Universe Creation 101

I WILL NOT be at PICNIC 06

Not by choice. I would love to go and I must say I had free pass to go since I am meant to be co-presenting the International Game Developers Association Alternate Reality Game Whitepaper that I co-wrote, but I couldn’t rustle up the funding in time. I’m sure the writers that are going will do a great job in the session and have a ball. To all the crossmedia researchers who are going that I know (Indira, Monique, Daphne, Peter…) – say hi to the ARG people.

I see that Frank Alsema, a cross-media producer I respect from afar, is attending and there are a few Aussies too: ACID researchers; Courtney Gibson, Head of TV Arts and Entertainment at the ABC; Brendan and Megan from XMediaLab; and some notable organisations who are not there … I must say, although it looks like there is going to be lots of fascinating talks and naughty stuff going on (see this Picnic video at YouTube) the majority of cross-media talks are in the Partner sessions. That means, the cross-media parts were not curated by Picnic, but by people who were attracted to the tag “crossmedia week” and who did it themselves.

In the end though, if I went to Picnic I wouldn’t of been able to do these wonderful things:

I WILL be presenting for the Film Makers Network in Canberra

I will be presenting for the ACT Film Makers Network at National Museum of Australia on Wednesday night for 1.5 hours! Yes, that’s right, they get 1.5 hours of me and I’m going to share lots of juicy cross-media stuff. It is a delight to be speaking to filmmakers and TV writers. Here is the blurb:

INTERACTIVITY – THE NEW WORLD OF PRODUCTION DEVELOPMENT WEDNESDAY 27TH SEPTEMBER 2006        
 
Consumers are becoming more demanding about their consumption needs. 

What is the new and progressively required relationship between the television/film content and the interactive component of content for websites, IPOD, RSS and content for mobile phones?

The creation, use and complexity of developing content for producers is progressively becoming more complex. 

We are now living in the information age and what are some questions, considerations practitioners should consider when developing their productions. 

Some questions include:

How is the modern movement in communications affecting the film and television industry?
What can content creators develop to take advantage of other new channels for content dispersal?
How is the new technology of IPOD, interactivity and mobile phones effecting the production planning cycle of production?
What kind of personnel and technologies are involved and required with creating alternative distribution platforms for productions?
How do these new technologies influencing distribution strategies?

I’m going to really enjoy this one. Then, I’ll be flying to Brisbane to do this:

I WILL be presenting and attending the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Brisbane

I will be presenting and attending the Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences, Association of Internet Researchers conference. I will be presenting my talk, How the Internet is Holding the Center of Conjured Universes, in the 8.30am session in the Lockyer Room on Friday 29th Sept. It is a talk about how people are using the internet to manage cross-media projects. There will also be a talk by Anja Bechmann Petersen, a longtime participant in this blog and crossmedia researcher who has come over to Oz from Denmark. Anja is now studying at Syd Uni with me now! She is presenting on Thursday 28th in the 16.15 session in Ballroom B. 

Here are the various sites and tags for the conference as there is sure to be alot of commentary on the web as it unfolds:

• The Main Conference site is here: http://conferences.aoir.org/index.php?cf=5 
• The Conference program is here: http://conferences.aoir.org/program.php?cf=5 
• The Conference Wiki is at: http://wiki.AoIR.org/index.php?title=AoIR2006 
• The unconference, AOIRCamp, is at: http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=AOIRcamp 
• Technorati tag: http://www.technorati.com/tag/aoir2006
• Flickr tag: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/aoir2006

See you in Canberra, Brisbane or on the Net! Have a great week everyone!

 aoir2006      <
font face="Arial" color="#4c4c4e" size="1">

Baby Rock Records is offering lullaby versions of rock tunes so that the parents can enjoy listening as much as their bundles of joy. They’ve got lullaby versions of Metallica, ColdPlay, Bjork, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Tool, The Cure, Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, The Pixies, Queens of the Stone Age, No Doubt, Smashing Pumpkins and The Beatles.

As fortune would have it, the site was recommended to me by a stranger while I’m in the middle of a discussion on a narrative listserv about plurality. Perfect.  

As of 10th Nov, 2007, this page moved to:
http://www.christydena.com/online-essays/cross-media-virtual-worlds-cinema-tv-and-books/

My latest articles in SLATE Magazine explore the notion of the art space in virtual worlds. In part one I analyse how some spaces are remediations of the real world and then in part two I pose ideas about what would be the ‘white cube’ equivalent (the ideal environment to experience art) in a virtual world. I’ve opened up a forum thread at the end so anyone can add their own thoughts. In this 2nd issue of SLATE are reviews of art festivals and galleries in SL, an interesting article about a theatre production in SL by Anya Ixchel (Angela Thomas in RL) the editor of SLATE, and the second installment of the backbackers guide to SL: Sim Trekker. I love the idea of the last one: getting around SL on a budget! Anyway, there is plenty more: talk about the notion of identity in SL, relationships, science fiction and so on. Enjoy!

reblogged at WRT

**World Premiere**

**Day Of The Figurines, HAU, Berlin**

Blast Theory presents the world premiere of Day Of The Figurines, a mass participation artwork using mobile phones that is part board game and part secret society.

Set in a fictional English town that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay, the game unfolds over 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town. Up to 1000 players place their plastic figurines onto the board. They are moved by hand in a meticulous performance throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Players participate by sending text messages. They must help other players as they receive updates from the town, missions and dilemmas.
They can also chat to players who are near them in the town using text messages as events unfold in the town: a gig by Scandinavian death metallists, an invasion by a Middle Eastern army, a summer fete.

Day Of The Figurines is the world’s first MUD (Multi User Domain) for mobile phones.

