The Pervasive and the Digital

Pervasive games are games that are played in the real world-they are not played as a computerized simulation or on a limited physical game arena. The central attraction for pervasive games is that they offer the pleasure of doing things for real. The world is a vast and infinitely changing resource of content for pervasive games. Interference is a pervasive game playable by groups of 6-8 players lasting for a total of 3-4 hours and using both technology (such as GPS positioning and augmented reality) and human actors to create the full experience. In this paper, we describe the design goals for Interference and how these permeate through all aspects of the design of the game to create a coherent experience. Interference shows how an emotionally complex game experience can be achieved without resorting to ambiguity or deep role playing. The game has so far been staged on seven occasions and we briefly report on the experiences from those stagings.

2001

♣ The eight following partners constitute the art.live consortium: Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Casterman Edition S.A., Bruxelles, Belgium; Associação para o desenvolvimento das telecomunicações e técnicas de informática, Lisboa, Portugal; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Fastcom Technology S.A., Lausanne, Switzerland; Association pour le Développement de l'Enseignement et de la Recherche en Systématique Appliquée, Paris, France; Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble 1, France; Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazion S.p.A., Torino, Italy. ABSTRACT

2021

In 2019 the ERC project AN-ICON lead by Prof. Andrea Pinotti and Casa degli Artisti in Milan decided to join each other to create a virtual atelier, the 12° Atelier, a digital reconstruction of the Casa degli Artisti, realized on Mozilla Hubs by the developer Enea Le Fons. Mozilla Hubs is a VR chatroom system designed for every headset and browser, designed to give the possibility to have both an immersive and screen experience. The 12° Atelier was conceived to host an art residency program, curated by the AN-ICON team (Elisabetta Modena and Sofia Pirandello), aiming at realizing original artworks in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality both in-person and remotely. The artists were invited to reflect on the relationship between the concrete physical environment (the eleven physical ateliers in Casa degli Artisti) and the virtual one (the 12° Atelier), investigating the perceptive and agentive possibilities that the new virtual technologies allow. The final exhibition was intended to be installed both physically and online, constructing an interactive and mixed narrative. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our project completely changed its design and goals, revealing unexpected pros and cons. We were forced to push aside the physical installation of the artworks in the concrete exhibition space, annihilating the AR and MR part of our research. Together with Luca Pozzi, the first artist in residence, we then decided to realize a VR artwork, entitled Rosetta Mission 2020, inspired by the homonymous European Space Agency mission which took place between 2004 and 2016. The comet 67.P Churyumov Gerasimenko, which was reached by the mission, is transformed from a physical celestial body into a digital convergence point for different disciplines. Luca Pozzi conceived the artwork as a new collaborative environment to teleport travellers in. We had to imagine a new way of working together and designing the complete experience. The present intervention will explain how we experienced the virtual environment as a fruitful workspace, where we felt more present than in ordinary online social platforms. Using both Mozilla Hubs and Unity, we thought about the narrative to introduce the artwork as a virtual immersive travel space mission to reach the comet in outer space. While museums were closed, we were able to continue the residency program. Furthermore, we were able to use the Pozzi’s artwork as a place for academic seminars and other didactic activities. https://zip-scene.mome.hu/#about https://an-icon.unimi.it/12atelier/

6th International Conference on Generative Art, Milan, …, 2002

Our society's modalities of communication are rapidly changing. Large panel displays and screens are be ing installed in many public spaces, ranging from open plazas, to shopping malls, to private houses, to theater stages, classrooms, and museums. In parallel, wearable computers are transforming our technological landscape by reshaping the heavy, bulky desktop computer into a lightweight, portable device that is accessible to people at any time. Computation and sensing are moving from computers and devices into the environment itself. The space around us is instrumented with sensors and displays, and it tends to reflect a diffused need to combine together the information space with our physical space. This combination of large public and miniature personal digital displays together with distributed computing and sensing intelligence offers unprecedented opportunities to merge the virtual and the real, the information landscape of the Internet with the urban landscape of the city, to transform digital animated media in storytellers, in public installations and through personal wearable technology. This paper describes technological platforms built at the MIT Media Lab, through 1994-2002, that contribute to defining new trends in architecture that merge virtual and real spaces, and are reshaping the way we live and experience the museum, the house, the theater, and the modern city. 1. A new architecture for the information society Architecture is no longer simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces the pla y of digital information in space. William J. Mitchell, Dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, in: e-topia, pg. 41 Our daily lives are characterized by our constant access-to and processing-of a large quantity and variety of information. In the last decade, t he rapid diffusion of the information superhighways, the amazing progress in performance and processing power of today's computers, paralleled by a drop of their cost , has determined a profound transformation of western world societies. In addition to being transmitted by the traditional media, such as television, radio, the newspaper, the book, the telephone, the mail, information is conveyed to us in electronic form by the home or office computer, public billboards, private hand-held PDAs, cellular phones, and soon even by our wrist-worn watch and clothes. The potential offered by the rapid and efficient exchange of data, globally, between individuals and organizations, delineates new social, economic, and cultural models based on the exchange of knowledge. The information society is defined by the primary role of information, such that power and growth are associated to our ability to receive, store, process, and transmit information instantaneously.

