selectparks

Neural #30: 'Dangerous Games' now available.

Sporting a brand new design, the new printed Neural issue #30, Dangerous Games is available.

The issue includes a Ludic Society/Margarete Jahrmann interview, Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition report, Play Cultures, the world of digital games report, an article on games of control and human avatars (by moi), news about Emotoscope, Modi 2.0, Rom Check Fail, Amalgus Cycle Process1, HAI and a swathe of awesome reviews.

It's a super mag so I'll give it a shameless plug: you can subscribe to Neural here or find it at a local bookstore.

Passage

This Sunday's game has 100x16 pixels and an aspect ratio of 25:4. It's called Passage. Give it 5 minutes of playtime and you'll get the hang of what's happening. Great work Jason and thanks for supporting Linux and OS X.

Cheers to pix for the link.

Game Controller->Arduino->PD workshop @ Hangar, BCN

This looks to be a great workshop. It covers methods for interfacing game controllers with Arduino such that they can be used to drive audiovisual instruments built in the powerful and popular graphical development environment PureData.

The workshop will be led by PD luminary and active developer Hans-Cristoph Steiner, at Barcelona's infamous Hangar. All that learning will set you back a cool EUR20.00..

Read all about it here..

Camspace: Markerless Tracking that's Free (as-in-beer)

A small team in Tel Aviv, Israel has been working on what they describe as a paradigm shift in gaming: rather than using an input device like a WiiMote or mouse+keyboard (almost) any object in the room can be trained to be tracked by a standard webcam and their software.

Check out their impressive demo here. They just pick up a brightly coloured object, train and then track.

To be fair, this technology has been around for quite a while in computer vision, popularised most of all by Intel's OpenCV library which allows for defining and tracking many different Regions Of Interest (to unpack a geeky acronym).

Read on for more about this great technology (and why it won't displace the WiiMote any time soon)..

ASIA-EUROPE Art Camp: The Art of Gaming

Pavel Sedlak writes to us about this interesting Call for Applications..

6TH ASIA-EUROPE ART CAMP: Ludic Times | The Art of Gaming
22 29 July 2008
Singapore

The Asia-Europe Art Camp project is an initiative set up by Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) in 2003 focusing on New Media Art. The project aims at developing a platform to promote dialogue between art students from Asia and Europe, to learn more about each other¹s contexts, cultures and be inspired
during a week of lectures, workshops and public events. Focusing more on the creative process than on the 'artistic product', the Art Camp has been designed as a learning experience and an opportunity for professional development.

Built upon the achievements of the previous five Art Camps, the 6th Art Camp will gather 20 young artists or students, usually in their final year of study, from ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) countries for an intensive week of workshops, lectures and meetings as well as artistic and collaborative work.
A team of Asia-Europe artistic advisors and resource persons specialised in art and technology will lead and facilitate the workshops during the Art Camp.

On the sidelines of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) 2008 and the Asia-Europe New Media Arts Policy and Practice Meeting, the 6th Asia-Europe Art Camp to be held in Singapore is conceptualised around the theme of gaming and will focus on the nature of our contemporary ludic
culture while taking into account psychology of gaming and theories of gaming (as tools for social development and awareness, real-life situation simulations, artificial and augmented realities, serious games for education and games as an art form). Electronic, internet-based and pervasive games
and their roles in urban society will be discussed as well as the possibilities for Asia-Europe game development collaborations and industry-artist-researcher partnerships.

Read on for more..

Augmented Reality Games Prototyping Workshop.

Alongside Jonas Hielscher and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, I'll be teaching a 3 day intensive workshop at Mediamatic on rapidly prototyping Augmented Reality games, at Mediamatic, Amsterdam.

Beginning on June 2, participants will learn how AR works while building game designs that incorporate corporeal and social elements with that of digital content. They will walk away with a base of several skeleton applications with which to be able to create and continue developing projects on their own after the workshop.

Read more and sign up here!

Homo Ludens Ludens Follow Up.

Because I have a piece in Homo Ludens Ludens it's little difficult for me to play journalist. For this reason I'm posting here a bunch of links by others that will give you good coverage of what there. I will take the license to say it's a super show, if not a little gigantic (in typical LABoral fashion). Congrats to Laura, Erich and Daphne on the curatorial front. Given the breadth of the topic it can't have been easy..

WMMNA.
WMMNA2 (Conversation with Daphne)
Neural
Artist Mika Satomi's Flickr Set

There were several works there that I will put into the archives in the coming couple of weeks. In the meantime HLL will be on show until September, so.. why not spend some of your summer holidays in Gijon, swim in the Cantabrian Ocean and catch a killer show of game art while you're at it..

Curtis Johnson: Art vs Entertainment

Curtis Johnson, student of game developer and theorist Celia Pearce, provides us with a few interesting thoughts on the popularly held diametric of Art and Entertainment.

His take on it is that Art itself is already a culturally rarefied form of entertainment and cannot be easily considered otherwise. As a result, this places games, as a self-confessed form of entertainment, well within the realm of art (or at least a little less conveniently separable). I've archived it here for posterity (all copyright belonging to Curtis).

MMUVE IT! Australia Council InterArts Grant

The Australia Council has announced a $30,000 grant for artists working within MUVEs. I'm hoping the Babelswarm project been responsible (is some small way) for their recognition of virtual worlds as legitimate artistic locations.

The grant aims to give Australian artists the opportunity to creatively and critically explore interactive, virtual worlds, with a particular focus on the body and interfaces facilitating 'mixed realities'.

The grant allows for a collaborative team of up to three artists (including a digital visual media practitioner) to develop inter-disciplinary artwork in a MMUVE of their choice.

With more than 73 million participants in online games and social networking sites such as EverQuest, Legend of Zelda, Second Life and World of Warcraft (to name but a few), and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Wiimote, an opportunity exists to develop an innovative artwork engaging embodied users in a highly networked environment.

Homo Ludens Ludens opens on the 18th at Laboral, Gij�n, Spain.

Following the success of Gameworld and Playware, Laboral brings you Homo Ludens Ludens

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial presents HOMO LUDENS LUDENS, an international exhibition and symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives and a speculation on the emergence of the “Homo Ludens Ludens”: the contemporary playing man. What does it mean “to play” and to be “a player”?

The goal of this Symposium, organised jointly with The Planetary Collegium, is to provide the framework for contemporary play, to highlight its interdisciplinary nature, and to show the multifaceted reality of our present-day entertainment society.

ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN THE EXHIBITION: John Paul Bichard, France Cadet, Derivart, Devart, Hannah Perner-Wilson & Mika Satomi, Ge Jin, Vladan Joler, Radwan Kasmiya, John Klima, La Fiambrera Obrera & Mar de Niebla, Danny Ledonne, Valeriano López, Ludic Society, Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand, Martin Pichlmair & Fares Kayali, Brian Mackern, Larry Miller, MIT Lab - Drew Harry & Dietmar Offenhuber & Orkan Telhan, Molleindustria, Julian Oliver, Orna Portugaly & Daphna Talithman & Sharon Younger, Personal Cinema & the Erasers, Rolando Sánchez, Alex Sanjurjo, Gordan Savicic, Axel Stockburger, Silver & True, Román Torre, David Valentine/MediaShed (ft. Methods of Movement), Volker Morawe & Tilman Reiff, William Wegman.

I'll be exhibiting my own levelHead there (it's first public appearance, gulp). It'll be on show with other work by artists above for 5 months.

Read on for more about the accompaning symposium. Looking forward to seeing some of you there next week!