About
Jeff Watson is an artist, designer, and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Games at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
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Author Archives: Jeff Watson
Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity
Despite its length and hard-to-pin-down clunkiness, I always liked Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’ rambling near-term sci-fi film about (among other things) the psychological impact of a technology that enables the recording and playing back of one’s … Continue reading
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Tagged berkeley, brains, lifelogging, neuroscience, science, science fiction
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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). Here’s the description of the talk: In this talk, Jeff Watson will present Reality Ends Here (2011), … Continue reading
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Tagged bcnm, berkeley, events, pervasive games, reality ends here, speaking
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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 blog post about the evolution of her writing process, describing “the way that my creation of stories and my creation of … Continue reading
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Tagged andrea phillips, complexity, game design, screenwriting, storytelling
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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… Continue reading
“In its efforts to be “safe rather than sorry,” precaution becomes myopic. It tends to maximize only…”
“In its efforts to be “safe rather than sorry,” precaution becomes myopic. It tends to maximize only one value: safety. Safety trumps innovation. The safest thing to do is to perfect what works and never try anything that could fail, … Continue reading
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“Ubiquitous systems lend themselves easily to—indeed, redefine—surveillance. However discrete they…”
“Ubiquitous systems lend themselves easily to—indeed, redefine—surveillance. However discrete they may be at their design and inception, their interface with each other implies a domain of action that extends from the very contours of the human body outward to whatever … Continue reading
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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. Continue reading
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Tagged nicholas de monchaux, parametric design, sustainability, urban space
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Mogees: Realtime Gesture Recognition with Contact Microphones
Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees project — “an interactive gestural-based surface for realtime audio mosaicing” — implies all sorts of interesting futures for musical instruments and performance: http://youtu.be/erz-9f4M9B4 Via @elejansen
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“Thomas Maldonado … saw the design process as a system embodying both scientific-based and…”
“Thomas Maldonado … saw the design process as a system embodying both scientific-based and intuitive-based thinking. He considered that while design is indeed an art, the designer is not solely an artist. Aesthetic considerations were no longer the primary conceptual … Continue reading
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