I’ve been reading ‘Eden’ by Tim Smit so to get a glimpse of what eden is about and its history etc. There are some interesting points about the geology of the Bodelva site where Eden is situated. The Eden project is sited within a disused china clay mine near St Blazey which produced fine white clay for the porcelain industry and then later for the paper industry. The refinement process for the clay involved filtering out all the sand and hardcore that was mined with the raw clay. This produced 17 tonnes of sand per 1 tonne of white clay which then presented a problem for the mining companies. This was literally piled up around cornwall on land that was aquired by the company, these formed pyramid shaped hills that form some of cornwall’s topography that we see today.
(img to be inserted)

Its been a while since I last went to the Eden Project…in fact it was at the start of my first year in Plymouth as part of an architecture field trip to check out the architectural qualities of the ‘domes’. One of the first things that struck me about Eden was how cool it was! The space is amazing…and to think its smack bang in the depths of deepest darkest Cornwall! Apart from looking like some kind of space station that fell out of the sky its amazing to think about the ecosystems that they maintain within the ‘biomes‘. From what I remember you completely forget where you are and get immersed in the environment you are exploring because you are actually walking through a slice of rainforest with tropical birds flying overhead and the accurate humidity of the atmosphere. Until you look up through the clear dome to see you are still in Cornwall!

This got me thinking about the Production of Space module that I am taking this year. This first assignment is to complete a precedent study into a ’space man/woman/thing’ of our choosing. The study should “reveal core principles behind an artist, architects, designers approach to intervening / negotiating space”. I am thinking of taking a trip up to Eden in the next few weeks or so to take it all in and get some more ’stuff’.

I thought that the Eden Project would be a good topic for this study due to the fact it contains 3 different ecosystems from different parts of the world within an old clay pit in south cornwall. Its a bonkers concept and Tim Smit (the father of the eden project) must have been high on something…but its cool and it works.

Image courtesy of wikipedia

Ok so last night saw the first of this years Apollo seminars hosted by iDAT. Presenting was Gianni Corino, an Italian digital artist and all round digital explorer who is currently working alongside and teaching at iDAT. Below are some notes taken from the evening including a list of his past projects. I have to confess that these notes are blatantly stolen off Adam as he has a PDA with a keypad where as I have a silly little stylus touch screen jobby and cant keep up with the typing! Thanks adam!

Cultural and social interface for public and open spaces

Social Processes
Creativity
Knowledge
Consciousness
Technologies

Media art

Locative and mobile
Mixed reality
Net art
Digital storytelling
Crossmedia
Concepts of network and mixed space undermine my production and research

Dissertation on locative media and quixote as project

Social networks and locative media.

Trame
Project concerning technologies and online for cultural memory of 21st century. A multiarchive web system based on open source video technologies for multimedia online archives.
Trame.polito.it/trame

Remote risonanze
Telematic audio installation. A bridge between the inside and the outside, the online and the offline. Voices from the virtual world come back to the real world to their visitors.

Quixote
A collective project that is made as a moblog and locative media, a diary in real time of quixnote adventures made of images and text to create and send through performance participants phones. Puppet tracked through a gps signal. Suprised how the artefact can create an emotional reception to people.

Dn[T]3
An interactive installation for public spaces. A semantic ecosystem a memetic ecology, where the tag is equal to meme as a semantic unit according to Darwinian theory and lasting all of the installations time. It analyses words sent via SMS with an inferential engine and tracks each word received as absolute frequency, relations frequences. The project applies folksonomis model a typical internet digital world to real world. We can assume semantic clustures thru doing this.
Met.amor.ph

Metrobosco
An installation which has profound social and ecological value. A sort of game to be played by people, creating places of discussion and reflexion around urban replanning and its deeper meanings.

Practice based research in the context of interaction design and social adventure.

Right! I’m getting fed up now of not having brilliant ideas spring into my head instantly!

I have a starting point for my project but cant seem to form it into any decent idea! My starting point is my dissertation subject, this will be the thesis for the project. I have a strong and focused idea for my dissertation but I cant form it into a project idea.

Open source’ technologies are transforming the way we use and interact with the web with many social networking sites thriving off mass collaboration and also making millions for the site owners from user generated content. ‘Open source’ technology is also playing a massive role in transforming scientific practices, business, the economy and politics.

Businesses today are adapting their business model to accommodate emerging technologies such as ‘open source’. With sites like YouTube and MySpace founding a new form of business that has emerged from mass collaboration and user generated content termed ‘wikinomics’. This new ‘open source’ business model has replaced traditional forms of teamwork with “collaborations on an astronomical scale” (Tapscott, 2006). There is also a theory that one day these technologies could assist in the prevention of famine, disease and global warming. (West, 2007)

Watch this space…

We got to play with one of iDAT’s Aibo dogs in the games module the other day. Seem pretty cool if not rather expensive. Also Sony shut down their robotics division in 2006 so they don’t sell them any more…or offer any support! Nice one Sony!

Aibo wikipedia depinition below:
“AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt, homonymous with “partner” in Japanese) is one of several types of robotic pets designed and manufactured by Sony; there have been several different models since their introduction in 1999. Able to walk, “see” its environment via camera, and recognize spoken commands, they are considered to be autonomous robots, since they are able to learn and mature based on external stimuli from their owner or environment, or from other AIBOs.”

The aibo is basically an artificially intelligent robotic dog with loads of cool things bunged in…like wifi connections, cameras, voice and face recognition, sensors and the whole thing is programmable to pretty much whatever you want it too. There are loads of downloadable personalities for it…some quite questionable…but on the whole its quite a cool bit of kit!

I took some videos of it doing random stuff…we couldn’t work out what personality it had loaded at the time.

Simon has expanded on my post about shotcodes. Our initial idea was to make up stencils of the shotcodes so we could spray paint them onto surfaces…aside from the legal issues involved in that idea, the stencils would be a nightmare if not impossible to make. So Simon has found a company that can make up vinyl stickers quite cheaply…good work!

Shotcodes aren’t brand new but this week is the first time I have really looked into them. They are like little circular barcodes that, when used in conjunction with the shotcode mobile phone app, become mobile URLs that can be placed literally anywhere you like. They are better described by shotcode.com:

“The circular sequence of black and white blocks represents a url, any url you want, for example to your products website or a point of sale. The ShotCode reader understands this code and connects the end users mobile phone to your location in three clicks or less!”

I’ve had a play with making my own shotcode using the online generator…this one just links to danlake.com

So its the start of the fourth (see what I did there?!) and final year of my degree. The blog has all been changed around for the final year and as I technically haven’t been set any assignments yet, there are no posts to show! But watch this space…