FoAM - txoom

Vlaamse Overheid

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:24:36 +0000

Culture 2000

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:19:08 +0000

[tk's:um]

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:29:43 +0000

[tk's:um]

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:43:17 +0000

grow your own worlds

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:13:49 +0000

Alive Textiles

nik — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:14:43 +0000

Start: 2002-10-11 00:00 Europe/London

End: 2002-10-16 00:00 Europe/London

txOom public workshop, 11-16 October 2002, Norwich School of Art and Design, England, UK

Alive Textiles was a professional development workshop in the field of smart/active/responsive materials, exploring the boundaries between materials and media.

The workshop was designed for the students of The Norwich School of Art and Design, as well as interested local artists. The participants had three days to create concepts for responsive garments, using off the shelf 'dumb' materials, smeared with inks and films from the school's printing department, analysed for their internal, inherent 'alive' properties and augmented with ideas of what they would become if they were truly smart. In the course of the workshop, the students' ideas were visibly progressing: they began with garments with integrated video cameras, mobile phones and colour-changing fabrics, evolving into a range of imaginary environments: growing forests of worms, affected by the human movement within them, empathic homes with embedded mood detectors, happiness inducing chairs, and 'cocooning' aids in the form of portable coat-chambres.

p~lot

nik — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:58:53 +0000

P~lot or the Play Lab on Open Grown Territories brought together a motley crew of artists, designers, students, theorists and enthusiasts in the tiny Istrian village of Groznjan. P~lot was a workshop designed to examine the 'play' and 'games' as tools for mixing physical and digital realities.

The workshop had two strands, called Gamespace and Playspace. Gamespace was designed to enchance creative skills in the field of online game development, specifically looking at context based gaming environments, rooted in existing places such as the village of Groznjan. In Playspace, the participants worked the physicality and the local fabric of Groznjan to create playful environments in the broadest sense of the word. The participants wove the local substances with materials brought from their different places of origin. Legends were massaged to excrete symbolic meanings for arbitrary game rules. To populate the hybrid reality, the participants collated an intricate bestiary of characters to form a basis for a role-playing game, guided by the p~lot master narrative.

The story of p~lot: http://libarynth.org/plot_world_context

'All art derives from play' -Johan Huizinga

txoom

nik — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:25:16 +0000

The word txOom is an amalgam of ‘texture’ and ‘bloom’. As a part of txOom, we produced two environments which were thick, malleable and layered as a texture, elegant and responsive as a bloom.

Designed as imaginary eco-systems, txOom spaces 'feed' on by the bodily movement of the players. The kinetic energy that the movement generates is 'recycled' into sounds, light and visual textures, rendering effects of movement visible in the space in which the movement happens. The turbulent gush of air generated by a vigorous jump, or small swirls of wind sent across from one person to another in an animated conversation; these otherwise imperceptible airflows are amplified until they become visible and audible. Movement is not just a propelling force, but a generative force - it gives form and behaviour to the simulated life-forms in txOom's irreal eco-system. Using active materials and digital media, we are able to magnify, camouflage and influence the players' gestures. These gestures are captured, analysed and interpreted by tiny sensing, computing and communication devices embedded in the players' costumes. The movement is translated into digital signals able to influence the generation of rich streams of audiovisual media. The media are projected in the play-space and experienced in real-time. txOom environments evolve through perpetual cycles of influence – garments influence movement, which generates media, that define the space, inspiring movement, which ruffles the garments, that stretch the space... To design this imaginary eco-system, we were inspired by biological systems, as well as cultural phenomena. As with the growth of biological organisms, shaped by the internal needs and external pressures, so is the the form and experience of txOom guided by its inhabitants, as well as the contexts in which they are placed - be it a circus, a gallery, or a horse stable.

txOom was a collaboration with four European organisations (Time's Up, Kibla, Interactive Institute and Future Physical) and several independent artists, between 2002 and 2003.

txoom

nik — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:10:03 +0000

DSCF0024

nik — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:30:36 +0000