Offload Festival

We got back from Bristol and a short break in wales to recover, yesterday.

Offload was a really interesting festival and was good to be part of a festival that looked beyond the arts debates and the detail of location based gaming, locative arts, digital arts etc... and was more about wider issues of health, wealth and the environment. It somehow felt more in touch with how we work as artists. Our interest in ideas as opposed to an obsession in defining what we do.

The festival opened with a very interesting talk by John Thackera who has written a book about design and gave 5 issues for working with design and new media in the context of environmental change, looking at qaulity of life and economy. It was very interesting and good to have a theoritical approach to the context in which many of us artists are working.

The first day we were setting up and testing for the workshops at Create (a Bristol council based environmental centre on the island in a huge old warehouse). Nottingham seems so un-ambitious after you see Create, Arnolfini, Spike Island, Watershed, all close together. Nottingham could be like this, it has the people, the interest, the audiences. HOpefully the new contemporary arts centre will begin to change things.

The evening we were kindly invited to Maarten's house, one of the organisers for dinner with some of the other artists, this was great and always good to all meet up. Although we got very lost getting there, Matt trying to google earth the way with a postcode i wrote down wrong. Me, Matt and Robin stumbling around bristol in the dark.

The workshop day went really well. Had 15 eleven year olds, from a school in Wells. We collaborated with the Participate (BBC project) group to combine both our workshops which seemed to work really well. giving a chance for the kids to experience the game and creative side of the technology and health, alongside getting a more details bolts and bits insight into sensing yourself and the environment from Participate. They loved the monster that they named fluffy. one girl became a little obsessed...

That night we were pretty knackered from chasing hyper 11 year olds round the field so we had a meal (me, Matt and Robin) and then went to the screening of Silent Running in the Euroland ampitheatre on the dock, very strange experience. we were staying just across from there and spent alot of time feeling freaked out by the Euroland style of development, that we keep encountering. not made for humans.

Saturday was watershed day. went well on the whole. not a large audience but the feedback Lizzie got(who was doing evaluation for us) was very interesting and on the whole positive. had issues with the network caused by it being a massively busy day in bristol (carnival, several festivals and a march!) this messed up some of the multi-player game experience.

but overall the audience returned from playing looking healthier and smiling, which is the aim of the game...

The monster had a hard time, some kids got a bit excited and stole it's tail and then a drunken bristolian decided to strangle it...

at the end of the day we went off to Wales to see our friends Stuart and Nicola, have a walk in the hills, eat pub food and recover.

Thanks to Offload team and particularly Connor and Ira, the monsters!!

off to Bristol

The spider robot as featured in Chemical Garden in 2000

Today we are off to Bristol, in fact we should be on our way but getting together arts council applications etc... boring stuff, so late leaving.

I haven't added anything to the blog for a while as couldn't find the password, but ai are on the move again. This time to the Offload festival in bristol where we are doing a school's workshop with a Bristol primary school on Friday, designing mobile games that involve exercise and different sensors, we are taking down our spider robots, webcams, pedometers and heart rate monitors to get their imaginations excited and maybe they will design some cool games.

On Saturday we are running Dragons at the Watershed, so if you are down in Bristol and want to plug your heart in and explore come to the Watershed 10am-4pm

Should all be fun, we met the organisers Teresa and Kathy in Cambridge, more than an arts festival, see the web address www.offloadfestival.org

last day in Tokyo

Last night we had a curry and a drink in Shimoda by the sea. We had booked into an expensive but crap hotel, because there was nowhere else to go, fag burns on the duvet...mmm... then wandered around, and discovered many many traditional drummers (called Taiko) all practising for the festival next week, was great, must have been what the drummers had been doing the night before when I got lost trying to find the launderette.

Found a bar called jahjah that had a dj booth and lots of kids trying out their dj and MC skills, was fun, like dj karaoke.

got up early this morning and returned to the hecticness of Tokyo, shopping and trying to find Emma with out bag of our equipment. Home tomorrow, feels like we`ve been away for months...

