10.00 – 12.00u SLIMME STEDEN EN BEWONERS

Joost Plattel THE QUANTIFIED SELF

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Leonieke Verhoog – FIGURERUNNING

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René van Engelenburg – DROPSTUFF

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13.00 – 14.30u CONTENT OP LOCATIE

Hermen Maat en Karen Lancel – SAVING FACE

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Jeffrey Braun en Billy Schonenberg -DOCS ON THE SPOT

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Robbert Ritmeester – HET WAS VROEGER VANDAAG

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15.00-17.00u DATA IN DE STAD

Frédérik Ruys – NEDERLAND VAN BOVEN

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WdKA – SHOWCASE ONDERWIJSPROJECTEN

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“…If you think of every light in the city, …essentially being a pixel…that is programmable, that is editable, that can transform the experience of the city… that respond to the people moving around in the city and engage in the city… This is a fundamental reformulation of the idea of ….urban lightning…  Now you can embrace every single light source, and think of the entire city as a programmable display.” -William Mitchell*

Since 2008, PhD Candidate from the Smart Cities Group at the MIT Media Lab Susanne Seltinger,  Danny Perry from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Dawood Rouben from the Architecture department, are working on what they call the “Liberated Pixels” project.

They are experimenting with systems aimed to blur the boundaries between what we conceive as urban lightning and public digital displays. In contrast to typical urban screens, their concept doesn’t restrain pixels to rigid frames. Liberated pixels can be applied to surfaces in any configuration and communicate with each other to enable playful patterns. A second development in progress consists of wireless liberated pixels, what they call Urban pixels. These solar-powered units are programmable and have a distributed interface which brings it flexibility.

More information and a video of the pixels in action can be found at the LabCAST webpage.

*Founder of the Smart Cities Group at the MIT and author of the books “City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn” (1995), “E-topia” (1999) — subtitled  “Urban Life, Jim — but Not as We Know It,”  and “Me ++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City”(2003), among others.

Urban Screens crew visited the festival, and couldn’t miss a workshop of our special interest: “Urban Screens and the Electric City“.  It took place on the 1st day of the festival, Wednesday September 14th at the Crystal Palace. Different speakers shared their ideas and at the end of the session there was a group activity to creatively propose content for urban screens.

Matt Cottam from Telart presented Soundaffects, an experiential project by Parsons The New School for Design. It takes environmental data, like weather or traffic, or even motion and connectivity,  and transforms it or expresses it with musical sounds. The idea is to let us see and listen to our environment, from a new point of view, a different way to understand our cities. Matt  uploaded some pictures of the results of the quick workshop, you can check them out in his flickr account by clicking on the picture:

Another speaker was Maia Garau from XPlane. Their company focuses on Business Design Thinking. They combine research, collaborative consulting, design thinking, social media technology and visual communication. She made an open invite to everyone to attend their Visual Thinking School, which is open to the public and takes place every 1st Thursday of every month at their offices in Portland and Amsterdam.

Beeker Northam from Dentsu London Strategy Director was also present. Dentsu is a communication agency and they are working on various innovative advertisement projects. An interesting project by their authorship is a video which was produced using Ipad tablets to “paint” with light. You can check the make-off in the following link: Making Future Magic.

Chris Heathcote, Creative Technologist also from Dentsu noted how screens have crept into our cities. He addressed examples like the tube in London, where in a period of 50 seconds you can see 60 screens while going down or up the escalators. He also exposed the fact that there are more than 75,000 screens installed in public in the UK. Some of the characteristics that he can relate to urban screens is that they are normally silent, you can’t turn them off, they might be or not controllable, might be or not aware of you through sensors. Uses and location, he added, are important characteristics to think about, some screens are used in many contexts for many different reasons, from gyms to post offices, there are screens for information, for interaction, advertisement… some of them are even virtually unreadable because of their location, etc.  You can read more of his ideas about urban screens in the following link:  http://anti-mega.com/antimega/2009/09/30/screens-in-context

London-based Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving improvements in human and animal health. This year they celebrate their 75th anniversary, and they hold a special exhibition that introduces visitors to some of the key people behind the Trust’s achievements, including the Human Genome Project; malaria drug discovery; funding of science and art collaborations; and research to understand the human brain.

They have given the seventh in a series of annual design comissions to rAndom International, to welcome their visitors through a façade intervention named “Reflex”. This light Installation will be living at Wellcome Collection building’s windows until April 2012 and it is  located at 215 Euston Road. It now is the habitat of an organism that represents itself in the form of light, which reacts by establishing physical responses between the building and the passers-by. The behavior of the screen is inspired by an algorithm developed to simulate the collective decision making process that animals such as birds flocking, or ants, employ in the natural world. Something different from their indoor-installation “A study of time” is the location. An estimated number of 5,000 people walk past each day. While the first project is designed for an interior space, a choreography, “Reflex” stands between the public and the private, caged inside but in constant dialogue with the street.

rAndom International is a London-based collective who are developing projects and installations that have as a goal to re-interpret the ‘cold’ nature of digital work and emphasize on the interaction of the audience with the object.

