Pest Control got’em going at Glastonbury last week. More images here.  Some of the subtleties were missed in the frenetic nighttime of Shangri-La, people generally opted for splatting the bugs rather than nurturing or controlling them, but revellers were intrigued, and certainly seemed to enjoy what they were doing.

Next outing is the Secret Garden Party, in Cambridgeshire (UK) and there is more in the pipeline.

We have also collected our main project videos into a Vimeo channel – see vimeo.com/channels/squidsoup

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!

We’re very excited that Ocean of Light has been nominated for Brazil’s FILE PRIX LUX for Interactive Art. It’s an impressive list, with many high profile and excellent projects from across the globe. We would love your support! If you can, please vote for us.

Go here, select PAGE 4, then choose Ocean of Light and follow the instructions.

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

Kinetica has been good to us.  In addition to the coverage on the BBC and Telegraph mentioned below, we were featured in numerous publications including DigiMag, UK Features, and this from BigShinyThing.

Thanks to James Lane for putting the video together.

ALSO, Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is still finding its way through customs to us, having spent a joyous week or so in Montreal, as part of Technofolies at the Montreal Science Museum. And Bugs is also being shown at Grizedale Forest (Cumbria) as part of Abandon Normal Devices. And we think that yet more outings for the Bugs will be announced soon.

We have just emerged from six days in a black box at the Kinetica Art Fair, nurturing Surface, the first project on the Ocean of Light 3D LED grid. It was an intense period, with apparently some 10,000 people passing through in three days.

Surface is a responsive virtual eco-system that occupies physical space.  It uses a room-sized 3D grid of individually addressable points of light to simulate movement in physical space. The space is dominated by a surface – the boundary between two fluid virtual materials.  The materials are affected by sound – nearby noises create waves that ripple across the surface.  The surface is, however, unstable: the turbulence caused by noise also triggers luminous blasts. Abstract insect-like autonomous agents, aware of their surroundings, also navigate and negotiate the environment and the surface.  The result is a series of interconnected spaces and environments, overlapping physical and virtual spaces that coexist and are aware of each other.

For us, it was also an intense learning experience.  The first outing for the Ocean of Light, a hardware project supported by the Technology Strategy Board, was a litmus test for whether this kind of 3D visuals work on the uninitiated – whether people “get it”. It seems that they do – responses were very positive. We’ve also had a lot of ideas – our own and suggested by others – about future directions and options.

Press coverage included this on BBC News and this on the Daily Telegraph.

The images here are taken from a forthcoming documentary on the project by James Lane – details to follow.

So where does Ocean of Light come from? Through an experimental and playful approach to creating interactive digital installations, we often found ourselves exploring where real and virtual space coexist. We had explored this through multiuser activity and shared experience of audio and visual virtual space (altzero, ghosts), then entering physical space, perceptually through stereoscopy and physically with wearable proximity sensors (come closer) also using stereoscopic cameras to analyze physical movement to navigate virtual space (driftnet,freq2).

Each project led to their own discoveries but until we started working with LEDs in space it seemed like we were making experiences and environments that a user peers into through some kind of portal, or the screen space. Working with the Nova grid (Stealth, Discontinuum) certainly took a leap out of screen space and into the real world in a more determined way. However the close proximity of the LEDs still created a screen like situation as the viewer would be forced to view the work from an external proximity.

The Ocean of Light Grid is part of the evolution of this development process, Designed on the back of all this investigation and experimentation by squidsoup Ocean of Light should enable audio/visual environments to be experienced from within.
Surface is the first artwork to be exhibited using the Ocean of Light hardware. It uses minimal visuals and sound to evoke the essence of character and movement. Autonomous entities engage in a playful dance, negotiating the material properties of a fluid surface. (Posted by Gareth)

We have been working on a new project, Ocean of Light, that seeks out the immersive and affective possibilities of light-based visualisations in three physical dimensions – a recurring theme in our work. The aim this time is that the piece is large enough to be considered an environment rather than an object – a room filled with countless points of light, each one contributing to a dynamic space that surrounds and envelops you.

The hardware uses re-configured video-wall technology to create a walk-through 3D grid of LEDs. The first piece to be shown on the grid (to be premiered at KINETICA Art Fair, February 5-7 2010), combines abstract volumetric visuals with spatialised sound, to suggest an ecosystem of audiovisual entities that inhabit physical space. Visible and audible as they encircle and fly around the room, they dance with each other and together create what is both a fully three dimensional audiovisual environment and a musical composition.

www.oceanoflight.net

The work continues several themes in our work. We started exploring spatialised musical composition in 1999 with Altzero. The compositions became dynamic and agent-based in Driftnet/Fly like a bird. Visualisation in 3D has been used in several projects, using a range of techniques from classic red/cyan glasses to view real time anaglyphic projections (Come Closer, Driftnet, and a version of Ghosts), experiments with autostereoscopy, projection onto 3D objects, and most recently moving our work into physical 3D space. See also The Stealth Project and Discontinuum (projects using visualisation techniques in three physical dimensions using NOVA, a 3D LED grid built by ETHZ).

More images here

Been busy in Oslo of late. Two talks about various aspects of Squidsoup’s work during Kedja and gRIG conferences, and another outing for Freq2 during Kedja. The Kedja conference, on Dance and New Media, also features a 96 page publication on various aspects of interdisciplinary dance and new media. Contributors include Johannes Birringer, Ghislaine Boddington (body>data>space), Stuart Jones and Anthony Rowe. The cover (see above) featured Freq2. Hard copies available from Lise Amy Hansen, and a PDF will be available soon.