Grand Text Auto

mary has been so quiet…. because . . .

In my effort to avoid doomist thoughts given the week’s events, I attended the nyc acm siggraph (future participants ?) panel presentations at Pratt Manhattan. Amit Pitaru ‘s talk was noteworthy. Trained as a pianist, he never intended to write software, but he does now, spending time between writing his own tools and using them. He demonstrated a beautiful 3D drawing tool, and in general the set of tools he develops is amazing! I highly recommend checking out his work, pretty inspirational. A nice summary and more links can be found here. While he does not argue that his work is political, I can see how his very specific ideas about how tools are created for specific needs could be applied as an activist software design strategy. Its heartening to see someone rethinking the tools they use so clearly and articulately, stripping away commercial concerns and just plain irrelevant interfaces. . .

more from Day 1, State of Play II.
The economic and work aspects of gaming were analyzed in depth on the panel Virtual Property/Real World Markets: Making a Living in a Virtual World. Aside from the current economic practices such as exchanging characters and materials on ebay (and this ebay market has been said to be significantly large enough to affect real economies, see Castronova), further economic implications lurk for all of what is being called “the play economy.” While raising far too many questions than could be answered in a 90 minute session, the issues brought forward in the discussion resulted in a compelling conversation about the social impact of games.

The morning panel at the State of Play conference 2 here at the NY Law School was invigorating; David Johnson from the NY Law School led a discussion of Intellectual Property/Digital Property. The panelists, an amazing mix of lawyer, culture worker, and theorist, provided a glimpse at a range of approaches towards IP law in online worlds and specifically games.

The discussions were lengthy and inspiring at code and creativity 3.0 (participants included John Klima, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Alex Galloway, Ruth Catlow, and yours truly Mary Flanagan), hosted by Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais at the University of Maine. Conversations hovered around the idea of computer gaming and how gaming interfaces with / against larger political and cultural issues.

Hi all, after a busy robot-filled weekend, I greet you! and send you this link to somebody’s great little synopsis movie featuring some of the work. I was very pleased to have been a part of it.

Tomorrow I’m off to U Maine for the Code and Creativity 3.0 Event in which a group of troublemaker artists are venturing off-concrete.

“This conference tackles the tension at the heart of war/gaming and explores alternative design strategies in the company of some of the top game design artists working today.”

Atsuko Tanaka and Akira Kanayama, two members of the Gutai movement in Japan, spoke tonight at the Japan Society in nyc. Amazing talk. For those of you who may not know, Gutai was an art movement, based in Japan, that asked many of the same questions that fluxus, conceptual artists, and I daresay new media artists ask(ed), but very early in the scheme of things… Begun in 1955 (!) with a big two week event in the suburbs outside of Osaka, Gutai was proclaimed as an experiment : to take art outside the closed inside and expose the works to the outside, to sun wind and rain. A bunch of teens and young artists took over a pine grove park and staged a 13 day exhibition of paintings, gigantic sculptures created from abandoned machinery, and other unusual objects and performances. Atsuko Tanaka, one of the first women conceptual artists (ok, yes I know putting myself on the chopper here) put out a large pink bubble gum vinyl sheet to ripple in the wind. With the zero artists, Gutai members demonstrate a very early strain of conceptualism. Another member, Saburo Murakami, would take a ball, dip it in ink, and toss it against a wall… trying to invent a “new painting” using the “feel” of velocity. According to Alexandra Munroe, host of the talk and interviewee, GUTAI means “tool and body” – the element of performance is a strong strategy in many of the works.

Here’s an article with a few factoids re: women gamers from cnn.

Also folks, I want to remind you that if you are near NYC this weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun), the fabulous ARTBOTS show is coming! The Third Annual ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show will take place on September 17, 18, & 19 from noon to 6:00pm @126th Street & Amsterdam Avenue. I was a curator of the show along with Mark Tribe and Douglas Irving Repetto of Columbia U, and I can promise that there are some amazing pieces in the show!!

Since ISEA has been a theme not only in GTxA but in various lists, blogs, etc, I thought I’d add this. As noted by other drivers @ GTxA, the art and science distinction is still a discussion point even within a field developed from this assumption. I think that has more to do with the institutionalized spaces in which many ISEA participants work, and not an inherent difficulty in the topics or fields. But the important question is, how can this be addressed?

Have you seen Kaena: The Prophesy yet? Caught it at the Red Vic cooperatively owned theatre in San Francisco. Like her colleague Dr. Aki Ross of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Kaena is another youthful virtual heroine meant to save a people and a planet from absolute annhilation. While crawling around on the most lovely-rendered branch-architecture-world I’ve seen since the short “Cathedral” at SIGGRAPH 2003, Kaena practically bursts her high tech bodysuits in virtual exuberance crawling around her planet Axis. MANY moments of homage to Oshii’sGhost in the Shell as well… Sometimes feeling like a mod, sometimes Matrix like, and oddly, sometimes Jungle-Book inspired character animation styles clash in the weirdest pop culture mix I’ve seen on the big screen. Is this what EuroDisney feels like?
Unusual bonus: As the character learns more in the film, her breasts appear to grow. Talk about innovative character stats interface design…?

hi all, delighted to be here. Lots to write about incl. new artwork, activist design, programming, and gender… I promise sarcasm and whimsey to boot. For starters, I send along the RAPUNSEL url, http://www.rapunsel.org. This is a collaborative project to teach middle school girls to program. More soon!