‘A study of time’ is one of their recent works, which is based on their choreographic design for the dance piece FAR by Wayne McGregor at Random Dance. It was premiered at Design Miami Basel 2011, and takes light as a medium for the representation of the time of day. An algorithm reveals the time through the strong communicating power of light and shadows, reminding us of sundials, surfaces that let us interpret the time by analyzing the shadows the sun casts in them.  Especially interesting about this piece are the transitions and the visual effects that the illuminated points in the “deep grid” achieve.

Use Your Head is an interactive urban projection produced by MediaLAB Amsterdam together with the Filmwerkstatt Munster for the Flurstucke Festival. The audience can play a game where they use their own head as an avatar on the characteristic facade of the Diozesan Bibliothek. The goal of the game is to find a balance between Culture and Industry. By playing this game, they intend to make the public reflect on the use of public space for cultural or commercial purposes.

The project is developed by students of the MediaLAB Amsterdam, of the Applied University of Amsterdam (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). They worked with the creative producers Jan Scholte & Gijs Gootjes, and the project was assigned by Winfried Bettmer and the Filmwerkstatt Munster.

The students who participated in the project are:

Guido Huijser – producer

Natta Frank – producer

Oskar Moleman – graphic designer

Janek van Abeelen – programmer

Thijs Last – 3D designer

Artists:

Interaction Designer: Arne Boon

Visual artist: Felix Kraemer

Code Guru: Wouter Reckman

Sound designer: Michiel Nijhof Samplemaster

In addition to 40 portraits of international dancers, Holland Dance has commissioned three portraits of Dutch dance talent: Sabine Kupferberg (formerly affiliated with the Netherlands Dance Theatre), Stijn Hoogendoorn (a young dancer sometimes referred to as the Dutch Billy Elliot), and Besim Hoti (who was nominated for a VSCD-dance award, in 2009).

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By exhibiting the work on large urban screens, the city of The Hague wants to festively open the new dance season.

Source: http://www.slowdancingfilms.com/

The group experiments with digital technologies, L.E.D. lights, software, projectors and magnets as tools for artistic expression at urban level. Their projects, which were exhibited at several modern art festivals, are detailed by videos on their website. The L.A.S.E.R. Tag project  for example enables writing on urban surfaces such as building facades or walls by means of computer vision technology, projectors and a laser pointer:

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But what makes the group’s activity truly valuable is the fact that the artist – engineers develop free tools with open-source technologies which can be used by graffiti writers. Their website documents all their projects and offers the tools for free download. The group has even posted tutorials on the DIY website instructables.com on

This does not make digital graffiti accessible to anyone however because a certain level of practical understanding of the technology is necessary to operate and adapt the tools. The pratice is more of a ‘geek’ – oriented graffiti, to use the words of one of the founders of the group, Evan Roth. Moreover, the high prices of acquisition for some of the equipment, such as the projectors, which can get to 7000 euros, make them still inaccessible to many.

Urban Screens is a series of events and seminars that has been organized around the theme of outdoor display screens (LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals as well as intelligent architectural surfaces) in urban areas. It supports the idea of using public space as a platform for creation and cultural exchange, strengthening the local economy and encouraging public discussion.

Since the first Urban Screens event in 2005 in Amsterdam, related international conferences have taken place in Manchester in 2007 and Melbourne in 2008. The INC and the MediaLAB are proud to present a day-long program dedicated to current Urban Screens research and practice, in Trouw Amsterdam on 4 December 2009. The event will include a seminar with lectures by Urban Screens researchers and professionals, followed by the launch of the Urban Screens Reader, which is produced by the INC and the University of Melbourne.

Topics:
Urban Screens as Architecture, with Matthijs ten Berge (Illuminate), Mettina Veenstra (Novay Research), and more. Moderator: Merijn Oudenampsen (Mute, Flexmens).
The Mobile Screen, with Martijn de Waal (The Mobile City), Nanna Verhoeff (Utrecht University), Annet Dekker (Goldsmiths and Virtual Platform), Auke Touwslager & Ursula Lavrencic (Cell Phone Disco). Moderator: Jan Simons (UvA).
The Mediatized City, with Theodore Watson (Graffiti Research Lab), Juha Van ‘t Zelfde (VURB) , Gijs Gootjes (MediaLAB Amsterdam), Visual Foreign Correspondents. Moderator: Shirley Niemans (HvA).
Urban Screens Reader Launch, with Sabine Niederer.

The Urban Screens reader draws together theories, technologies, histories and artistic deployments of urban screens in public spaces. Edited by Meredith Martin, Scott McQuire and Sabine Niederer. Contributions by Giselle Beiguelman, Andreas Broeckmann, Uta Caspary, Sean Cubitt, Annet Dekker, Erkki Huhtamo, Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat, Nikos Papastergiadis, Scott McQuire, Saskia Sassen and more.

Urban Screens 09 is organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with MediaLAB Amsterdam, Trouw| de Verdieping and the Urban Screens Association (Melbourne).
At the venue: installations by MediaLab Amsterdam, visuals by Visual Foreign Correspondents