Shimoda bichi(beach)

Today we did the classic tourist thing of going to the beach after sorting out a slightly dodgy hotel for tonight and havig breakfast. Rachel had the biggest cheeese on toast we have ever seen. The bread was less of a doorstop more of a door to bank vault
It was overcast but it's still a balmy steamy heat so heading to the beach seemed fitting. Japan has it's fair share of beach posers and surf dudes blaring hip-hop from their suped up toyota's and suburu's as we discovered on arriving at Kisumi beach.

We had a great swim in the pacific which to our pleasant surprise was quit cold. I did a bit of body surfing but the waves weren't up to much.

This evening we stumbled on a ritual tuna cook off in the town centre. Quite something to see 6 men lifting a fish the size of a pig.

the fundamentals including personal hygeine (not for the faint hearted)

As Matt has described we have been to one of the most beautiful places in the world. Mount Fuji is everything expected and more, it looks like two strokes of a japanese paintbrush with a small hat on the top, stroked by clouds. I maybe a cynical old cow but I have had a very zen time. we walked along a ridge on the hills opposite fuji that just rose from nowhere covered in green green trees. below fuji-san is the sea of trees, we were told about this when we made chemical garden (an art installation of thousands of salt crystal trees in front of a video of mount fuji to celebrate the millenium). it is a true to premieval forest growing on a sea of lava from the volcano, feels spooky, the light, you could get very very lost there.

anyway. personal hygeine. me and matt have had fun getting some of the basics these last couple of days. a bath or shower. well trying to understand onsen and communal baths has been fun, time limited and potentially shared with anyone, i went in the mens! here by the sea it is proper onsen (hotspring) how hot??? when it is already sweaty so you are in a pool of water - hot humidity outside, how hot can you be??? included in this I have a fever from a bad cold and cough.

the toilet are fun, they are either ancient hole in the grounds (which I am sure are good for you) or high tech service washes (which are also great, if not slightly too nice) better when you know where the stop button is, once you get cleaned for a while you begin to want to start the whole process again.

and finally, even the tampons are hi-tech, i am too embarrased to ask anyone how to use them, the adaptors are a feat of engineering that goes beyond my simple knowledge, I was stuck in the toilet for half an hour getting through half a pack trying to work out what that was about...

but the sea is beautiful, mountains, city, mountains. and I haven't started on the adventure to wash our clothes, which resulted in me getting sprited away by some guys playing the ancient japanese drums...

Fuji to the coast

It's been sometime since we have been able to add to the blog. We are now in Shimoda a little fishing village 50km from Tokyo. It's very relaxing, a bit like Padstow or Abersoch, Japan style. I am siting in a western style bar listening to funk and sipping on a Kirin in front of the largest Mac screen I ever seen.

We spent 2 nights in Fuji Kawaguchi-ko. The Lake district of Japan. We spent an amazing but sweaty day hiking in the mountains around Fuji-san. We didn't bother with cliumbing Fuji as the main reason for going there is to see Fuji not climb up up miles of volcanic sand. Call me lazy but that's my excuse.

We saw an ancient cave full of Shinto prayer flags and offerings and walked through "the sea of trees" which is an amazing forest around fuji which stretches forever. Japan has some really beautiful country side. Because it is either city or countryside you get the best of both. The cities are huge and dense and the country is endless and empty.

Shimodo is great. We are here for 2 nights then back to Tokyo for shopping and then home. Hopefully get some swimming and beach life (although it's raining at the moment but humid as hell).

