Graffito: Vintage Festival replay videos
September 8, 2010 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment
Some videos from Graffito in use at the Vintage@Goodwood festival
Jump In workshop
May 1, 2009 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
As part of our contribution to the Creator Research Cluster, Giles Lane, Sarah Thelwall (mycake) and Tim Jones (Solar Associates) organised a 1 day workshop at The Rookery in Clerkenwell to explore how small arts organisations could explore working with research departments in universities, and develop the case for becoming Independent Research Organisations. The workshop brought together around 20 participants from a wide group of artists and creative professionals, many of whom are already in collaborations with universities, to share experiences and insights into collaborative practices.
The workshop was partly inspired by Sarah’s Troubadour study for the Creator Cluster (due to be published in June 2009 by Proboscis), the executive summary of which was circulated to all the participants. It drew on the experiences of Proboscis (already an IRO since 2005), Blast Theory and Scan who have all maintained long term partnerships and collaborations with universities stretching back a decade or more. The AHRC was also represented at the workshop and was helpful in identifying the probable routes needed to be taken to achieve IRO status in the current climate.
The participants agreed to set up an informal cluster of interested parties who wanted to take the process further.
Participants: Giles Lane (Proboscis); Sarah Thelwall (mycake); Tim Jones (Solar Associates); Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield); Helen Sloan (Scan); Julianne Pierce (Blast Theory); Rob La Frenais (Arts Catalyst); Tassos Stevens (Coney); Ruth & Bruno (Igloo); Glenn Davidson (Artstation); Rachel Jacob (Active Ingredient); Evelyn Wilson (LCACE); Gini Simpson (Queen Mary); Annamaria Wills (cida); Carien Meier (Drake); Ben Cook (LUX); Tim Harrison (ACE London); Isabel Lilly (Stream); Joanna Pollock (AHRC); Nick? (A Foundation).
Absent Friends: Bronac Ferran (boundaryobject); Julie Taylor (Goldsmiths); Lorraine Warren (Southampton); Ted Fuller (Lincoln)
Funded by the CREATOR Cluster, part of the EPSRC’s Digital Economy programme.
UrbanSense08 Workshop
November 6, 2008 by karenmartin · Leave a Comment
The third in a series of workshop on the theme of urban sensing, UrbanSense 08 took place in Raleigh, North Carolina in November 2008. The workshop explored ideas, prototypes and realised projects around participatory sensing. Karen Martin made a presentation of ‘Participatory Sensing for Urban Communities’ which described the Robotic Feral Public Authoring and Snout projects which Proboscis had created in collaboration with Birkbeck College, University of London.
Read the paper ‘Participatory Sensing for Urban Communities‘ (PDF 650Kb) by Demetrios Airantzis (Birkbeck College, University of London); Alice Angus (Proboscis), Giles Lane (Proboscis), Karen Martin (Proboscis), George Roussos (Birkbeck College, University of London), Jenson Taylor (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Here is the workshop abstract:
Sensing is going mobile and people-centric. Sensors for activity recognition and GPS for location are now being shipped in millions of top end mobile phones. This complements other sensors already on mobile phones such as high-quality cameras and microphones. At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking.
This workshop promotes exchange among sensing system researchers involved in areas, such as, mobile sensing, people-centric and participatory sensing, urban sensing, public health, community development, and cultural expression. It focuses on how mobile phones and other everyday devices can be employed as network- connected, location-aware, human-in-the-loop sensors that enable data collection, geo-tagged documentation, mapping, modeling, and other case-making capabilities.
http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/urbansensing/
CREATOR Troubadour Study
August 6, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Proboscis is collaborating with Sarah Thelwall to conduct a ‘troubadour’ study to investigate artistic & creative research models and the ways in which these interface between creative SMEs and organisations such as HE institutions and the Research Councils.
In the work which culminated in Capitalising Creativity, Sarah developed a model for defining those activities which are at the core of an artist or creative organisations activities versus those which exploit the intellectual capital created and leverage it into income streams and commercial collaborations. Whilst this model of ‘first ‘and ‘second order’ activities was a good fit for some SMEs, Proboscis concluded that the research focused approach which it pursues is not well suited to the development of second order activities in this manner. Instead Proboscis, and organisations with a similar outlook such as Blast Theory, have pursued an approach that increases connections and activities with research focused institutions.
It is these connections and methods that we would research in the Troubadour Study:
- what are the interactions between SMEs and research institutions?
- how does each side of a collaboration evaluate the partmnership and define ‘value’?
- how is this value communicated to funders and stakeholders?
- what are the limiting factors of such collaborations and why are there so few examples?
- what lessons can be learnt from the experiences of Cluster members Proboscis and Blast Theory and how might this contribute to influencing funding policies and frameworks?
Team : Sarah Thelwall and Giles Lane
Funded through the CREATOR Research Cluster, part of the EPSRC’s Digital Economy programme.
CREATOR Pilot – Sensory Threads
August 5, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Proboscis is leading a pilot project, Sensory Threads, funded by the CREATOR Research Cluster. The project builds upon our previous collaborations with Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab on the Feral Robots and Snout environmental sensing projects and takes wearable sensing into new areas with new collaborations with the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham and Southampton University’s School of Management.
