We have been commissioned by At-Bristol to produce an interactive evolutionary timeline, based on the ideas behind our Glowing Pathfinder Bugs project. This is an exciting opportunity to use some of the techniques we’ve developed in a new setting.

The project brings the last 460 million years of evolutionary development to life, with creatures ranging from spiders, beetles and snails, through ammonites and trilobites to sharks and dinosaurs inhabiting a Mixed Reality ecosystem. It is part of an upcoming permanent exhibition, “Our world – no more waste”.

The creatures are projected onto a physical 3D landscape measuring 4.6m. Like Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, creatures sense the presence of visitors through the use of Kinect stereo camera sensors, and they respond accordingly by disappearing, running away, or crawling up your arm.

The exhibition is to open in late March 2012.

Squidsoup’s Glowing Pathfinder Bugs get two trips to Brittany (France) this year. We showed them in St Brieuc in June (at ART ROCK) and we will be showing a new version of the piece (using a Kinect camera) at this year’s SCOPITONE festival in Nantes, in October.

The Bugs have also been travelling further afield than France. In January they were in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, followed by a stay at the Salt Lake City Art Center. In June they were also spotted at Oslo’s Art-on-Wires festival, and last December they were in Wellington, New Zealand. There are rumours that they liked New Zealand and are planning to return…

Finally, the article we wrote for Leonardo – Glowing Pathfinder Bugs: A natural haptic 3D interface for interacting intuitively with virtual environments, can now be found here.

We had fun at this year’s SIGGRAPH in Downtown LA. We showed Glowing Pathfinder Bugs in the Art Gallery – it was interesting to present a sandpit at a heavily tech-led event, and seemed to go down well. We also presented a conference paper on the project, published in a special issue of Leonardo (vol 43, issue 4). And we did an artists’ talk.

More images here, and the project was also covered here by Core77.

Pest Control came into being at dawn today in the Shangri-La area at Glastonbury, on the eve of the festival starting.

Above, graffiti inspired by the project, and below, a piece of found graffiti that we rather liked…

Glastonbury at dawn on the eve of the festival.

More images here.

BUGS GET A NEW LEASE OF LIFE AND HIT THE FESTIVALS CIRCUIT!

We are developing a new iteration of our Glowing Pathfinder Bugs project for this year’s Festival season, called Pest Control. Like the original piece, Pest Control consists of autonomous multi-legged virtual creatures that respond to each other, and any physical objects and real people in their way. But this time, the bugs get nasty…

Pest Control will be on show at the GLASTONBURY Festival, in the Shangri-La area, and also at the SECRET GARDEN PARTY Festival and WALTHAMSTOW Festival – with thanks to Up Projects and Arts Council England.

ALSO, the original Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is being shown in a few venues this Summer, including the SITE Festival (Stroud, late May, see previous post), SIGGRAPH (LA, in late July) and Le Cube (Paris, September). A fun Summer!

The SITE Festival, “a festival of artist led projects in stroud gloucestershire”, will be showing two of our pieces as part of a long list of interesting local, national and international artists’ work.

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs will be on show at SVA (Stroud Valley Arts), Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th May.

Freq2 will be on show on the 5th June (11-6) in Union Street. You might also catch it at Bar Nine a bit later in the week.

More details at www.sitefestival.org.uk

Bugs is also being shown in Liverpool on SATURDAY 25th SEPTEMBER, outside FACT, as part of AND (Abandon Normal Devices).  More here.

Onedotzero at the BFI also went well last weekend – the sand made a nice mess of the carpet… images below and more here.

Note Bugs is shown on SATURDAY 12th and SUNDAY 13th September only.

Here’s a reminder of what Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is about:

And here‘s a link to some more information

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is a Portable Pixel Playground commission by Folly

Other images (of Stealth and other projects) here.

The Stealth project is built on the NOVA 3D LED grid (courtesy of ETH / Horao GmbH) and uses 2 monome64 devices.