Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Fashion in Space - Hyper Space Couture Design Contest
UPDATED: May 18, 2006
Your Design Goes to Space in 2007
Competition for Microgravity Wear for the First Generation of Space Tourism
Deadline: August 15, 2006 (Dream section extended)
Deadline: March 31, 2006 (Designer section now closed)
http://www.space-fashion.com (Japanese with English coming soon)
http://www.erimatsui.com/ (Eri Matsui)
Host:
The Steering Committee for Space Couture Contest
The R&D Committee for Space Couture Contest
Rocketplane Ltd.
Cooperation:
Industrial Collaboration Department, JAXA
What is the Space Couture Design Contest?
As you probably know, in 2007, the door will open for space tourism much like the same feeling of travelling overseas. We will look for the designers for the first generation travel wear for space tourism in this competition.
In the Designer Section, since it is possible to go to space wearing normal casual wear, please design for a cool space flight suit which releases your stress for space travel and inspires your dream for space travel. After the top 10 selections are chosen out of your design sketches, the final selection of the competition open to the public will be held by the style of the fashion show.
At the same time, The Dream Section of Design Drawings of space tourism wear will be held. In this section, we look for a more free image design for space tourism wear. Dream Section will be open for broader participation; not only the general public but also kindergarten, elementary, junior high, senior high school and university students.
Fashion show of the winners will be held in Tokyo and Paris in Mar. 2007.
The people selected for the top award will be able to develop real space tourism wear, which will be used for space tourism flights in 2007, with fashion designer Eri Matsui, Dr. Yoshiko Taya, Japan Women’s University, Katsuyoshi Horie, creative designer of Angel Square. The competition winner will be able to have a ticket for space flight (under negotiation), with following awards receiving travel ticket for space tourism flight viewing, space camp and so on.
space_couture.doc
space_couture_update.doc
Monday, April 18, 2005
VSMM 2005 (Belgium)
October 3-7, 2005
Flanders Expo
Ghent, Belgium
http://www.vsmm.org/2005
The Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation would like to announce VSMM 2005, the 11th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. The theme of this conference will be VIRTUAL REALITY AT WORK IN THE 21ST CENTURY . It will take a closer look at how Virtual Reality interacts with society, how it affects its users, and how it promotes or directs social change. The theme of the VSMM2005 Conference is Virtual Reality’s present or potential impact on 21st century society in the fields of Heritage, Education, Applied VR Technology, and Entertainment and the Arts. It will also feature a special session in which the theme of professional guidelines and health, safety, and usability issues will be addressed.
Friday, April 15, 2005
AV.06: First Announcement (Call for Expressions of Interest)
AV.06: the second audiovisual festival
March 2006
NewcastleGateshead, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, UK
http://www.avfest.co.uk/
Deadline for Expressions of Interest: 27 May 2005
http://www.avfest.co.uk/interest.html
The AV Festival is a new bi-annual international festival of digital art, moving image, music and new media convergence which takes place in the North East of England. The second AV festival - AV.06 - will take place across three cities in the North East of England during the first two weeks of March 2006. It will examine one of the key issues within creative and scientific practice - life.
AV.06 will include internationally renowned artists, filmmakers, researchers, technicians and musicians as well as emerging practitioners. Concerts, performances and exhibitions will be complemented by a conference and an education programme.