I have included the weirdest advert. I have no idea what it means. But it's great.

off to the mountains

just getting ready to go off to see Fuji. have booked a ryotan which is a tradional japanese inn with a view of fuji over the lake.
we stayed in an inn here in kyoto, was great, just like in karate kid when Ralph Macchio went to Japan. a mat on the floor, a table with tea all layed out, all feng shui and stuff.

yesterday went to the most beautiful calm place either of us had ever been to, a temple, with this rock layout of 15 rocks that you can:t see all at once but had to try and see all together in your mind. the trees, and moss and lakes, and bridges jsut made your head clear. we going all buddhist.

then went all seady went to gion where the geishas are, didn`t see any but lots of things going on behind wooden slats in traditional houses by the river, and lots of bars that we couldn@t quite get. ended up in a really horrible english/american bar and got pissed and ranted about facism and psychopaths.

then went back to the quiet calm of the ryotan.

Kyoto is a great place. will try and find internet in the mountains, but may jsut go very zen and forget all about technology and modern life.

Kyoto - Space and Sunshine

Arrived In Kyoto last night about 7pm and missed the Tourist info centre. So we had to wander the streets with our bags looking for a hotel. But being Japan, we found a cheap business hotel which was cleaner than most 5 star hotels in the UK.

We then headed out into Kyoto for a meal. It is a much more relaxing place than Tokyo there is more space, walks by the river, canals and tiny streets with amazing little restaurants. We stopped in one and had Sushi (Well I did, Rachel had tempura veg). I think Rachel was little put off when the chef dipped a net in the fish tank next to us to get my dinner. But the Sushi was great not fussy, just rice with big slices of raw fish. Delicious.

After dinner we went to the river and the police were getting a DJ on the river bank to turn down his music. So we listened to him mix house at pin drop volume for a few minutes. We then headed to a huge Pachinko parlour and Rachel tried her luck with the falling balls of chance.
We really had no idea what was going on and no-one could really explaiin what we should do. But we enjoyed the noise and the buzz. An old lady sat watching us, obviously we were ripe for the taking. She pounced on our machine after we had left, to reap the rewards.

We are now off to take in the cultural sites. The Imperial Palace and the Zen Rock Garden.

More pictures soon.

Matt

end of the festival

The last two days have been great. Full on, and full of conference stuff. Have began to get to know the group of artists that are attending the conference, it has worked out more like a lab really as there isn't much of a bigger audience, but that has been great, some very cool people, from Korea, Japan, England, Canada, Australia, German, Serbian...

Alot of talking, although I have spent most of the time running the demo of Dragons which went really well, although not many people, but the people who came where just off the street, spending their weekend at an arts festival, some young couples, a chinese business man, some of the festival people. Most of the time I didn't have an interpreter and most people speak only a little more English than I speak Japanese (and I can only really say three words, hello thankyou and desert) but have managed to communicate and people seem to have enjoyed it so that is ok. One person didn't understand wait a moment and ran off in excitement, ending up playing the game whilst looking at the set up screen which couldn't have been very exciting but apart from that it seems surprisingly easy for people to play here. Probably helps that games consoles are massive here and then graphics are quite cutesy which is the big thing here.

Two amazing nights. Saturday night a group of us headed off across Tokyo to a massive fireworks festival, which we missed, but got to see the people, millions of people in kimonos and cool cutesy clothes, a fair, a temple, a thing that tells your fortune involving chopsticks in silver boxes, and fortunes in a chest of draws.

Last night involved getting very pissed, laughing at the phrase books interpretation on how to chat people up shag them (it's ok I can help myself??) (particularly the English and Koreans) and eating a 10 course meal and getting back to the hotel at 4pm.

Today we are going to start our adventures. Not sure where we are heading. The sea, the mountains and Kyoto is far as we have got.

Off to say goodbye to InYong who we have been hanging out with, and then off we go.

Day 2 in Japan - The Heat Closes In

Today it just seems to get hotter and hotter. The humidity must be up above the 80% percent mark - phew!!! I woke up late nearly missing the hotel breakfast. Jet lag just wont let me out of bed.

We went off this morning to Yokohama to check if the co-ordinates for the game were correct by playing it around Yokohama Baseball stadium. It was hot, too hot to be walking around in the midday sun.