As teachers of art, we prepare our students to be artists in the 21st century while defining, along the way, what that might mean. This work takes place largely within our courses at the Fine Arts Department at the University of Murcia in Spain. Our courses make use of place, mobile technology, and the language of games to engage our students in new artistic modes. Some may see technology as something that distracts people from art, but artists are playing a key role in understanding, in a emotional and creative way, the potential for mobile technology in society. Specifically, this chapter describes our explorations with two significant affordances of the medium: (1) Geolocation—the ability to link place and media, and (2) distributed authorship—the common ability of many people to contribute to the creation of a single artifact or to remix existing content to fit their needs. We provide examples of student projects that model these affordances and demonstrate a merging of art and technology in order to begin to understand possibilities for art that intersects cinema, hypermedia, mobile, games, and public space. Much of our work builds on the concept of expanded cinema, as defined by Gene Youngblood in the early 1970s. He proposed the term to express his understanding that the traditional way of making cinema and its separation of the audience from the creator was over. Today, with this same understanding we use mobile technology and games, as well as other formats and genres, as means to ask students to approach broad themes of importance to the future of art and society. To expand cinema, we combine typical media formats, production, and performance. Additionally, we especially seek to take advantage of new formats like mobile games and the unique senses and aspects of the world—like public space, smell, sound, and/or energy—that these new media open up. We aim to create cinematic moments in the first person and first place across a variety of digital and analog formats. It is important to clarify that the projects we mention here are not finished creations. We are interested in the process of opening minds to new ways of thinking about art with digital media 124 and mobile. We consider these designs as ephemeral moments of creativity. They stay alive in the minds of students during their long and hard journey to the world of corporations and markets.

2005

This is a tribute to Marie-Laure Ryan, presented as part of the Booth Prize Panel at the Narrative 2017 conference in Lexington (Kentucky). It gives an overview of some of her most important contributions to digital narratology.

Advances in Media, Entertainment, and the Arts, 2020

This chapter examines the evolution of trends in the arts, storytelling, and immersive media, along with the emerging awareness, expansion, and deliberate application of social impact entertainment (SIE). The author discusses how the ideas and concepts of transmedia, convergence, and storyworld-building have now expanded beyond academic theory into more organic commercial and artistic applications. The focus is on how this approach relates to extending intellectual properties and stories into immersive media platforms and beyond. Additionally, the author presents several case studies and examples of emerging arts and media formats to support what we might expect to experience in the near future.

Technoetic arts, 2011

Understanding the interactive art experience requires investigation of relations among multiple (v)users-participants who are both viewers and users in interaction with the artwork and among themselves. The author proposes five elements in interactive art: Presence, including components of proximity, boundaries, common ground and scale Mapping, comprising both space and time, and whatever interface organizes the two; this may result in a dynamic map-one that changes in response to (v)user interactions Action, designating both the analogue and digital behaviours that (v)users engage in, as well as the various gestures that become meaningful Learning, involving a learning curve, scripting by the artist, improvisation by the viewer in figuring out the system, and repetition to confirm patterns, resulting in a rhythm or flow 1. (v)user is a term introduced by the author in early 1998 to discuss participants who are both viewers and users in the interaction with the artwork and between themselves. Bill Seaman uses a similar term, (v)user, also coined in early 1998.

Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Immersive design fiction is a novel approach that embeds speculative interactions within a rich virtual reality (VR) storyworld. Immersive design fictions use VR to translate new design opportunities into story-driven, embodied experiences by positioning the participant as a character in a narrative world. This paper presents a case study of an immersive design fiction that depicts a fictionalized reimagining of an industry partner's work practices. This VR experience explores speculative interfaces for creative work and collaboration in the context of a fictional workplace environment. By placing design fictions within rich immersive contexts such as room-scale VR, researchers and practitioners can go beyond prototyping imagined interfaces to also speculate about the interaction rituals and surrounding social context within an experiential storyworld. This approach makes methodological and theoretical contributions to design fiction research by demonstrating a toolkit for exploring and reflecting upon the intersections between speculation, embodiment, and narrative context.