Its been a long but exciting week here at AI HQ.
Paulo and Marcelo from Mobilefest / newTV came over from Sao Paulo to begin work on the Dark Forest project, and plan our visit to Sao Paulo next month that will also include taking part in the Paralelo workshop - a British Council and research council exchange event, all very exciting with artists from the UK, Brazil and Holland coming together to look at international exchanges and artists working with the environment.
Lots of talking and planning and i think the highlight for us all (apart from pancake day party at my house and the making of over 60 pancakes with the help of Janet from mm...deli - thanks!) was a trip to Sherwood Forest to meet the top ranger (Site Manager) who seems very excited about the project. She took us on a tour through the birch and oak forest, and showed us the heathlands and work they are doing there. I think we all fell in love with a particular oak tree (as most of them over 800 years old) called twister. Which will be spot where we aim to put our forest probe and to connect old twister up to a tree in the tropical atlantic forest outside Sao Paulo.
Today we ended the week back with Them and Us, preparing for our workshop at Kingston University, now postponed until June. Geeks at play we have finally managed to get the technology to work well enough to be able to play a new social game, a bit like people snooker... where you use your body to herd virtual objects into a box... watch this space, its actually really fun but current prototype involves wearing a computerised tag on your forehead so you tend to look like a right knob/tag head. Got alot of work to go but we had an afternoon of sneaking around the Mixed Reality Lab with tags on our head trying to capture red dots and move them into the big green blob...