In the afternoon we went to the ICC. The japanese gallery for interactive artwork. As you can imagine there were some amazing examples of work. From lo-tech stuff like an anoechoic room (the opposite of an echo chamber). Your voice seems to die inches from your mouth. And even if you shout, it sounds like a mere whisper. Also a sculpture of a man juggling weird items which rotates in a room with a strobe light. Each portion of the sculpture is like a separate frame of an animation. The strobe light creates the zoetrope effect of making the rotating objects come alive.

To the most beautiful hi-tech work like a series of taps which when turned on water pours from them into a bowl. A projector overhead beams little images into the stream of water depending on the speed of the flow. Using a big spoon you can actually pick the digital objects out of the water. Amazing.

In the evening we went to shibuya to meet a Japanese friend: Keiko. There we went around some shops and she showed us her favourite shop. A cut price dept. store. Which sells everything a sort of Wilko's of everything useful and useless.

We then went and had a meal of Hokkaido style food including a jacket potato covered in pickled squid. Yum. I mean it! Lovely.

Rachel's first day blog

Photos: Matt tired on the metro, hotel room, in the restuarant, in the bar, Matt, Sasha and Christian.

A day of travelling, three films - walk the line for the second time, a slushy american one and Factory Girl, lots of cabin fever on a BA flight (how little room, and i'm already little).
Met Christian (one of the other artists) at customs, he was on the same flight, and we all took the train to Tokyo (lots of rice fields, industrial buildings and tons and tons of houses most wth curvy rooves, some bright blue, glistening in the sunshine).
It's hot, very hot, makes you sweat. No rain, which is amazing, just hot and blue sky, although hazy.
We are in a very posh hotel. small rooms, but you get your own house slippers and night shirts and it is all very Japanese and beautiful details.
We walked to the Imperial Palace (round the corner from the hotel) and then got too hungry so found a canteen and very bravely chose a picture of random looking food, luckily one of the dishes was vegetarian (as far as I could tell). I have decided to eat seafood if I have no choice while I am here, although I am not sure how much I can stomach. Then found a place to have a coffee that made no difference to the intense tiredness.
All the devices are charging and I am going to have a sleep and try not to dream of Bill Murray in Lost in Translation with a red mohican, which is a recurring dream I am having at the moment.
Went for a meal in Ginza with Emma (the festival organiser), the other artists and the gallery curator. Was in a rabbit warren of a restaurant, with sitting down in an alcove seats (matt sat crossed legged for ages before he realised there was a pit underneath the table to hang your legs down. With Emma being vegan, they managed to order vegetarian and vegan food, silken tofu with spice and ice, egg that was sweet and savoury in only the way an egg can be.
Popped into Ginza art lab on the way, the smallest gallery in the world, about as big as my bathroom. But in Ginza and very contemporary. I sat next to the curators who were very interesting, the main guy Ken studied at Nottingham Trent!
Went to a bar afterwards for a very sleepy final drink of the night.
Dreamt all night of wierd things, proper jet lagged sleep, I killed a person and made them into sushi and was found out when a dog found their scalp, arghhh, feel very strange now, time for breakfast.

The Dragons arrive in the Land of the Rising Sun

We have just arrived to start exhibiting 'Ere be Dragons at the Dislocate festival. We are both feeling a bit jet-lagged and out of sorts. I was wedged in the central seats for the 11 hour flight and had continuous cramp most of the way. Anyway, self pity aside, we have checked into our hotel. I have tried the automated toilets of japanese reknown and can report that the service wash delivered to my backside, was curious, to say the least.

I have also discovered that smoking is only permitted in certain parts of the street. So I joined a huddle of salary men for a crafty fag next to a set of vending machines and an ashtray with this strange inscription. (You may have to click it and make it large to read it.)

If you still can't read it it says:

"Inhaled. Burned. Thrown Away. If it were anything other than a cigarette it would surely be crying.
Meet. Love. The End."

