Stepping into Storey

I escape the slightly cold rain and enter...shelter. Shelter in more than one sense, for here are gathered again people like me, people addicted to ways we can express ideas in electronic media, ways we play with text and society and space on a computer screen.

Our colleagues are spread across the world — and it is such a luxury to say things like "metatext as a spatial discourse" and not have to unpack the meaning behind that. So for me, coming to these is like coming home for the holidays — a rare chance to meet up with people I can talk to without having to backtrack into hours of explanations.

I feel alone, on the edge of story, the edge of words...and then I enter. Step into an oddly shaped building with green geometric barnacles stuck randomly on the side: Storey Hall in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne.

I pet a very willing kangaroo: he feels as a kangaroo should: softer than a buffalo and less wool greasy than a sheep, and not as silky as a pampered cat.

Gathering my yearly supply of inspiration

I come to these conferences not as the academic but as an observer of ideas. I like to investigate what others are doing, to see the recent fascinations in the digital world, to find stray seed crystals for my thoughts to focus on. And I am never disappointed.

These conferences are always supersaturated mixtures of information — too many things to go to and to see and people to talk with. So, please don't take these notes as what the authors said or truly meant — go to the originals! The DAC site will prove to be an invaluable resource for future musings on digital arts and culture, thanks to the range of papers and topics and the notes in the DAC blog — a real reflection of the community.

Thanking all involved: the conference organization was tops

But I must say that this conference was extremely well run, with many behind the scenes minions making sure that the technology worked well, that there were easy to access computer terminals, and even wireless access. The conference was on more than just a face to face basis: I joined a community of bloggers and blogged my on-the-fly notes, baring my poor typing and off thoughts without editing at all.

Kudos to Adrian Miles, Anna Farago, Antoanetta Ivanova, and all the rest at RMIT who made the whole thing work so well.

Building time in to think: what a great schedule

Even the timing was well thought out — from the order of the papers to the breaks and venues. Monday's papers fell into analyses and looking at game theory and the word and ways to subvert it, Tuesday's gathered about narrative and theory, and Thursday's focused on practice to show what people were doing. Wednesday was a scheduled "day out" in the middle, a welcome break perfectly timed to give us a chance to talk to people who had presented and people whose papers we had read earlier. There was even a day devoted to looking at works both in a VR studio on the campus and at the nearby library.

Mark McGuire and Andrew Hutchinson discuss matters of deep importance in lush green surroundings.

Twisting through a whirlwind of old and new faces

DAC brings in people from all sorts of disciplines: from independant artists and writers to academics (in media, English, history, game studies) to developers. This conference relected the recent surge in interest in gaming: whereas the Brown conference centered on theory, much of this conference centered on the potential for games to be studied under theories and to provide insights into theory and practice.

So what can I tell you about the entire conference? A week of fast paced ideas, of grasping after that elusive concept, of not enough sleep, of meeting old friends and new people: all with fascinating projects and visions? Whew. Not much. My DAC notes come to 28 printed pages, so I will merely relate a few of the things that vied for my attention: and that may interest you as creators and academics.

To get to the papers below, go to the DAC papers, scroll down for the person's name, and click for a PDF version of the paper.

For the writers among us: Wild eyed and wild haired with eyes that see different visions (from graffitti along St. Kilda Road, Melbourne, Australia)

Experimenting, merging the traditional and the modern, the expected and the unexpected. (Digeridoo player busking on the sidewalk on Swanston Street, Melbourne, Australia)

Carry cameras and capture memories wherever possible. (Kate Richards taking photos for her next artwork)

Look in the corners, tell the truth but tell it slant. (Kangaroo at Healesville Sanctuary)

• Virtual worlds to create: As Lisbeth Klastrup relates: "These worlds are a potential waiting to be realized. The seed is virtual, the tree an actualization, the cycle of constant re-virtualization."
• Expressions to economize: Janez Strehovic shows how the poetic economy is intensified in the electronic media with temporal and spatial syntax. "The logic of replacement gives way to the logic of coexistence and simulation"
• Ways to flicker: Susan Ballard talked of ways we embody artwork, of flicker as something we can see and enter, or see and not enter. I thought of three-dimensional onomatopoeia.
• Expectations to mess with: Jim Bizzocchi spoke of Ceremony of Innocence and the way it refutes the user's expectations of cursor and screen.
• Sounds to place: Gregory Moore pointed out the obvious — but I hadn't thought of it. Sounds originate from a particular place. So in your pieces, locate the sounds. Use 3D space to convey abstract notions of space, place, and sound.
• Spaces to cover: Keith Armstrong showed how to cover spaces such as train stations and malls with ecosophical art (site specific, sensory, evolving and emerging).
• Languages to create: My paper and Julianne Chatelain's explored the poetic and graphic possibilities in Glide, a visual language created by Diana Slattery.
• Textual instruments to play: Noah Wardrip-Fruin represented a panoply of voices that are creating electronic works that function like musical instruments: you play them to create stories and meanings just as you play a violin or an instrument to create sound and music. You can get very different sounds — and effects — from the same instrument. Examples include Noah's Talking Cure and Screen, Diana Slattery's Glide language, and Brion Moss' Prate.
• Trends to spoof: Tiffany Holmes has her art students at the Art Institute of Chicago spoof the "break out" game to find themes and expressions in the simple act of bouncing a ball to destroy targets.
• Art to subvert: Catherine Bott scattered objects around in four New Zealand towns and tied the whole thing together with an internet escapade — all without funding or institutional support or even government sanctions in the Picnic.
• Immersion to drown in: Jill Walker showed the magic of immersion — an ontological interaction that fuses you into the fictional world, where your clicking affects the happenings on screen.
• Hardware to demand: Jeremy Yuille showed us the differences between sound quality in film and online: we need better sound production and distribution for computers.
• Art sounds to create: Jeremy Yuille also demonstrated play primitives — ways to combine sounds. I thought of Jim Andrew's Nio. Caleb Stuart showed how laptop performances generate interest in their own right, and explored ways to present laptop sound concerts.
• Sofware to expand awareness. Lonne Malmburg's students use software in unexpected situations such as a silver fox statue that measures coffee smells and emits steam or portable personal devices like shoes that ring out when you stand too long.
• Recursion to bend: Anthony Hunt set up a display in a small room in a museum that mirrored what was outside the museum, including the outside of the display, bending physical and digital media. (Daniel Palmer)
• Objects to interact with: In Richard Brown's Alembic, the object sees you as much as you see it.
• Performances to measure: Jayne Fenton Keane provided a performance between the screen and herself, showing her heartbeats on the screen as she performed.

