Multimedia Art in My Community: Kristi Ryba's Video Art, Sonja Hinrichson's Mapping Charlotte Project at Community Day, McColl Center for the Visual Arts

I thought I'd share some of the multimedia art that is going on in my area.  The McColl Center for Visual Art, in conjunction with the Arts & Science Council's Cultural Free-for-All, hosted Community Day, a day of free fun and art for everyone.  The galleries were open for tours, and the artists set up a range of exciting activities.  I've selected two of the artists-in-residence to highlight in this post.


As I wandered around the McColl Center, I came across Kristi Ryba's video art on a Mac laptop on a table in an upstairs hallway.  I was holding my video cam in one hand and my purse and umbrella in the other. I fumbled around with my video camera so I could capture the doll house dance quickly.  In the video, a woman was dancing down a street of miniature houses, and in the next scene, she was dancing inside a beautifully furnished doll house.

After taking a look at Kristi's video, I peeked into the studio.  To celebrate Community Day,  Kristi encouraged visitors to dance in front of the green screen, while she captured their movements. It was a delight to watch. For more about Kristi Ryba's work, take a look at her website at http://www.kristiryba.com.

The link below is to a video of Community Day activities, posted on Facebook. You can see some of the visitors dancing in front of Kristi's green screen around the 1:30.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=143268648690

On Community Day, Sonja Hinrichson, a multimedia artist-in-residence at  McColl Center, invited visitors to go on a mapping "treasure hunt" around Charlotte, and document their experiences.  This event was related to Sonya's current work,  Charlotte in Layers:  The Mapping Charlotte Project.  This project is collaborative video/media installation created with students of Sonja's Special Topics class, offered through UNC-Charlotte's School of Art and Architecture.   The students used video, photography, audio recordings, and interviews during the process of exploring, researching, and mapping aspects of life and history of Charlotte, North Carolina. 

The opening for the Mapping Charlotte installation will be held at the Rowe Main Arts Gallery on the UNC-C campus from 5:00-7:30 pm. The exhibition will be held from November 19th through December 10th.  Sonja will give a public lecture about the Mapping Charlotte project on Friday, November 20th, at 11:00 A.M. in Room 130 of the Rowe Arts Building.

Mapping Charlotte Links

Mapping Charlotte (Class project blog for the installation)

Syllabus (Provides a detailed description of the activities involved in the project/installation)

City Exploration Game

RELATED
McColl Center Community Day on Flickr


McColl Center for the Visual Arts Overview

Multi-User Virtual Environments for Kids, Teens, & College Students

I recently posted about Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) on the TechPsych blog:


Multi-User Virtual Environments for Kids, Teens & College Students


The post includes a variety of resources such as video clips, slide presentations, links, and references, including research articles.  Included are a few resources related to social skills/communication skills and mental health applications.

HCI & Education: CHI 2010 Workshop On User Interface/Interaction Technologies and Educational Pedagogy

The 28th CHI 2010 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) will be held from April 10-15 2010 in Atlanta, GA.  The Workshop on UI Technology & Educational Pedagogy will be one of several workshops held during the conference.

Info from the workshop's website:

Given the exponential growth of interactive whiteboards in classrooms around the world, there has been a need to explore how next generation HCI will impact education in the future. Educators are depending on the interaction communities to deliver technologies that will improve/adapt learning to an ever-changing world.

In addition to novel UI concepts, the HCI community needs to examine how these concepts can be matched to contemporary paradigms in Educational pedagogy. The classroom is a challenging environment for evaluation, thus new techniques need to be established to prove the value of new HCI interactions in the Educational space. This workshop provides a forum to discuss key HCI issues facing next generation education.

We invite authors to present position papers about potential design challenges and perspectives on how the community should handle the next generation of HCI in education. Topics of interest include:

• Gestural input, multitouch, large displays
• Mobile Devices, response systems (clickers)
• Tangible, VR, AR & MR, Multimodal interfaces
• Console gaming, 3D input devices
• Co-located interaction, presentations
• Educational Pedagogy, learner-centric
• Empirical methods, case studies
• Multi-display interaction

Submission:  The deadline for workshop paper submissions is January 6th, 2010. Interested researchers should submit a 4-page position paper in the ACM CHI Extended Abstract Format to the workshop management system. Acceptance notifications will be sent out March 15, 2010. The workshop will be held April 11, 2010 in Atlanta, USA. Please note that at least one author of an accepted position paper must register for the workshop and for one or more days of the CHI 2010 conference. 

Website: http://TechnologyAndPedagogy.edwardtse.com

Workshop Contact:  Edward Tse  edwardtse [at] smarttech.com SMART Technologies

Johannes Schöning

DFKI GmbH

Yvonne Rogers

Pervasive Computing Laboratory

The Open University,

Chia Shen

Scientists Discovery Room

School of Engineering and

Applied Sciences

Harvard University

Gerald Morrison

SMART Technologies

RELATED

Learning Through Touch (pdf) -SMART Technologies

Interactive Administrator: Now is the time for touch SMART Technologies

Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2009 Conference

November 23-25, Banff, Canada

The Vodafone Symphonia- A Symphony of Phones, Via Henry Jenkins, author of "The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture"

I learned about the Vodafone Symphonia video through Henry Jenkins. If you haven't heard of him by now, and you've found your way to this post, you should!


Henry Jenkins co-founded the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and now is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California.


Be sure to read Henry's recent blog post, Strange Overtures: Vodafone, Tchaikovsky, Ernie Kovacs and the "Wowness" of New Media, focuses on how joyful it is to receive a delightful gifts, such as the VodaFone video,  and how this sent to him by a former student. In this post, he relates this experience to some of his thoughts from his recent book, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture.


I came across the link to the video through Facebook, since Henry decided to circulate the video. (I'm really Henry Jenkin's FAN.)


FYI: Today, 11/6/09, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, Henry is participating in a free webinar, "Moving from "Sticky" to Spreadable": The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality". 


VodaFone Symphonia



The Making of the Vodafone Symphonia


The Making of the Vodafone Symphonia Part II


RELATED
Vodafone's Symphonia Website
(You can download the full track of the Symphonia and the 53 ringtones)

Interactive Video Art in Action: MuchoWall from Tangible Display (and Jimmy Hertz)

 

Photo of MuchoWall, an 80" multimodal sensitive wall from Tangible Displays (Jimmy Hertz, Founder)

Jimmy Hertz is a member of the NUI-Group and has been involved in various activities to spread the world about natural-user interfaces and interaction.



Be sure to watch the entire video. It is almost like watching a dance performance when you watch artist interact with the display.


Thanks, Seth Sandler, for the the link!

A little off-topic: Video parody of the Facebook friending ritual, only in real life - (and more serious thoughts about social software apps)

Facebook in Real Life is a short parody of the Facebook "friending" ritual by theBritish comedy sketch group, Idiots of Ants



I came across this video featured in a blog post on the Core77 website, "Software: The Other "Design for Social Impact", by Gentry Underwood, after following a link from Experientia's Putting People First blog. 

Gentry Underwood works at IDEO, and he's spent some time thinking deeply about social software design and everything that surrounds it.  His article is long, but in my opinion, very important to read, even if you are not a designer or developer.  

After you finish the article, you might be interested in visiting Underwoods' new Designing Social Software website.