What does it all mean. I must rest to gather strength for social event this evening and stop puzzling over love affairs with giant cigarettes.

Matt

an alpine view and a trip to Japan

These are exciting times at AI.

We have now moved into a studio with a view... see the Alpine scene, with a secret door that leads to the world beyond the mountains... or Caroline's room.

We are preparing for our trip to Japan, flying out on Tuesday 24th (for me after a weekend at a festival in Wales, I will be glad for the 12hour flight!)

We are taking the single player version of 'Ere Be Dragons to Dislocate in Tokyo and Yokohama. We are hoping to add a system to play back people's games so that they can see the re-run in real time when they return.

We are also showing our new Dragons film (still being filmed) at a gallery in Ginza and will be playing the games on the streets of Yokohama.

...then we are off on a holiday to Kyoto, Fuji (what a dream!) and maybe even an island to a beach for a couple of days if we have time.

We will try and BLOG along the way...

Lift Off

Walked past the Pitt Building where our Dreaming of the Future installation is. Funny to think of Thomas Thomas sleeping up there amongst the debris as we walk past. If you look at the left hand window of the tower there is a light on, that's out installation. On the Dreaming of the Future website you can zoom the camera out the window and maybe see us walking past!














The Domes in Parkers Piece lit at night, the central point of the festival.














We have all had the lurgy this week. Robin fell asleep on the job.



Today we start in Cambridge. We are all set, I wont say everything is working because I am getting superstitious about Dragons (as you should be when messing with myths!) but the set up has gone well and all our tests have been pretty succesful.

The venue is ok, certainly will get alot of interest as right next to the student union at Anglia Ruskin. We have a really enthusiastic volunteer working with us, Window he's called (well Chris) who looks great in the Monster costume as he is about 7ft tall!

Last night was the launch night and was nice to catch up with all the people we know and have met from our previous workings in Cambridge, and met some very interesting artists from Bristol who also work with MRL and do pervasive stuff. Polar they are called.

The launch had a good night of Cornish Rave performance, was funny and odd interactive music making installations. Saw a cool acid techno drummer, who had set up a laptop to a drum kit and made live techno by drumming, was itching to have a go. Getting a wah wah wah by banging away, cool.

ENTER Cambridge

Today we are in Cambridge. We have a fancy flat next door to the venue. Meeting Chris at 10am to see the venue, check out if the big projector we have brought will work there and do some tests. GPS is fixed and everything is working.

Cambridge is so cool, feel like I'm in a Merchant Ivory film or Chariots of Fire, lots of posh boys with the flapping hair playing rugby and football on Parkers Piece (a park full of excited students and where the main bit of the festival is happening), opposite our city living flat.

Off to find croissants for breakfast for Matt and Robin.

What next?

Well we have been off on holidays and got back and are now off to Cambridge ENTER_unknown territories festival next week, showing Dragons, the mutli-player game. Will try and blog from there and link with festival blog too.

More information: ENTER website

more pictures

The view from the hotel
















The team in Matt's hotel room










Divers swimming out to Alcatraz
Robin in the bar where we drank many Tequila's and met a guy who works with Python, and drank more tequilas...

Capra, escape from Alcatraz!

The docks and looking out to Golden Gate Bridge

Leif in a bar, again

A crazy mural outside the bar
Another Tram
Alcatraz
The choclate factory across from Alcatraz, now that is torture!

pictures

Pictures:
Lombard Street, where Bullet was filmed - our taxi driver did a very scary impression of the car chase down here!
Museum of Modern Art - me and Robin sneaked off on the last day to get away from games and look at fine art, bliss, my centre of worship. Lichenstein, Picasso...
Leif at the Nokia Ngage party, free bar (really... even the champagne), Leif got very drunk, well we all did, lots of cool geeks there! and we all got a free Nokia blow up sofa that supposedly Capra took to Yosemite and blew up and sat amongst the trees on it (this is a second hand story)
Out and about round Union Square, a tram turning on it's turning thing.
A fire engine (how old fashioned is that? I thought America was a futuristic society)
Houses like in all the films.
Capra - King of the World! He came from the jungle and now look at him in the Hilton hotel, San Francisco negotiating contracts with Hewlett Packard (his words)
Big bus - another example of the futuristic look of America!
What we were really doing there - sitting a computers in a hotel room.