Sensory Threads is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them. We aim to premiere the work in 2009.
Team: Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Karen Martin and Orlagh Woods (Proboscis); Demetrios Airantzis, Dr George Roussos and Jenson Taylor (Birkbeck); Joe Marshall (MRL); Dr Nick Bryan-Kinns and Robin Fencott (Queen Mary) and Dr Lorraine Warren (Southampton).
Funded through the CREATOR Research Cluster, part of the EPSRC’s Digital Economy programme.
StoryCubes Installation – bTWEEN08
June 20, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Following the Manchester Beacon workshop, Proboscis facilitated a StoryCubes ‘landscape of ideas’ to help Just b. Productions and the Manchester Beacon Project define the brief for a new commission to create an online public engagement service that maps connections between people, places, knowledge and creative activity in Manchester. Starting with a series of questions derived from the initial day-long workshop, delegates of b.TWEEN were asked to add their comments, ideas and suggestions to scope out wider issues, aspirations and challenges for the design brief of a new online ‘public engagement tool’.
The StoryCubes Installation was subsequently voted Best Interactive Gallery Installation by the delegates of b.TWEEN.
Team: Giles Lane and Karen Martin.
CREATOR Research Cluster
April 27, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Proboscis is a founder member of the CREATOR Research Cluster, funded by EPSRC as part of the “Connecting Communities for the Digital Economy” initiative. The cluster brings together practitioners from the creative industries with researchers from varied traditions that span ICT, the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and business studies.
The cluster seeks to establish a close connection between ICT researchers, those with an interest in business and innovation, and practising members of the creative industries and seeks to answer 4 main questions:
- What key challenges face the creative industries due to the emergence of a new generation of social, pervasive and affective ICT?
- And conversely, what long term challenges must be tackled by ICT research in order to support future creative industries?
- How can we better engage small creative companies in research and knowledge transfer?
- And especially, how can we establish new interdisciplinary approaches across ICT, the arts and humanities and the social sciences that support “practice-led” approaches to research?
Members include:
Blast Theory, University of Reading, Storey Gallery, AmaK, University of Nottingham, University of Cambridge, Queen Mary, University of London, University of Technology, Sydney, University of Sheffield, University of Lincoln, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Exeter University, Decoda, The Creative Media Centre, Lancaster University, Brunel University, University Of Chichester, Birkbeck College, University of London, Proboscis, Newcastle University, University of Glasgow, iShed, Watershed, SCAN/Bournemouth University, University of Bath, University of Worcester, University of Southampton, University of Sussex.
A series of Pilot projects and ‘Troubadour’ studies will be conducted over the year 2008-09.
Capitalising Creativity
November 15, 2007 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Cultural Snapshots No.14 November 2007
Capitalising Creativity : Developing earned income streams in Cultural Industries organisations by Sarah Thelwall
Conversations & Connections Report
May 28, 2007 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Social Tapestries: Conversations and Connections (May 2007)
Download PDF 3.3Mb
Order a Hard Copy
Shared Encounters Workshop
April 30, 2007 by karenmartin · Leave a Comment
‘Shared Encounters’ was a workshop which took place at CHI 07 in San Jose, California. CHI is the annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and this one-day workshop brought together researchers from academia and industry to explore how mobile technologies might support shared encounters in urban environments. Karen Martin and Giles Lane submitted a position paper describing Proboscis’ Conversations and Connections project and the challenges and opportunities faced by projects which make use of, and develop, new technologies but have primarily social goals.
You can read our paper here: Making Glue (PDF 150Kb)
This is the workshop abstract:
Our everyday lives are characterised by encounters, some are fleeting and ephemeral and others are more enduring and meaningful exchanges. Shared encounters are the glue of social networks and have a socializing effect in terms of mutual understanding, empathy, respect and thus tolerance towards others. The quality and characteristics of such encounters are affected by the setting, or situation in which they occur. In a world shaped by communication technologies, non-place-based networks often coexist alongside to the traditional local face-to-face social networks. As these multiple and distinct on and off-line communities tend to carry out their activities in more and more distinct and sophisticated spaces, a lack of coherency and fragmentation emerges in the sense of a shared space of community. Open public space with its streets, parks and squares plays an important role in providing space for shared encounters among and between these coexisting networks. Mobile and ubiquitous technologies enable social encounters located in public space, albeit not confined to fixed settings, whilst also offering sharing of experiences from non-place based networks. We will look at how to create or support the conditions for meaningful and persisting shared encounters. In particular we propose to explore how technologies can be appropriated for shared interactions that can occur spontaneously and playfully and in doing so re-inhabit and connect place-based social networks.
http://www.mediacityproject.com/shared-encounters/description.php
ST – St Marks Coop Report
October 15, 2006 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
St Marks Housing Coop Report (October 2006)
Experimental Ethnography
February 15, 2005 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Urban Tapestries: Experimental Ethnography, Technological Identities and Place (February 2005)
An LSE Electronic Working Paper by Roger Silverstone and Zoetanya Sujon
