterly feel of Paper Airplane, collaboration between Nervo and muh-tay-zik back in 2008. Nando is married to the illustrator Linn Olofsdotter whose use of colour is remarkable.

Julien Vallee

It is a treat to get an insight into how animators create their work. I’ve been stockpiling sweets and jelly beans for some sweet based stop motion for the Dream Machine project, and it is reassuring to know that a lot of Vallee’s work comes out of compulsively collecting bizarre objects. He talked us through the making of his OFFF Paris titles. Love the basket ball shot into the net that transforms into a watermelon and satisfyingly splats on the tarmac. Magical transformations: it’s what animation is all about.

Cyriak

Local animation genius Cyriak is all about the unexpected transformations, though transformations that are more on the grotesque side of things. Cyriak’s bizarre and twisted creations were unleashed on Wednesday. I went on a camping trip after seeing his latest celebration of the bovine form and can definitively say that the way I see cows has been changed forever. Cows and cows and cows has notched up 5 million plus hits.

Seb Lee-Delisle

On a more Flash based tip, another local boy, Seb Lee-Delisle, gave an inspired talk on the future of Flash with a shambolic live game of Family Fortunes. It was also good to see an interactive installation of his upstairs in the Dome.

]]> http://kategenevieve.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/flash-on-the-beach-2010/feed/ 0 FOTB_small kategenevieve http://kategenevieve.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/neuroscience-and-the-guitar/ http://kategenevieve.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/neuroscience-and-the-guitar/#comments Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:34:10 +0000 kategenevieve http://kategenevieve.wordpress.com/?p=392 Read more]]>



This is a snippet of animation from the Neuroscience and Guitar event on the 22nd October, a collaboration between neuroscientist Anil Seth, musician Richard Durrant and myself. This piece of animation to accompany Richard’s new piece was projected onto a large piece of gauze during the event. The animation combines illustrations of brain cells by early 20th century Spanish neuroscientist Ramon y Cajal with visualisations of the various ways we are conscious of music: musical notation, soundwaves, memories and visual impressions and also electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded from the collaborators, when playing and listening to the specially composed music.





At the beginning of 20th century, the great Spanish neuroanatomist, Cajal, was establishing the new world of neuroscience. Vital to his work was visually recording the structure of the brain, and he created breathtakingly beautiful drawings of neurons.





At the same time, the Spanish guitar was enjoying its golden age, with Albeniz, Barrios, Tarrego, and Granados. Guitar virtuoso Richard Durrant will be playing some of the greats, and also a specially composed new piece for the ukulele and a kaoss pad.





The two apparently distant paths of human achievement, neuroscience and music, will be brought together by neuroscientist Dr Anil Seth. He’ll take those assembled on a mind-bending tour round the brain.





Here’s the team: including EEG assistant Becky Heaver, Neuroscientist Anil Seth and Musician Richard Durrant.


& here’s me covered in electrodes…





Not pictured are my two incredible animation assistants, digital maestro Laura Elmes and 2D wunderkind Emma Wakely: we’ve all been looking at a lot of neurons lately.

———————————————————————————
The event was covered by the BBC and the University of Sussex and reviewed in The Argus.




]]> http://kategenevieve.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/neuroscience-and-the-guitar/feed/ 1 ropetackle3 kategenevieve ropetackle3 ropetackle2 ropetackle1 -4 kateEEG