Chris's Blog Address
www.chriswalker55.blogspot.com

Red Team

Ok well as a team we don't have a blog to share our research/work but we have been meeting up in the game itself (SecondLife) and sharng our modelling and thoughts in there. We have checked out various islands and are now in the process of modelling our own buildings/area based around Digital Harbour. If any of you guys are part of SecondLife feel free to check out our modelling, just let me know your nicknames :)

Gen

Green Team's Blog Address

Just to let you know, we have posted a blog for this group on http://mmda07greenteam.blogspot.com/ as well as our own blogs for documentation.
No doubt the green team is obviously very behind,
but we've made good progress this week. The Superblue blog has definitely shown good organisation. Here's Another resource for game design as the other groups are using other applications it won't be as relevant however it doesn't hurt to look.

http://www.bestflashanimationsite.com/archive/games/

Elise

Digital Games ::: project 3 notes

Project 3 is all about games. Here are some links that we looked at in class.

Select Parks: game art resources
Gamasutra: game development site
Ludology.org: great site with articles on games, mainly from a ludic perspective
Daedalus project: analysing players in MMOs
Machinima.org: film-making in game environments resource
WoW: massively popular fantasy-based MMO
Half-life 2: photorealistic FPS with great physics engine and story-driven gameplay
Spore: best video game ever (yet to be released)
Spore video: great gameplay video (worth watching the full 30 mintues)

plus, list of games played in today's class:
- Shadow the Hedgehog (PS2): see Sonic
- Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (PS2)
- Rez (PS2)
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)
- We Love Katamari (PS2)

more links to be posted soon...

Digital Arts ::: week 3 notes

Alva Noto
Sound artist (Carsten Nicolai) who generates music and animation using mathematical processes, typically for live performance. Often highly minimalist work that closely connects sound and image that is inspired by self-organising processes such as the growth of snow crystals. In 2001, a collaboration with Marko Meljhan entitled 'polar' was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica. This was a space that used multiple projectors, speakers and other devices to visualise both the interaction of people in the space and a matrix of information.

ref: alva noto website | polar interactive artwork


Lee Bul
Korean artist that works mainly with sculpture inspired aspects of contemporary pop culture such as anime and sci-fi. These typically take the form of room sized installations in which the audience can walk through an exploded monster or cyborg. Although these works use the seductive aesthetic usually associated with advanced technology, they take a critical position and question the culture from which they originate.

ref: work at The NGV International


John Madea
Graphic designer, artist and computer scientist based at the MIT Media Lab. Maeda is a pioneer in the application of programming to solve design problems, including the development of interactive motion graphics at a time when the Internet was largely static text and image. His work was featured in a major retrospective at the ICC (Tokyo) in 2001 that explored his software, design and installation works. An excerpt from his most recent book 'Laws of Simplicity' is included in the reader.

ref: Post-Digital a retrospective of Maeda's work in 2001


Jonah Bruckner-Cohen
Artist / researcher interested in questioning our current perceptions of networked communication and experience, typically by making digital events tangible and perceptible by connecting them to a physical event or representation. His work spans across the domains of media art and academic research including workshops and exhibitions at events such as Siggraph, ISEA and Arts Electronica. Equally adept at the interface design, technology development, concept and exhibition aspects of media arts projects.

ref: Coin-operated website


Joshua Davis
Inspired by Jackson Pollock, Davis is an experimental and highly successful web designer who works with chaos and chance as a major element of his design process. Credited as illustrator, author, artist, coder and designer on many projects. Also known for his praystation project that made public his studio process (before weblogs were mainstream) and source code for many creative projects.

ref: art meets commerce in the BMW Z4 Coupe

Digital Arts ::: week 2 notes

Shynola
Creative collective (Richard “Kenny” Kenworthy, Gideon Baws, Jason Groves and Chris Harding) working with animation and motion graphics. The approach varies on each project resulting in the studio having no fixed style, medium or technique although there is a shared interest in animation. Clients are selected based on their willingness to share the artist's vision so that they can get their own ideas across in their work while still working in a commercial environment.

ref: Shynola website


Johnny Hardstaff
Designer, director, animator and artist. Hardstaff works across a range of creative industries on independent projects and commissions. He is best known for dark narratives produced for Sony Playstation that explore digital game culture using a mix of motion graphics, animation and video. His work combines robotics, technology, architecture and graphic design into a mutant hybrid form.

ref: Johnny Hardstaff website - check out the sketchbooks


Chris Cunningham
Music video director and artist with unique visual style, best known for his surreal video clips for Aphex Twin that involve prosthetics, CGI and special effects. His clip for Bjork's 'All is Full of Love' is one of the few creative works that has been awarded a Grammy and included in several retrospectives of contemporary art in the past five years. Also produces work for gallery installation and advertisements for Playstation & Levi's.

ref: Rubber Johnny independent film


nullpointer
Tom Betts aka nullpointer is a media artist / programmer. His work involves hacking game engines to create abstract art that explores the formal qualities of real-time computer graphics and sound. He also develops his own software, such as the game 'Endless Fire' that combines generative systems and scrolling shoot-em-up game.

ref: nullpointer website


dextro
Experimental studio that use generative systems, physics simulations and digital image processing to create their work. Often highly abstract, they explore the process of image making sometimes with an interactive component so that the view can influence the process. Their generative design methodology creates the source material used in their more traditional design work.

ref: dextro web site

Digital Arts ::: week 1 notes

This covered five examples of creative people working with musical-visual form in different ways - through moving image, interactive art, performance and gaming.

Autechre
Electronic music duo on Warp Records working with a range of digital formats. Inspired by the abstractions afforded by digital sound editing, and the music technology itself – ‘using the studio as an instrument’. Their work uses analogue sound synthesis, Digital Sound Processing (DSP) and generative processes. A mutant mix of analogue and digital systems controlled or manipulated by a wide range of software are used to feed an experimental process of sound construction and deconstruction.

ref: article on Ae with some good screenshots of their custom sound software

Alex Rutterford
British director and graphic designer working with music video that typically features synaesthetic computer generated imagery. He has worked with Amon Tobin, Autechre and Radiohead. Rutterford is interested in both commissions and producing independent films or interactive installations that experiment with motion graphics and abstract space.

ref: interview on the making of Gantz Graf and future plans

Golan Levin
Programmer, artist and composer interested in developing interactive works that use generative systems to create synaesthetic media in realtime. These systems often use gestures or other forms of embodied interaction to influence generative image and sound processes. As he writes his own software we can view this as an integral part of his creative process – developing and expressing his ideas through the act of writing code. Levin often collaborates on creative projects in different capacities – as artist, composer or programmer.

ref: artist website

Toshio Iwai
Iwai is a Japanese media artist originally inspired by proto-cinematic devices such as phenakistiscopes and zoetropes. His work includes interactive installations, television, museum design and video games, and explores the relationship between sound and image. His interactive works combine elements of chance and generative music to create musical-visual form. Most recently, this interest has extended to electronic musical instrument design in the Tenori-on developed in collaboration with Yamaha.

ref: historical overview of Iwai

Blast Theory
Artist group working across performance, games and interactive media particularly Location Based Gaming. They often collaborate with research centres, such as the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. Their games explore the connections made possible by mobile phones and other handheld electronic devices between online environments and urban streetscapes. The main focus of these experiences is the human interaction that occurs in these new kinds of social space and dramatic narrative that is generated by playing the game.

ref: artist website

welcome

Welcome to the mm&da studio blog.

This will be a resource for third year multimedia & digital arts students within the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University.

Watch this space for weekly wrap-ups from the seminar program plus any other relevant information...