AV.06 will feature:
- new commissions of film, digital arts, music and games
- outdoor projects which will transform landmark public buildings or spaces
- live performance events at the Sage Gateshead and other concert venues
- a major strand of activity focussing on computer games
- a screening programme
- exhibitions and installations
- an international conference
- an education programme of workshops, seminars and lectures
- a programme of club events and parties
- a radio station broadcasting on-air and online
- digital projects for the region’s public transport system
AV.06 is providing creative practitioners with an opportunity to contribute ideas to the programme. If you have an existing project which could fit the thematic context of the programme, or an idea for a new work, we would like to hear about it.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Eri Matsui
Born in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Graduated from Musashino Art University Junior College of Art in Design Studies, Dyeing and Weaving Course in 1973. Attended William Rainey Harper College fashion design course from 1983 to 1985. Established “Eri Matsui Japan” in 1988. Resided in Paris from 1993 through 1999. Formed “the ISAC Meeting” in 1999 with a physicist, mathematician, engineer and artist. Began studies at the Musashino Art University to encourage creative integration of fine arts and science. Lives and works in Tokyo and Switzerland. Member of the Council of Fashion Designers, Tokyo(C-F-D). Member of the Japan Textile Design Association.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Universe Looks Good From Here
Anyone can daydream about traveling through space or visiting other worlds. But to be able to pull those dreams out of one’s head and put them down on paper in the form of highly detailed and inspiring illustrations takes talent—and lots of it.
That’s why space agencies around the world seek out artists like Pat Rawlings when they need to illustrate concepts for new missions to far-off planets.
The 49-year-old is a member of an elite group of designers, engineers and scientists who create space art—the surreal, yet technically accurate, images of astronauts and spacecraft exploring newfound landscapes. Over the past 25 years, Rawlings has produced approximately 500 of these images, combining a love of technology and a talent for illustration into a career that inspires the masses.
It is not only a space lover’s dream job, but also one that carries a great deal of responsibility.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Plugging In [Art Digital Festival in Russia]
Image credit: Lorenzo Pizzanelli / M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art
There won’t be a canvas in sight as video artists gather for an international festival at the M’ARS Center of Contemporary Art this week. Instead, visitors will watch a robot drawing Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” and play computer games with a philosophical twist.
The Art Digital festival, which opens Wednesday and runs for three weeks, aims to prove that computers, digital cameras and Internet technology are all part of an artist’s armory. And that’s a concept that is still relatively new to this country, believes the festival’s curator, Antonio Geusa, a doctoral student of Russian video art at London University.
“Access to high technology, to computers [and] to cameras happened later here, basically because of lack of money,” Geusa said. The expense of buying equipment has long deterred Russian artists, and video art remains a minority, noncommercial area, unlike in Western Europe and the United States, the curator said.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Virtual film festival takes centre stage [NetDays]
[snip]
NetDays was set up in 1997 to promote the use of new media in education throughout the European Union, raising awareness of technology and its potential with an emphasis on fostering partnerships between countries and cultural organisations in public and private sectors.
Its centrepiece is a showcase of online and offline events during an annual NetDays week, held last year at Nemo, Amsterdam’s science and technology museum, with winning projects chosen by an international jury from more than 600 entries. The Norwegian effort, Media - and its power over me, took the prize in the 16-25 category of NetDays’ first virtual film festival. It was produced by four 18-year-old media students and was inspired by their studies and some personal disenchantment with the way media dominates modern life.
“We had recently had a project about post-modernism and had produced a website on it,” explains Simon Kristian, 18. “Post-modernism is a very vague term but one of the post-modern theories is that the media is no longer reliant on reality to shape the way we perceive it. On TV today you get a selection of what the media thinks is important.”
[snip]
The theme of this year’s event was dialogue between cultures and image, and many of the projects included collaboration with one or more nations, such as the Czech Republic’s work with the Taiwan Youth Knowledge Network which brought together students from both countries in a series of art workshops, lectures and a film festival.
The number of projects entered was up 25% on 2003, partly a reflection of the inclusion of projects from the 10 new EU member states.
Ursa Bajzel, the NetDays coordinator for Slovenia, one of the new member states, says the European-wide scheme gives young people an unrivalled opportunity to air their ideas on an international stage.
‘Intimachine’ weds man, his mechanisms
On an ordinary desk, a clipboard and computer monitor sit poised to record the comings and goings of strangers. A placard reads: ‘’All visitors please sign in.’’ As they do, a surveillance camera tracks their movements. The scene, typical of many office and government building lobbies, becomes decidedly atypical if the visitor makes any abrupt motion. Then the screen flashes red, and the camera darts and quivers, turning its gaze anywhere but on the offending intruder. The threat level - as measured in real time on the Dell monitor - clearly has jumped, but it’s the surveillance camera that reacts anxiously.
