Actually seeing Monique, Jak, Jane, Jill & Lisbeth

Although not everyone realises it, I am actually based in Australia. I spend alot of time online checking out what is happening around the world. The Net is great for this, but at the same time I hardly ever get to meet my colleages in person. This year I’ve travelled to five countries and meet many researchers & designers who have come to Oz from OS. Here are some pics of me (in order of meeting) with some colleagues who share my research interest (I’ve met others but don’t have the pics): 

CMID07

Photo by ?, uploaded by Eric Voight on flickr

This motley crew is the group shot from the First International Conference on Cross-Media Interaction Design held in Sweden in March. Wohoo! It was great meeting lots of people, including my fellow keynoter Liam Bannon. But in particular I was thrilled to meet Monique de Haas and Jak Boumans. In the pic: bottom right in the blue jacket is Monique, behind her is Liam, beside Liam is me, beside me (to the left) is Jak, and below Jak is Charlotte Wiberg who with Mikael Wiberg (the first guy to the left of Charlotte) are the conference organisers. 

Monique and I have been championing cross media for years now. We were discussing this stuff via emails and through our blogs long before it became a pervasive economic imperative. I got to spend lots of time with Monique as I stayed with her in Amsterdam and then Monique, Jak and I gave an impromptu panel session at Noordelijke Hogeschool where I was asked to give a lecture (organised by Eric Voight who is also in the pic). It was a delight meeting Jak — whose years of experience with the area has given him a balanced wisdom and generous spirit.

CJ

Photo by a lovely lady from AMP, on Jane’s flickr

This is myself and Jane McGonigal (right). Jane is of course the first major researcher of alternate reality games, she has lots of presentations and articles and a dissertation on the topic. It was especially great chatting with Jane because we got to talk about ARGs but also because she works in industry and academia. It was so good to share stories with someone who understands what it is like.

LCJ

Photo by Tama Leaver, on flickr

This is Lisbeth Klastrup (left), myself and Jill Walker (right), both of whom I met for the first time at perthDAC 2007. Lisbeth co-wrote a paper with Susana Tosca on ‘Transmedial Worlds: Rethinking Cyberworld Design’, which I have referred to here and in my papers and is in my chapter on World Creation in my thesis. The paper is available for download on Lisbeth’s articles site. Jill has written on ‘distributed narratives’ which I’ve referred to here many times, in many of my presentations and of course is in my thesis too. Check out her dedicated minisite  and here is a snippet:

Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This project explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives.

Now actually meeting people who share your research interest may not be exciting to you, but to someone who doesn’t get to meet people who work in this emerging area (and so not many looking at it) it is an absolute delight.

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