For the academics and theorists among us: who engage in calmer expressions of thought and practice, exploring the whys and wherefores (Daniel Pargman, Teri Hoskin, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin)

Debra Poulson and truna extrapolate possibilities in art.

Susana Pajares Tosca contemplates fields for study above while Bernadette Flynn takes it all in below.

• Games to play: Espen Aarseth issues his call to arms: ask not what games can do for your discipline, as what your discipline can do for games.
• Social networks to explore: These emerged as wonderful areas to study as people saw the difference between formal rules of engaging the game and informal (and formal) societies evolving online. (Mikael Jakobsson and T.L. Taylor). Immersive games take audiences on a journey that touches on real life — the Beast plays on your cell phone, email, and your life. How did the boundaries between game and real life become so slippery? (Jane McGonigal)
• Qualities of worldness to examine: What are the specific and unique traits that make this a world? (Lisbeth Klastrup)
• Metacommunication to translate: What roles do the metacommunication of games and readersplay in translating fiction and reality? (Anna Mette Thorhauige)
• Traditions to plumb: Explore the history of real life selling spaces to re-design and address the opportunities in internet retail space. (Nanette Carter). Of course, this can be expanded to address opportunities in internet education space, message space, gaming space...Then Hanna Lovise Skartveit showed us how to use traditional film editing techniques to analyse the effects of electronic media and games.
• Games and story to close read: Several people presented excellent explications, which should serve as examples for scholarship: Nick Montfort and Stuart Moulthrop's Varicella, Susana Pajares Tosca's Resident Evil spring most readily to mind.
• New media to edit: New media editing poses new issues: usability, intention, archiving. It blurs the relationship between editing and artistic collaboration. How can we analyze the importance and relationships in new media editing? (Robert Kendall, Rob Swigart, Nick Montfort)
• Avatars to psychoanalyze: Avatars are surrogate selves, but are malleable. Examining the avatar's roles and games between user and virtual world provides insights into digital relationships. (Laetitia Wilson)
• Memories to store: Mike Leggett showed Pathscapes, a way to store text in a visual realm. People can drag and drop their associations with visual memory to store ideas, narratives, image.
• History to come alive in: David Cameron and John Carroll showed To the Spice Islands, a school project that engaged students into studying history with email, websites, in-role presentations, plays, and weblogs. It is a great way to infuse participation and technology.
• Aesthetics to admire: Flash aesthetics are built on vectors rather than bitmaps, providing a new realm of interpretation and design theory where data compression becomes a synechdote for information. (Anna Munster)
• Time to consider: Different layers of time operate in games: negotiated and event time as well as phenomological time — the time of real life. (Ned Rossiter).

But wait! there's more! PlayEngines

The Victorian State Library hosted PlayEngines in association with the DAC conference, in a large sunny room in the library across the street from RMIT. It was nice having the web works to go to such as Robert Kendall's Faith, Stuart Moulthrop's Pax, Diana Slattery's Glide, Eddo Stern's MOO, Mez's _][ad]Dressed in a Skin C.ode_. But the most impressive for me was L. Sanderson's and P. Sansom's Somnolent Fantasies: a large work using two plasma screens and controlled with a clock: move the hands to get different dream sequences.

I also liked Kate Richard's and Richard Gibson's Life After Wartime, which draws on an extensive database of police photos from 1945-1960 and provides poetic links as glimpses into these lives.

And don't forget the VR!

RMIT hosted a VR lab/artist, with a spectacular interactive work. We went over in small groups to see it. The piece moved out from the screen in abstract visions of lines and blobs and structures. At first we were entranced with the imagery: I know now how a 19th century person felt who saw a moving picture for the first time. When we got to know the work, we followed our ribbon/snake avatars to navigate through the spaces.

The artist is intrigued by social interaction: how people work together to navigate within the space. I was intrigued by the author's talking of what he had not accompllished, whilst we saw the magnitude of what he had done. If you ever get to Melbourne, look this up.