’’(In)Security Camera’’ is one of a half-dozen works featured in ‘’Intimachine,’’ a high-tech show that explores intimacy and human behavior at Art Interactive in Cambridge through Jan. 30. Some of the pieces - such as ‘’(In)Security Camera’’ by Benjamin Chang, Silvia Ruzanka and Dmitry Strakovsky - wittily blur the distinction between a machine’s response and that of a person. Others extract a more contemplative experience from the interaction between the animate and inanimate. Of course, any exhibition focusing on new media also invites questions about the nature of art and beauty in the 21st century.
One Beijing museum leaps into the digital, global future
First-time visitors to the Millennium Art Museum’s new underground art centre might be startled as the framed “still-lifes” around them start magically moving - as if in Harry Potter books - speaking, or even changing places with other artworks metres or museums away.
These “moving pictures” are not an illusion, but the latest leap by one of China’s top museums to embrace the digital age and arts. They are also part of the Millennium Art Museum (MAM)’s wide-ranging plan “to make art more accessible to the public, more interactive, and more universal in appeal,” says Chaos Chen, one of the dynamic young innovators behind MAM’s transformation into a global art space.
[snip]
The Millennium’s exhibits will increasingly focus on works in new media, which cover the spectrum of “digital videos, Internet art/tech, digital photography, and other forms of digital imagery, including animations and virtual reality,” adds Wang, who is another prime force behind the museum’s race towards the future.
[snip]
The museum is also working with two of China’s top colleges, Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, along with the Boston-based MIT and the Dutch V2 Institute For Unstable Media (based in Rotterdam and partner in the Witte de With digital museum) in a May exhibition at the Millennium to focus on the neo-century’s convergence of art and technology in new media artworks.
[snip]
The May media exhibition at the Millennium, titled “In The Line of Flight,” will cover artworks “selected by a (global) group of distinguished curators, with representative works of telematic art, virtual reality, Net art, robotic art, interactive TV/cinema, software art, biotech art, data visualization and game art,” according to an outline of the show developed with New York’s Parsons School of Design and posted at http://www.newmediabeijing.org/.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Serious Games Initiative (Games for Health Project)
PORTLAND, Maine, Dec. 21 /PRNewswire/—The Serious Games Initiative, a joint effort between Digitalmill, Inc. and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, today announced that Digitalmill has received a two-year grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to support the Games for Health Project.
Games for Health is designed to promote best practices, community building, and research into how cutting-edge game design and development methodologies can aid in the creation of health tools that range from direct patient application, to personal health education, and workforce initiatives.
“Games are already playing a role in health care today,” said Ben Sawyer, president of Digitalmill, which will run day-to-day activities and planning for Games for Health. “We have exercise games, games that help with phobia treatment, games used for treating pain related to cancer or burns, and games used to train health care workers in important new procedures. We’re not starting at zero. We’ve already showcased more than a dozen projects, including commercial products that prove there is a potentially pervasive role for games and gamelike software in health care.”
Funding provided by RWJF will be used to continue the efforts already under way and to create new resources for assembling a comprehensive community to aid developers and users of games as solutions to a variety of health problems. Examples of these applications include the following:
-- Dance Dance Revolution: The popular dance game from Konami features an exercise mode. You set goals and play while it reports calorie burn from game sessions.
-- Iceworld and Splash: Gamelike 3D environments are now being used to help patients cope with severe pain resulting from burns and cancer treatment.
-- Yourself! Fitness: Designed to be the workout for the videogame generation. It provides dynamic personal workout sessions using state-of-the-art 3D game graphics and environments.
-- Code Orange: Helps hospitals deal with the rapid decision making required to deal effectively with mass-casualty events.
-- Cardiac Arrest: A computer adventure game that simulates the diagnosis and treatment procedures for people suffering from various forms of cardiac arrest.
