Huddersfield Digital Research Unit presentation at Culture Lab

Culture Lab enjoys excellent links to Huddersfield University's Digital Research Unit, which has developed a highly original practice-based digital research programme over the past years via activities including residency programmes and the internationally renowned Ultrasound Festival.

Thursday 30th November 2006

 " The Digital Research Unit in Huddersfield initiates, supports and disseminates creative research and production activities in digital, interactive, and network media, linking artists, researchers, academics, and creative networks. The DRU delivers a dynamic and challenging range of work from artists at the forefront of digital media practice, bringing new ideas and working practises to the fore. The Digital Research Unit is a research and production facility, developed through key partnerships with the University of Huddersfield, The Media Centre and Arts Council England. Its creative programme consists of three core strands; DRU Commissions, DRU Research Programme and the DRU Residency Programme.  "


SITES, SOFTWARE, SOCIAL SPACE, SYSTEMS


Programme

1.00 pm

Blink
Andrew Wilson and Lisa Roberts from Blink http://www.blinkmedia.org Blink (UK) design large-scale mobile phone projects, including the UK's first sms poetry initiative with The Guardian in 2000 and City Poems, a transnational locative media project in Leeds and Antwerp in 2003/4.
Working with SMS, Bluetooth or RFID Blink always aim to be subversive in the way we exploit existing technologies already familiar and accessible to a wide audience. Democratic in intent and execution Blink develop user-created content which often evolves with and reflects the experience of the user.

Robert Lycett
http://www.re-draw.org

Rob's recent Re:Draw series of digital artworks explores the graphic potential of GPS noise. Inverting the conventional use of GPS technology, a geographically fixed GPS device no longer records a physical journey, but the noise in the system - the changing signal strengths reflecting the position of the orbiting satellites, interference caused by local atmospheric conditions, a flock of birds flying overhead ... This recorded data describes imaginary journeys, events and impossible geographies. The 3D rendering produces an endless typographic projection, writings, books and other material.

Spencer Roberts and Anneke Pettican (UK)
http://www.anthropo.org.uk/newsdrip/
http://www.anthropo.org.uk/godot/
http://www.brassart.org.uk/

Anneke Pettican and Spencer Roberts play with spatial and temporal realities using text-based experiments. The media they employ ranges from simple subtitling techniques to custom built sensor systems and GPS devices.

Anneke Pettican is a director of Brass Art, an artist collaboration based in Manchester, Huddersfield and Glasgow. Positioning themselves as shadows, digital sprites, drawings, sculptures and performers, their installations focus on liminal spaces, their inherent ambiguities and notions of The Uncanny. Their work has been exhibited Nationally and Internationally.

Spencer Roberts is an artist and programmer with a background in philosophy. His work focuses upon the production and consumption of text as mediated through a variety of technologies. It tends to couple programming with custom built, hand made electronics and explores the relationships between philosophy, critical theory, literature and technology.

He is interested in the concepts of virtuality, immanence and transcendence with respect to the discourses of simulation and temporality. He is currently studying for a Ph.D. investigating the concept of allusion with respect to technological form.

Andy Gracie
http://www.hostprods.net/

Andy Gracie makes work with technological and natural systems. The work expresses a special interest in what takes place at the point where these two systems are mediated through each other and what bridges can be revealed or constructed. Many hostprods investigations concern the use of forms of Artificial Intelligence to build spontaneous communications between machine and living systems (insects, plants, cells...) to allow new language spaces and emergent relationships to develop. Various types of mechanical or robotic platforms are used in the work as agents in these emerging systems and as pseudo symbiotic or parasitic partners. Although many of the techniques used and areas being explored are rooted in and inspired by science, it is not intended that the work should have to practice according to its strict rules. Instead it maintains a wish to illustrate a poetry and wonder that exists where worlds collide and in the gaps of our usual experiences.

Jen Southern
http://www.theportable.tv

Jen Southern works collaboratively as part of Hamilton & Southern, and also maintains a solo practice. Her work involves investigating everyday journeys between virtual and physical spaces, which are navigated through socially embedded technologies such as video games, mobile phones and locative media. With a particular interest in personal and specific relationships with technology in everyday life and ordinary places her work investigates real experiences of game spaces through learning and navigation. Her use of technology is specific to each project and has included robotics, wearables, shipping containers, CD ROMs and currently GPS (Global Positioning System).
Jen's practice is installation based and has been both process led and collaborative, exploring the many grey areas between shared authorship, audience participation and interaction. She has also written and curated, and run technical and creative workshops as part of her own work and in other contexts. These modes of operation are integral to a practice that is rooted in social processes and the relationship between people and local environment.

3.30pm coffee break

4.00pm Games Culture: Ludic interrogations

Tom Betts (UK)
http://www.nullpointer.co.uk
http://www.thinkinggames.co.uk

Tom Betts (UK) Current work investigates the ways in which digital environments change our perception and treatment of space,time and material. My projects focus several aspects of this culture. Schizophrenic and multidimensional reconstructions of data forms, interventions and distortions of existing digital spaces, generative construction of content and the life of digital objects. Tom works as both a programmer, performer and participant within these virtual spaces.

Alison Mealey
http://www.alisonmealey.com/

Alison is a past Graduate of the MA programme at the DRU and recent recipient of an ITEM fellowship at FACT, Alison's work has for some time focused on changing and augmenting commercial games engines such as unreal tournament, to create physical artefacts, installations and portraiture.

Tuomo Tammenpää
http://www.tiletoy.org

Tuomo Tammenpää (Finland) currently collaborates with English game designer and NESTA Fellow Daniel Blackburn on electronically enhanced games and plays. They are interested in combining the social and physical aspects from plays and board games with the computational possibilities of microcontrolled electronics. Tuomo is exploring the misuse of everyday electronic devices as a demystification and democratisation of technology. Hacking, modifying, circuit-bending and reverse-engineering provide the working context where he questions the relationship between the electronic objects, the consumers and the objectives of consumer electronics industry.

5.30 finish


Published: 22nd November 2006