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From November 21st to the 2nd of December, I’ll have the pleasure to lead a course and workshop with Prayas Abhinav at the Center for Experimental Media Arts in the Srishti School of Design in Banaglore, IN.  Many thanks to Meena Vari for all her help in organizing the project.

Stories are flowing trees

Key words:  3D, interactive projects, data, histories, urban, creative coding, technology, sculpture, projection mapping

Project Brief:

Urban realities are more like fictions, constructed through folklore, media and policy. Compressing these constructions across time would offer some possibilities for the emergence of complexity and new discourse. Using video projections adapted for 3D surfaces, urban histories will become data and information – supple, malleable, and material.

The project will begin with a one week workshop by Parag Mital on “Creative Coding” using the openFrameworks platform for C/C++ coding”.

About the Artists:

Prayas Abhinav

Presently he teaches at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and is a researcher at the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA). He has taught in the past at Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT).
He has been supported by fellowships by Openspace India (2009), TED (2009), Center for Media Studies (CMS) (2006), Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) (2006), Sarai/CSDS (2005). He has presented his projects and proposals in the last few years at Periferry, Guwahati (2010), Exit Art, New York (2010), Futuresonic, Manchester (2009), Wintercamp, Amsterdam (2009), 48c: Public Art Ecology (2008), Khoj (2008), Urban Climate Camp, ISEA (2008), Sensory Urbanism, Glasgow (2008), First Monday, Chicago (2006), The Paris Accord (2006) and PSBT/Prasar Bharti (2006).
He has also participated in the exhibitions Myth ?? Reality (2011) at The Guild, Mumbai, Continuum Transfunctioner (2010) at exhibit 320 in Delhi, Contested Space – Incursions (2010) at Gallery Seven Arts in Delhi and Astonishment of Being (2009) at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkatta (2009).

http://prayas.in

Parag K Mital (London)

Parag K Mital is an American-born London-based PhD-student in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London working on augmented realities and audiovisual resynthesis. As an audiovisual installation artist, his work encourages the audience to directly question the processes surrounding perception through introspection and curiosity from experiencing real-time models of audiovisual perception. His work has traveled extensively in London, Athens, and Moscow, including the London Science Museum and the British Film Institute. As an educator he has taught at Edinburgh University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and is due to deliver a course on Audiovisual Processing for iPhone/iPad at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

http://pkmital.com

Workshop in “Creative Coding” using the openFrameworks platform

The workshop will cover the basics of openFrameworks, a c/c++ creative coding platform. This course will also introduce students to digital signal processing techniques in synthesis and analysis of audio and visual signals for interactive techniques using custom made libraries developed at Goldsmiths, University of London. Depending on interest, participants will also receive tutorial on developing for the iPhone/iPad in order to create real-time audiovisual apps.

http://www.openframeworks.cc
http://pkmital.com/home/code/
http://maximilian.strangeloop.co.uk/

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As part of a system of numerous dynamic connections and networks, we are reactive and deterministic to a complex system of cause and effect. The consequence of our actions upon our selves, the society we live in and the broader natural world is conditioned by how we perceive our involvement. The awareness of how we have impacted on a situation is often realised and processed subconsciously, the extent and scope of these actions can be far beyond our knowledge, our consideration, and importantly beyond our sensory reception. With this in mind, how can we associate our actions, many of which may be overlooked as customary, with for instance, the honey bee depopulation syndrome or the declining numbers of Siberian Tigers.

Responsive Ecologies is part of an ongoing collaboration with ZSL London Zoo and Musion Academy. Collectively we have been exploring innovative means of public engagement, to generate an awareness and understanding of nature and the effects of climate change. All of the contained footage has come from filming sessions within the Zoological Society; this coincidentally has raised some interesting questions on the spectacle of captivity, a issue which we have tried to reflect upon in the construction and presentation of this installation. The nature of interaction within Responsive Ecologies means that a visitor to the space can not simply view the installation but must become a part of its environment. When attempting to perceive the content within the space the visitor reshapes the installation. Everybody has a degree of impact whether directed or incidental, and when interacting as a group it is interesting to see how collective behaviour can develop and incite the outcome of the work.

captincaptin and Parag K Mital exhibited Responsive Ecologies at the Watermans between 6th December 2010 and the 21st January 2011. The installation was in the form of a 360 degrees multi-screened projection or CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). Visitors to the exhibition would enter the CAVE through a passageway leading from the gallery entrance. All four sides of the CAVE were back projected with each side connecting to form a large continuous projection. The presence of people within the space would be tracked and used to deconstruct and interlace the video in response to their movement. The video documentation below was taken from the installation (throughout this video the camera is panning around the space in order to record all sides of the CAVE).

Responsive Ecologies from pkmital on Vimeo.

Source code is also available with an example part of the actual installation (10 second clip as the whole video is far too long) – though you may also need 4 monitors/projectors or scale down the size of the screen in the code (SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT variables in testApp.h): http://github.com/pkmital/Responsive-Ecologies

More information:
http://captincaptin.co.uk
http://pkmital.com

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Memory @ AVAF 2010 from pkmital on Vimeo.

‘Memory’ is an augmented installation of a neural network by Parag K Mital & Agelos Papadakis.
hand blown glass, galvanized metal chain, projection, cameras; 1.5m x 2.5m x 3m

Ghostly images of faces appear as recorded movie clips within neural-shaped hand-blown glass pieces. As one begins to look at the neurons, they notice the faces as their own, trapped as disparate memories of a neural network.

Filmed and installed for the Athens Video Art Festival in May 2010 in Technopolis, Athens, Greece. The venue is a disused gas factory converted art space.

Also seen at Kinetica Art Fair, Ambika P3, London, UK, 2010; Passing Through Exhibition, James Taylor Gallery, London, UK, 2009; Interact, Lauriston Castle, Edinburgh, UK, 2009.

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This will be my second year supervising the Digital Media Studio Project at the University of Edinburgh. The course is a mix of over 60 Digital Composition, Sound Design, Digital Design in Media, and Acoustic and Music Technology MSc students. 10-15 supervisors pitch a project proposal and the students decide which ones they’d like to participate in. This year, I proposed Augmented Sculpture, and 3 students signed up of which 2 are Sound Designer and 1 is a Digital Designer. So far, they have managed to communicate tracking data via a reactivision framework and combine life-sized sculpture to interact with a sonic environment built in Max/MSP.

Chandan, Helen and Ev playing with a ReacTIVision controlled Max/MSP patch developed for the Digital Media Studio Project at Edinburgh University. This is the very first ever test run of the system, and it worked!

Follow more developments on their blog.

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I had the pleasure of exhibiting one of my works, Memory, with glass artist Agelos Papadakis at the Kinetica Art Fair 2010, from February 4-7th, 2010. The work was presented by TINTarts as well as another piece by Dave Murray-Rust, Agelos Papadakis, and Owen Green, called ChaoDependant. The fair was an incredible selection of contemporary artists and historical collections of kinetic and interactive art. I’ll be looking forward to next year.

Also worth checking out is a panorama with some interesting viewing options: www.z360.com/full/kinetica/
If you click to find the ‘Balcony’, you will see both ChaoDependant and Memory off to the side as well as Dave Murray-Rust and Agelos Papadakis in the foreground. 

As well, here is a link to our work on artstream: http://www.artstream.org/artists/view/250

I’ve also uploaded pictures on my flickr account

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