Berkeley Talk: Transforming Community Through Pervasive Play
I will be speaking at the Berkeley Center for New Media on February 2nd, 2012, at 5PM in the BCNM Commons (340 Moffitt).…
Play, writing, and the pleasures of complex dynamic systems
Writer and game designer Andrea Phillips, who I interviewed in this space a few years back, recently wrote a…
Metropolis II
Chris Burden’s Metropolis II opens this week at LACMA. According to Burden, “The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city.” And also, I would add, the thrill and the wonder…
An essential archipelago of opportunity
Nicholas de Monchaux’s WPA 2.0 entry, Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial data to map the thousands of abandoned city-owned lots scattered across North American cities. But this is more than just a data viz project: de Monchaux conceives of these spaces as “an essential archipelago of opportunity” for making cities more livable, functional, and sustainable.
Mogees: Realtime Gesture Recognition with Contact Microphones
Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees project — “an interactive gestural-based surface for realtime…
Innovation Ecotones
An ecotone — literally, a place where ecologies are in tension — is a transitional area between…
Video: Indiecade 2011 “No Screens” Panel
Featuring Mathieu Castelli, Nathalie Pozzi, Greg Trefry, Chris Weed, and me. Moderated by Colleen Macklin.…
Using location data to predict where people will be, when they will be there, and who they will be there with
Never mind the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance-by-smartphone of where people are. Next up is keeping…
Engine 29 “pop-up arts journalism lab” pays a visit to the @scareality Game Office
Doug MacCash of the New Orleans Times-Picayune caught this footage of me talking about Reality Ends Here when…
The secret #scareality experience at #diydays
Thanks to Lance Weiler and the rest of the DIY Days crew for helping us run a “bite-sized” version of Reality…
Henry Jenkins interviews me about Reality Ends Here
Special thanks to Henry Jenkins for conducting a wide-ranging two-part interview with Simon Wiscombe, Tracy…
Reality@IndieCade
Special thanks to the IndieCade organizers for asking us to appear at this year’s festival, and to all…
Embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects
Responsibility has yet to be claimed for the beautiful papercraft sculptures that have mysteriously popped…
Inscrutability and data visualization: the lost language of the khipu
While it has long been understood that the Inca khipu was an advanced thread/cord-based numerical accounting…
Posting Anonymously: The Talking Statues of Rome
Anonymity affords a kind of honesty and directness that isn’t always possible when people know who’s…
The Particle Physics Wind Chime
Earlier this year, physicist Matt Bellis helped Jen Stein, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz and me to put together…
Serendipity, ubicomp, and “over-coded smart cities”: an interview with Mark Shepard, creator of Serendipitor
Mark Shepard is an artist, architect and researcher whose post-disciplinary practice addresses new social…
Radiation cats and atomic priesthoods: the Human Interference Task Force
The question of how to mark the places where we store nuclear waste such that people in the distant future won’t…
Revel: a geolocative app with an emphasis on play and public space – call for participation
PEG-LA co-conspirator Sarah Brin is one of the coordinators of Revel, “a public invitation to participate…
Trionfi.com: a massive, rambling archive of playing and fortune cards
Trionfi.com has got to be one of the most confusing and messy websites on the whole internet. It’s also…
When games break (beautifully): the 1994 Caribbean Cup anomaly
One little change in a complex system can lead to a cascade of unpredictable outcomes. This is why play testing…
News canisters
Once upon a time, news was delivered by ship. It was a piece of cargo like any other. It took up space. It weighed…
Serendipity with an edge: A chat with Benrik about Situationist App
Situationist is an iPhone app that injects surprise and serendipity into everyday life. The app uses geolocation…
The Fluxus Performance Workbook
This collection (.pdf) of Fluxus “event scores” — instructions for performances, happenings,…
16 June 2014: Tunisian transmedia campaign
16 Juin 2014 is a participatory transmedia event that took place in February of 2011. The project engaged the…
The Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel is 32,000 years old
Everything that has happened since the time of Augustus Caesar takes up only 6.25% of the time that the Lion man…
AR Drone @uscmeml
MEML got an AR Drone over the holidays… Here we are testing it in front of curious students and passersby…
Dokobots: findable, sharable virtual playthings embedded in real space
Dokobots looks to be a great little geogame, with clever mechanics that push pervasive location-based participatory…