Invited by Trampoline as part of First Play Berlin which features innovative work that questions and expands the notion of interactive art, Day Of The Figurines will be on show in the foyer of Berlin’s venue, the Hebbel am Ufer theatre, HAU2, from the 28th September to 21st October 2006

Opening times

28th September to 21st October 4 – 6pm
 
First Play Berlin Weekend 12th – 15th October 4 – 11.30pm

Day Of The Figurines was developed as part of the European research project IPerG (Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming).

For more details

Day Of The Figurines http://www.dayofthefigurines.co.uk

Blast Theory http://www.blasttheory.co.uk

Mixed Reality Lab http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk

IPerG http://www.pervasive-gaming.org

Trampoline http://www.trampoline-berlin.de

Additional tour Dates

National Museum of Singapore, December 2006

Brighton, Birmingham and Manchester, 2007

Digital Fringe - Call for entries extended to September 27th

Seeking Digital Art submissions

Digital Fringe is a web based digital arts festival that connects to Melbourne via numerous screens throughout the city.  Streaming live across the city of Melbourne (Australia), from the monster screen at Federation Square to a host of other screens around town, Digital Fringe will have you thumbing art from your mobile phone and watching public projections in the most unlikely places.

Digital Fringe is seeking submissions of digital visual material to broadcast over the Internet as a part of the The Age 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival: September 27 to October 15.  We are calling for Digital art works to display on all screens.  These can be stills, animations, video art, short film, abstract pieces, whatever!  They will be played without sound.  This material will make up part of the general stream which will play on all screens throughout the city during the festival and can be accessed online.  Artists will retain the copyright of all works.

Digital Fringe is produced by Horse Bazaar in association with Melbourne Fringe.

For more info, log onto http://www.digitalfringe.com.au/

Oz Spade, the name of a Second Life resident, has created this handy comparison chart of the functions of Second Life, There and Active Worlds.

Got this heads up from Tom’s site. The next DiGRA in 2007 looks like they’re got their finger on the pulse. They say, among other points that we need to analyse games from a variety of different perspectives. It is wonderful to see this after I just gave a talk championing multiple-perspectives and how we consensus is not the dominating method for understanding anymore. Here is a sizable section from their website:

A digital game is an extremely complex social and technological phenomenon. Games are not isolated entities that one can effectively study in vitro. Games are situated in culture and society. To truly understand the phenomenon of digital games, it is not enough to merely study the games themselves or short-term impacts as described by laboratory experiments - they are only part of the story. Indeed digital games cannot be considered for study until certain socio-economic and technological preconditions for production take place. Their context begins when the games are marketed and circulated, and they reach the hands of players. Context continues to build as potential players satisfy certain prerequisites: resources to obtain a console or a PC, time and motivations to play games, and skills to enjoy sometimes very complex digital games. We need to understand not just narratological and ludological content of the games, but also the industrial and economic contexts that produce digital games, and the socio-cultural backgrounds that produce game players and generate gameplay. In short, to understand games, we need to look at them from multitude of different perspectives.

To make the case even more complex, while games are ubiquitous, they are geographically diverse, and game play is local. Games are produced and consumed differently in Japan and in North America. Online games have different meanings and functions in Korea and in Europe. When we look at the situatedness of games, we see more cultural diversity in games, even beyond the superficiality of geo-political boundaries into myriad sub-cultures that might find unifying interests across traditional cultural lines. Gameplay is messy. Yet we must strive to understand it, even if it means pulling together many small pieces of the overall puzzle together, in hope that the whole might reveal itself over time.

We, therefore, need to unite. We need to mobilize all those who can provide any insights about digital games, from academia to industry, across a wide range of disciplines and expertise. In particular, we need to gather voices from around the world to better reflect a wide range of experience and perspective. Tokyo will be an excellent place for game researchers from around the world to meet, and an excellent place for game studies scholars to talk with practitioners from game industry. We propose that this conference be an opportunity to bridge West and East, Industry and Academia, the result being a greater holistic understanding of games, their impacts, and potential in our world.

The only problem I have with ‘Situated Play’ is after all that rhetoric about diversity they keep referring to digital games only. Are they seriously limiting the conference to digital games only?!

Yep, you read it right. I’m presenting my theory on Mono-Polymorphism tomorrow (Friday Sept 15th) at Sydney University at a talk I was invited to give.

Mono-Polymorphism: A Paradigm for Understanding Cross-Media Entertainment
Christy Dena

In the age of cross-media production works are distributed over time and
space like never before. A story can be adapted into numerous media and arts
forms; episodes traverse television and digital games; a plot can stretch
from a book to the web; a work of fiction can be indistinguishable from
reality and a work of art indistinguishable from marketing. The
methodological discourses touched by this phenomenon are, among others,
Narratology, Ludology, Media Studies and Semiotics. How does one recognise,
analyse and frame these works? Introducing Mono-Polymorphism: the theory where
many forms and the singular co-exist. Giddy with the notion of a ‘unified
theory of everything’, this theory seeks to provide a schema for
understanding the meta-discursive, taxonomical, and rhetorical complexity of
these works. And yes, the dissonance with ‘mono-polymorphism’ is
intentional.

It will be in the Rogers Room, Woolley Building at 3pm. All welcome!

A heads up from Mysdirection informs me of this wonderful prank performance created by the Improv Everywhere team. Their latest mission was to have a team member act lost at the Yankee stadium during a game. He kept appearing but just couldn’t hear his mates yelling and waving at him. This continued for a while until whole sections where waving and screaming to help Rob get back to his seat. They describe the event and have pics and videos at the mission page. Lots of fun.