What’s this? Inspired by Kars‘ and Niels‘ efforts to create weeknotes, I will update this website with (irregular) scheduled notes about my work and what I’ve been up to.
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Thu Tran remodeling Baloo the Bear for Babycastles Cyborg Arcade
The week kicked off with the Citizen Science on the Move conference in Utrecht, which is according to the website “part of the GATE-funded Knowledge Transfer Project between Utrecht University’s Center for the Study of Games and Play and mobile story-telling platform 7scenes. A partner for this conference is the Waag Society, an Amsterdam-based institute for art, science, and technology”. It was good to see some faces of old again. Among others, MIT Director of Comparative Media Studies, William Uricchio was talking about the Social Documentary. In the audience was also Douglas Rushkoff who was to defend his phd dissertation later the same day.
In between breaks I briefly visited Dutch Game Garden where I ran into Guido Soetens and talked a little bit about his touch table game Bygar and why it was not taken into consideration at the Creative Game Challenge Student Edtion. The event took place the week before and I was one of the judges. It is an excellent game by the way, so make sure to check it out.
After the break I went to the beautiful Utrecht University “Academiegebouw” where Douglas Rushkoff was going to defend his PHD dissertation as announced on the GAP website. His thesis is titled: “Monopoly moneys: the media environment of corporatism and the player’s way out”. Among the committee members were Frans Mäyra, William Uricchio, Jeroen Jansz, and Ben Schouten. It was quite a ‘laid back’ ceremony with a more conversational style than firing questions towards the phd defender (hints: there was talk about playability and Lego Mindstorms). Dr. Christoph Bieber wrote a great blogpost on the ceremony and also gives us clues on behind the scene happenings, here (in German).
While the committee was deliberating, Douglas was relaxing and posing together with his ‘paranimfen’: his brother and Imar de Vries, for a couple of photos. The official ceremony concluded with a speech by Joost Raessens about how Rushkoff ended up at the UU and what a journey it was. And of course with the announcement that Rushkoff is now an official Doctor. Afterward we went to the U-Theater Studio T, for celebrations, bubbles and Douglas signing his dissertation for us. Rushkoff wrote a brief blogpost on his dissertation defense and used one of my photos (taken with a crappy nexus one camera, because we weren’t officially allowed to take photos) to illustrate the ceremony. I also briefly chatted with Anne-Marie Schleiner, whom I remembered from the earlier days with the Tomb Raider patches and gender & hacktivism.
On Tuesday I went to the second day of the Citizen Science conference, dropping by for the last session titled “Playing Activism”, with Mark Deuze, Anne-Marie Schleiner and Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff talked about the Occupy movement and how it incorporates a couple of things from science: Feedback, Narrative, Prototyping, Play and Systems thinking.
After Citizen Science I went to Dutch Game Garden for a meeting with Kitty Calis and Liselore Goedhart about our plans for an Indie Game The Movie screening and a small festival (without a name still) later in the year. In the evening I watched the documentary about Marina Abramović: “The Artist is Present”. It shows to what lengths the performance artist goes and how she emotionally engages and captures her audience. Will have to recommend this documentary to my DVTG/IPDG students.
On Wednesday I worked a little bit on the ideas for the festival without a name, and went to a meeting with Aneta Lesnikovska of mediaZOO at the Coffee Company to discuss the Cross Video Days we went to, and to update our plans for the game part of the Transmedia project LOUD. In the evening Google’s I/O conference started which ‘ordinary people’ like me, could follow live here. As everyone on my twitter feed I was quite blown away by the Glass project live demo in which they showed how Glass can live-stream an event in first person and shared via Hangouts. They did it while skydiving and mountainbiking to Moscone. Project Glass reminds me of the whole Steve Mann approach in the 80s & 90s with his wearable computers. The Verge has an excellent article on the history of wearable computing in relation to Project Glass.
On Thursday I took the train to Rotterdam, to meet up with Peter de Jong (Codeglue) who had expressed interest in doing a screening for IGTM also in relation to the new DGA Dev Sig. It seemed only logical to collaborate on this and I’m happy to say we are both very excited about the prospects of working on it together. I was invited to stay and have lunch at the Codeglue HQ, which has a beautiful view over Rotterdam by the way. In the afternoon we strolled to WORM, “Institute for Avantgardistic Recreation”, a fantastic venue / organization and with supernice people. We met up with Richard Boeser (Sparpweed) and Walter Langelaar (WORM) to talk about indie games. indie games arcade and events. More about that soon, so stay tuned!
I was going to grab coffee with Tanja Koning (who earlier this year organized the Facing Pages festival) while in Rotterdam, but she couldn’t make it, hope to do that soon so we can catch up!
I decided to go to Hilversum instead, where the end was near for the “It’s Art in The Game” exhibition in Museum Hilversum. As closing event the museum organized “It’s Design In The Game”, a symposium “about the role of games and design in art and the museum”. Among the speakers were Micah Hrehovcsik (HKU), Britte Sloothaak (Independent Art Professional) and Alan Boom (curator). Arjen de Jong was in the audience to supply the discussion with (well-informed) critiques from the game side perspective. Also read his excellent review of the It’s Art in The Game exhibition on Bashers. The designers of the exhibition were also present and talked about their experiences of creating two (simple) games for the exhibition and handed out a beautifully designed “Bookazine” which deals with the symposium and the exhibition.
On Friday I finally found some time to sort and edit my 7DFPS Show & Tell photos and upload them to flickr. I also fiddled with the zo-ii facebook page and currently thinking over what to do with the page.
On Saturday I sorted and edited the photos of the Babycastles Cyborg Arcade Workshop and the Cyborg Arcade Party that were organized two weeks ago by WORM. You can find them apples here. Don’t forget to watch the Babycastles workshop video made by Walter! Birgit also took some photos.
Sunday it was time for these (lengthy!) weeknotes, found out I missed the Digital Crossroads conference in Utrecht, and had a conference call with the other Global Game Jam directors to talk about directions and to do’s for next year’s edition of Global Game Jam.
I also realized I had not even looked at tweets and happenings at TED Global this year that took place from June 25-29 in Edinburgh. Last year I was involved in doing a playful collaboration (after my TEDx talk in Oslo) at the TEDxAmsterdamLive event where the audience watched the Global talks together. This year they did it again.
Tomorrow the start of a new week!