Final document – The MediaLAB Amsterdam offers students of different backgrounds to participate in creative projects. During a semester, students get the chance to work in a professional environment and get a taste of working life in the creative industries. Our project group, Led It Up, took charge of the Culture Vortex project. Together with partners DROPSTUFF.nl and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, the team developed an interactive installation consisting of a big LED screen (5m by 3m) and a web application to interact with the screen through the use of a smartphone.
Our assignment was to remix the content of the Sound & Vision Open Images database while using the DROPSTUFF.nl LED screen as a channel to introduce this remixed audiovisual material to the public. It had to be an interactive product. For this interactivity we chose a mobile web application (as opposed to a native application) because of the widespread support for different platforms. By logging into the web application on your smartphone with your Facebook or Twitter account, you can play 2 games on the LED screen. The games are ‘Galgje’ and ‘Wat mist er?’, both familiar games for many. The games revolve around the audiovisual material from the Open Images database which consists of old Polygoon journals from the 1920’s till 80’s.
The public can experience this remix of audiovisual history in a contemporary setting. One of the goals of the project was to point the audience to the visuals of the database and to stimulate creative re-use. By emphasizing the videos in both games as main focus point, the public is actively playing with their cultural heritage.
This final document provides a guide through the project from beginning till end – and beyond. All steps and phases of the project will be described thoroughly to create a clear picture of the project in its entirety. Besides that this document serves as a manual for reproduction later on.
Concept game ideas – Examples of games
LedItUp research – The MediaLab Amsterdam offers students of different backgrounds to participate in creative projects. During a semester, students get the chance to work in a professional environment and get a taste of working life in the creative industries. Team Led It Up will be in charge of the Culture Vortex project. Together with Dropstuff and the Institute of Sound & Vision, the team will be working on a project that combines discourses of urban screens in public space and the remixing of culture (in this case we focus on cultural expressions such as films/television/images, as provided by Sound & Vision’s Open Images) and puts these into practice. Our main goal is to create a new and creative way to remix old material, showcase this on the big screen provided by Dropstuff on an event or festival, and add an interactive layer to it. The public should be able to interact with what they see. To make this happen the project requires communication between big LED screens and mobile devices/phones.
Design research – This document provides information about the technical design of our project. In the first part. all three games will be shortly described and elaborately explained on the basis of the rules of the games and the gameplay elements. Furthermore, this document serves as a guide through the design phase of the project, as we describe what is seen on the screen and what is seen on the mobile throughout the different phases of the gameplay. This way a detailed overview is presented of what the screen should look like, what the mobile should look like and what happens during the game experience – step by step. The second part of the document does the same thing but for the overall format.
Attached you find the technical design illustrated in a flowchart. This chart, bundled with the document, serves as the foundation of our game development.