• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ’s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

• Kinoautomat (movie vending-machine), 1967… 2007

This 1967 work by Radúz Çinçera, One Man and His House, is a film that was screened at the Montreal World Fair in a specially-constructed cinema with buttons for the audience. The film continually stops at certain points, two of the actors then come on stage and ask the audience to make their choice of direction.  This is regarded as the first interactive cinema work and is interesting too because the film was specifically designed for this interaction. However, it should be noted that the interaction (like many interactive works for various technical and skills reasons) was only the illusion of interaction. As Media Art Net observes, although a different filmic sequence was shot and screened based on the audience choice. The next choice was always the same. It has recently been revived with an English version being screened in Prague. An interview with Radúz’s daughter, Alena Çinçera , and more pics is here.

Image sourced from Media Art Net. Copyright Radúz Çinçera

• Cause and Effect , 2002/…

Inspired by Kinoautomat, Chris Hales has been creating short ‘interactive cinema performances’. Cause and Effect has been running specially-created short films since 2002 and is currently touring Poland and Finland. There is a video available for download on the site, and here is a basic description from the main page:

We experiment with various techniques of group interaction and the types of interactive film that are commensurate with it. Although using sophisticated methods, the show is designed to be portable, tourable, and suitable for most venues. Currently interaction methods enable audiences to influence films by shouting, passing around bright or coloured lights, using mobile phone handsets, waving, singing soprano and humming. A typical performance consists of around eight short interactive movies (chosen from a substantial repertoire) covering genres of video art, drama, non-fiction, education, and music. The show is both entertaining and intellectual and appeals to a wide audience demographic. It is constantly developing, with varied modes of interaction being explored and new films being regularly created. Certain films are customised for the actual theatre and the language of the country in which the show takes place during a rapid pre-production phase when we arrive at the location. This localisation adds to the audience’s surprise and involvement with the films presented to them.

Image sourced from Cause and Effect

• Lance Weiler’s “Cinema ARG”, 2006/…

As I’ve mentioned here before, Lance Weiler created a unique theatre experience for the screening of his latest film, Head Trauma. His ‘cinema ARG’ involves special screenings of the film with a band playing the soundtrack live, actors and props from the film in the audience and mobile phone interaction. It has been touring across the USA and is now expanding to the web. His latest description:

This fall the HEAD TRAUMA cinematic gaming continues. Players will interact with the film’s characters; offline, online, and via mobile devices in what is a cross between flash mobs, urban gaming, and ARGs. The game starts in late September with the airing of a special web series. The series will run across a number of outlets such as myspace, xbox, twitter, eyespot, stage 6 and opera. Then on Oct. 20th, live cinema games will play out in 10 cities across the country. Within the series are clues aka rabbit holes that lead to hidden sites, blogs, social networking pages and media. A full list of cities will be released in the coming weeks.

• MSNBC’s Newsbreaker Game, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before in my post that includes stats on its success, this example is an interactive cinema advertisement. They actually call the work ‘interactive crowd gaming’ in movie theatres. It was created by SS+K in collaboration with Brand Experience Lab for msnbc.com. Here is a video of one of the cinema events:

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All of these works show without doubt the reinvigoration of the embodied and multi-modal cinema experience. What I find exciting are the fact that many of these works (and more to come I’m sure) are being specially designed. Do you know of some other interactive cinema performances/gaming?