-- VR Phobia: The Virtual Reality Medical Center has modified commercial games to create effective treatments for patients suffering from common phobias, including fear of flying, spiders, heights, and driving.
Full press release at:
http://www.gamesforhealth.org/
http://www.seriousgames.org/
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Robots Suffer for Art’s Sake
In Hollywood these days, post-modern technologies—and in particular, robots—are often portrayed as a threat to humanity. In films like Metropolis, I Robot, The Matrix and Minority Report, the audience faces endless scenes where people must fight or be scared of technology.
But Fernando Orellana thinks such fear is overblown, and in fact is worth turning on its head. An artist whose métier involves building interactive electronic and high-tech installations, Orellana recently won an honorable-mention prize at the Spanish art show, Vida 7.0, for his piece, Unending Closure, an installation aimed at showing that sometimes, common perceptions are far off base.
Unending Closure presents viewers with three robots enclosed in tall, narrow columns. Each column has a thin slit through which people can see the robots, and vice versa. When no one is nearby, the three robots appear to communicate with each other by emitting a series of calm, running-water-like sounds.
When people approach the robots, however, they react. If someone gets close, the robot that senses a person crossing its RF scan will respond with what seems like curiosity. But when viewers get too close, the robots are designed to do what could only be called freaking out.
“Rinspeed Senso”, the most sensuous car in the world
On March 1, 2005, look for the world premiere of the “Rinspeed Senso”. Rinspeed and Bayer MaterialScience are working together to develop a new vehicle concept car which focuses on the driver and runs on CO2-reducing natural gas.
Lateral thinking, looking at things from a new angle, thinking out of the box and feeding the senses – sight, touch, feel, smell and hearing – these are major elements of the development work that has gone into the “Rinspeed Senso”. Its name reflects what it actually does. The “Senso” “senses” the driver and adjusts to him/her. This is especially important as the risk of an accident is significantly reduced if the person behind the wheel is relaxed and wide awake.
This project also involves a sophisticated system of sensors developed by the Universities of Zurich and Innsbruck. Smart Surface Technology, a new 3D-formable electroluminescent film from Bayer MaterialScience and the Swiss electronics specialist Lumitec, uses biometric data and other information to create an appropriate level of light for the driver, thereby having a positive effect on him/her.
The environmentally friendly “Senso”, which runs on CO2-reducing natural gas, puts the central focus on the driver as an individual and appeals to the emotions thanks to its unusual design. It also features an innovative outer skin coating.
“Senso” is sure to polarize opinions. And that is precisely what it is designed to do.
Monday, December 20, 2004
A Studio Where Kids Take Control
More than 40 children in St. Petersburg are studying at an animation studio in Primorsky district thanks to the city’s Danish partners.
The studio, based at an Extra School Studies Center in the district, opened in September 2003 when the Copenhagen city government offered a unique present in the form of cartoon-making technology.
The gift consisted of a real animation studio with a staff of 25, where children make their own cartoons: write scenarios and dialogues, and then produce them.
Among project sponsors, the Danish Culture Institute and Royal Danish Consulate General in St. Petersburg provided help.
“It is an unusual and interesting project, where children have an opportunity to make their own cartoons,” said Nadezhda Krupskaya, deputy head of science and technology center run by Primorsky district’s administration.
The St. Petersburg Times (Russia)
Saturday, December 18, 2004
The Best Webcomics of 2004 and The Future of Webcomics
The Webcomics Examiner Advisory Board picks the best webcomics of 2004 and has a roundtable article on the future of webcomics.
Friday, December 17, 2004
Mathematicians crochet chaos
Mathematicians have made a crochet model of chaos - and are challenging anyone else to repeat the effort.
Dr Hinke Osinga and Professor Bernd Krauskopf, of Bristol University’s engineering mathematics department, used 25,511 crochet stitches to represent the Lorenz equations.
The equations describe the nature of chaotic systems - such as the weather or a turbulent river.
The academics are offering a bottle of champagne to anyone who cares to follow the pattern published in the journal Mathematics Intelligencer.