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.

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

http://www.folly.co.uk/node/1358

Glowing Pathfinder Bugs, a playful piece commissioned by Folly, has been shown at several Portable Pixel Playground events in 2008 and 2009.

The bugs analyse the shape (topography) of the sand around them, preferring to move gently downhill.  This means they can be shepherded, enclosed within walls of sand, encouraged to meet each other (at which point strange metamorphoses happen; they merge into larger caterpillars then, if you’re lucky, into butterflies.  If they get frightened, they pop and disappear.

And with kids, this is what happens most often…

http://www.squidsoup.org/bugs

The unique ecology of Blackpool was augmented yesterday by the addition of a few very rare Glowing Pathfinder Bugs. Their presence was noted by many passersby at the Solaris Centre on 28th September, where Folly staged the latest installment of their Portable Pixel Playground tour.

Future Portable Pixel Playgrounds, featuring Glowing Pathfinder Bugs:

18 October (Lanternhouse, Ulverston)
15 November (Carnforth Station)
6 December (Tullie House, Carlisle)
24 January 2009 (St Nicholas Arcades, Lancaster)

And as an afterthought – a glimpse of the magical Blackpool trams at night:

Clear sighting of the pathfinder in two stages of metamorphosis

The first stages of domestication?

(image courtesy of Folly)

More details at squidsoup.org/bugs

More information to follow.

For us it’s a great opportunity to make something solid, simple, fun, immediate and aimed directly at kids – something we haven’t done directly since the Virtual Puppeteers project… although it has to be said that children have explored and had fun with several of our other projects.

Virtual caterpillars, projected onto the sandpit, react to the physical topography of the sand, and can be enclosed by sand walls, scared by children’s hands and fingers, and attracted to each other. When they meet, magical things begin to happen…

Technically, the project uses a Point Grey Bumblebee stereo camera to capture depthmap information from the sandpit in real time – using software and ideas first developed for Driftnet during a Research Fellowship at Arts Institute Bournemouth in 2007. See here for another experiment with the Bumblebee.

Camera view of sandpit, and depthmap (red near, blue far)

Bumblebee on tripod

Trial setup

Physically, the piece is going to need to be strong – not only to survive the elements outdoors in a playground, but also to survive the children! Currently the ideas revolve around a large 3 or 4-legged dome-shaped structure (steel and tent material) that will shield the equipment and the sandpit itself from the elements, and also some light.