Final photos from San Francisco

Although it was over a month ago and we became incredibly slack at doing any blogging, here are the final pictures of San Francisco.

The workload took over from blogging and all that fun stuff and we got absorbed by the games developers conference. Overall it was a wonderful challenging experience. We were put in the centre of the Hewlett Packard Booth, to showcase their new Mediascape application through our game.

We ended up showing the single player game as it is the most robust version and after some issues with networks it felt like the most appropriate in that environment. It complimented well with Tom's presentations on how Mediascape worked and from our evaluation that took place afterwards it appeared that it was very well received. Certainly lots of exhilarated smiley faces returned from playing in the streets around the Moscone Centre, many "awesomes" (although it seemed a often repeated response all around the trade fair). Being squashed between Nintendo and Nokia Ngage was a good buzz, particularly when people pointed out that our game was one of the only innovative and new things there. Finally and probably most importantly for us, Hewlett Packard's commercial side response was very positive and interested.

Here is a BLOG response and video from one of the testers from the development test prior to the demo at GDC.
Alex Vorbau's HP blog

After the long week of testing and demo-ing our gang got pretty close from hanging out in the Hilton.

We had a last day of relaxing, cycled all the way to some Redwood trees, over the Golden Gate bridge, to Sausalito and then off to some surburban park with some redwood trees, we got lost too many times to get to the real forest. I was on the back of a tandem with Capra which was quite amusing / scary...

Saturday in San Fran

Saturday was also a long day, but some real moments of success and getting used to the city and seeing more tourist style little insights into San Francisco's America...

Spent most of the day in the hotel working. Mainly in Leif and Tom's rooms, which have great views across the city to remind us that we aren't still at Nottingham University or our office.

The GPRS problem got resolved at 1pm in a frenzy of excitment, when the SIM cards we had suddenly started working, Leif and Capra accidently used one thinking it was one of the SIMs that did work and we were on... All six of us jumping around the room setting up PDAs. Sounds very sad when written down but after a day or tearing our hair out it was very exciting.

Did our first full test with the new version. Several issues now being sorted out, the heart rate monitors and GPS are acting strange now, just to wind us up some more on a sunny sunday morning...

Worked until late and split up to focus on what we needed to do. Me, Matt and Robin ended up roaming the streets late into the night, caught the end of the Chinese New Year parade in Union Square, which was exicting although only really got to see the SFPD strutting their stuff.

Completely forgot to watch the red eclipse which was a real shame, but heads were down at the screens!

Found a great Turkish restaurant a bit further out from the downtown area we have been in so far, really busy. Had a shocking walk back, the streets where lined with homeless people, so obviously with no health care as many of them were severly disabled and hardly any of them were white. We've seen loads of begging and homeless people, at times it feels like India, it was like the area around the hotel I stayed in, in Mumbai. People living on a square of pavement each. Proper Skid Row, in one of the richest cities in the world. It makes you sick.

Maybe I just don't see it in England, I know it was getting more like this in the 90s in the UK but not on this scale, and I have never had this feeling of such obvious apartheid in the UK.

Anyway, it is Sunday 8am so back to work on the heart rate monitors, hopefully today will be a bit easier and involve lots of running around testing in the streets.

Pictures to come... and there will be some of me (Rachel) for my Mum and Dad who have complained it is just pictures of the geek boys - sorry guys I will stop calling you that soon and it has been agreed that Matt is a nerd not a geek (: