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Augmented Reality Events workshop

Augmented Reality Workshop Reportback


San Francisco, CA

On the weekend of March 31st-April 1st, Upgrade! SF produced its first ever workshop. The theme was Augmented Reality and the guest instructor from Boston was artist John Craig Freeman (Craig), who did an excellent job of getting the 13 students going with the technology and placing augments in the SOMArts “I am Crime” show.

Craig spent most of the day discussing concepts of Augmented Reality and configuring everyone’s computers so they could view the sample augments on their phones.

No easy task! But it was a great group of people; artists, teachers, grad students, community organizers, and a few start-up folks. The vibe was good and everyone ended up sharing information (and snacks!), seated at a banquet-style dinner table with laptops and mobile devices.

On day 2, the AR action began with everyone designing several augments as PNG compilations. The idea was that they would generally be drawn from personal memory or experiences.

Here’s what one looks like, graphics overlaid onto geolocations, viewable from your mobile device.

Now you see it, now you don’t. Scott Kildall is being stabbed with a virtual Golden Knife created by Dorothy Santos.

All of the augments the participants made were amazing and they now populate the SOMArts gallery as virtual sculptures. Below is DC Spensley‘s creation.

And Christine shows Bob Dylan in the corner.

And Isabel Reichert exhorts us to “Trust” — is it the gallery or her partner Sean Fletcher that she’s talking about.

Casondra tells about her family history in Pittsburg as this “impossible object”.

And here is a press pass from 1934 which caused imprisonment for one’s “radical” beliefs.

You can see these augments and more at the closing night of “I am Crime” — April 19th at SOMArts.

Special thanks to Victoria Scott, who spent both the two days acting as T.A. And much gratitude to Justin Hoover at SOMArts and Southern Exposure Gallery for providing an Alternative Exposure grant that helped keep the workshop financially accessible for all.

art Events open discussion presentation workshop

Augmented Reality Talk + Workshop with John Craig Freeman


San Francisco, CA

Workshop is now $50!!

Upgrade! San Francisco is proud to present two events with Boston-based media artist and activist John Craig Freeman at SOMArts Cultural Center (934 Brannan Street, San Francisco).

Free Public Talk: “Emergent Technology as Art Practice and Public Art as Intervention”
Thursday, March 29th, 7-7:30PM meet and greet; 7:30-8:30PM lecture + questions.

2-day Workshop: “Making Art with Augmented Reality”
REGISTER HERE
Saturday March 31st & Sunday April 1st, 11am–5pm both days.
This 12-hour workshop provides a hands-on introduction to Augmented Reality (AR) – a technique where virtual 3D objects can be overlaid into physical space and viewed through the camera and screen of mobile devices. AR is an emerging tool in game design and offers many exciting possibilities for visual artists and activists to realize their ideas in any scale or location in the world.

All participants in John’s workshop will have their finished digital augment and a 17″ x 22″ color print automatically added to the current SOMArts exhibition “I Am Crime: Art On the Edge of Law“.


John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public works at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. He has produced work and exhibited around the world including in Xi’an, Belfast, Los Angeles, Beijing, Zurich, New York City, Taipei, São Paulo, Warsaw, Kaliningrad, Miami, Bilbao, Havana, Atlanta, Calgary, Buffalo, Boston, Mexico City, London and San Francisco. Freeman received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990.

John is currently an Associate Professor of New Media, at Emerson College (Boston) in the Department of Visual and Media Arts and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, at UC San Diego.

Support for this workshop is provided by Southern Exposure Gallery Alternative Exposure Grant Program.

Pictured above: Border Memorial Frontera de los Muertos by John Craig Freeman

Events

Upgrade meeting Jan. 18th @ SOMArts


San Francisco, CA

The first Upgrade-SF meeting of 2012 will be 7-9pm, Wednesday, January 18th at SOMArts, (934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th Street).

We will be holding the meeting the exhibition space of “Get Lucky: The Culture of Chance“, which was curated by our very own Hanna Regev and Justin Hoover.

We have billed this as a “Community Conversation” and here we hope to engage a conversation around chance in new media art. Hanna will be giving an overview of the show, followed by some “surprise speakers”, who will engage in a chance-based conversation.

Place and Time:

Date: January 18th, 2012

Time: 7pm-9pm; 7-7:30 is meet and greet. At 7:30pm (sharp), we begin the speaker + conversations.

Place: SOMARTs, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th Street
Bring: food or drink to share, but no alcohol

Invite Others:
Please bring relevant artists, curators, writers and thinkers.

Hope to see you there,
Scott, Victoria and Tim

Exploratorium fieldtrip Meetings Report

Report: New Media Studio at the Exploratorium

Last Thursday, Upgrade! San Francisco met at the Exploratorium — an art & science institution founded in 1969. Hosted by the New Media Studio, whose mandate is a hands-on educational experience, we got a tour from staff & Upgraders: Eric Socolofsky, Lotte Meijer and Chris Cerrito. In the after hours, we learned about three of NM Studio’s projects and the behind-the-scenes techniques to make a rich viewer-based experience.

The first installation we saw was Elastrotron — an interactive installation, which acts as neo-funhouse mirror, warping our reality. In front of the screen, visitors quickly loose their inhibitions, performing with their bodies and creating interactions with strangers.

We then played with Where do you belong? in which you can take a picture of yourself, inserting your image in between two other people you select. The buttons to take your picture are at the edges of the frame, creating an effect so that you appear to be holding hands with your two neighbors. The challenges here were less conceptual — as the idea was straightforward — but instead of user-interface. The solution was to make two large buttons that you have to hit with both hands at the same time and also a countdown timer so that that you don’t repeatedly hit the ‘take picture’ button (a common result, especially with younger kids).

This bubble floor, called Social Projections impressed me by its non-interactive nature. At first, it looks like it responds to movement, reminding me of Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions — but instead, there is no camera vision. People quickly make up their own rules. Different shapes appear and move through the space. People negotiate social behavior, jumping over lines, stepping in and out and performing collaborative tasks, all without interaction.

We followed up the tour with conversation along the lines of development process, how to generate user feedback and more. Here, it turns out that the new media staff spends a lot of time casually observing how people use the interfaces, refining the process. Prototypes are put on the floor without a huge degree of bureaucracy, creating a truly experimental science space.

Zer01

Upgrade! SF in the news

A very nice description of our activities this past year by San Francisco arts writer, Dorothy Santos for the Zer01 blog.

Thanks D!

Exploratorium fieldtrip Meetings presentation

Upgrade! SF – Fieldtrip to the Exploratorium!

We are pleased to announce that the Exploratorium’s New Media Studio will be hosting the next meeting of Upgrade! SF on Thursday, October 27th from 7pm-9pm.

Email lucky@kildall.com to reserve your spot for this event, as we are a small gathering and limited to only 20 people. Spots are reserved first-come, first served, and we will confirm with you if there is room or if you want your name on the waiting list.

The New Media Studio is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining interactive exhibits that use digital and physical technologies.  The NMS also coordinates and supports interactive art installations by visiting artists.

The visitor/user experience is an essential factor in the exhibit development process. During the different stages –from prototype to on-the-floor interactive–  the exhibit is tested with visitors, to make sure the experience and understanding of the exhibit matches the intention of the maker.  Feedback from visitor evaluation is fed back into future iterations, each cycle building on the next until the exhibit approximates “completion.”

We will have a brief presentation (10-15 minutes) by NMS staff members (Bill Meyer, Eric Socolofsky, North Pitney, Lotte Meijer, Chris Cerrito) to frame a context for a larger group discussion about the role of the user in new media art.

Place and Time:
Date: October 27th, 2011
Time: 7pm Sharp -9pm; 7-7:30 is meet n’ greet followed by the presentations and group discussion.
Place: The Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts, 3601 Lyon Street, San Francisco, CA 94123
Bring: snacks or drink to share

Important: You must confirm your spot by emailing lucky@kildall.com. The museum will be closed when the event starts, and we will gather at the main entrance. Please be on time. There is free parking next to the museum, and public transportation is slow.

Bio:
The Exploratorium is a museum in San Francisco with over 475 participatory exhibits, all of them made onsite, that mix science and art. It also aims to promote museums as informal education centers.

Founded in 1969 by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer, the Exploratorium offers visitors a variety of ways—including exhibits, webcasts, websites and events—to explore and understand the world around them. In 2011, the Exploratorium received the National Science Board 2011 Public Service Science Award for its contributions to public understanding of science and engineering.

Hope to see you there,
Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott and Tim Roseborough

apps art Meetings presentation

Upgrade! Meeting featuring media artist Scott Snibbe

The next Upgrade-SF meeting is set for 7-9pm, Thursday, August 25th at the studio of Scott Snibbe, (1073 Howard St., between 6th St and 7th St).

Scott is a San Francisco-based media artist, who is the founder of Snibbe Interactive and Scott Snibbe Studio and has a well-established reputation in the new media art world for user-activated interactive environments. Recently, he has recreated a number of his artworks as apps for the iPhone/iPad and collaborated with the musician Björk for her new all-app album ‘Biophilia’, and with James Cameron on Avatar: The Exhibition.

During the past few meetings, the question of how new media artists can learn from the tech industry and monetize their artwork has come up for discussion. We have asked Scott to speak  because of his experiences as an artist with creating an alternative business model and in turn introducing his work to new audiences.

Specifically, in the last several years, Scott has moved away from exhibiting solely in galleries and museums and into direct sales of  his artwork for public spaces and events and on mobile devices  available directly to the public for $1.99.

For this meeting, we decided to switch-up the format a bit while keeping the gathering casual – Scott Snibbe will speak for approximately 45 minutes on his new work in the context of how  to make a sustainable business model and then he’ll field a Q & A.

Place and Time:
Date: August 25th
Time: 7pm-9pm; 7-7:30 is meet and greet. At 7:30pm (sharp), Scott Snibbe will begin his talk, followed by questions and group conversation.
Place: Snibbe Interactive, 1073 Howard St., between 6th St and 7th St.
Bring: food or drink to share, please RSVP (off list)

Invite Others:
Please bring relevant artists, curators, writers and thinkers. We’re expanding slowly through word of mouth and trying to augment this group this way (as opposed to posting on Facebook or Tweeting about it).

Bio for Scott Snibbe:
Scott Snibbe is a media artist, filmmaker, and researcher in interactivity. Whether on mobile devices or in large public spaces, his interactive art spurs people to participate socially, emotionally, and physically. His works are strongly influenced by cinema: particularly animation, silent, and surrealist film; and often mix live and filmed performances with real-time interaction. Snibbe’s artwork is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Museum of Modern Art (New York); and has been shown in several hundred solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including a solo retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His large-scale interactive projects have been incorporated into concert tours, Olympics, science museums, airports, and other major public spaces and events, and he has collaborated on interactive projects with musicians and filmmakers including Björk and James Cameron.

Hope to see you there,
Scott, Victoria and Tim

art Meetings open discussion regionality

Next Upgrade! SF meeting, Wednesday, June 22nd 7-9pm

Hi Everyone,
We are excited to have our 4th Upgrade! San Francisco meeting, this time at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), an organization which has been  hugely supportive of digital arts and social change in the Bay Area.

Where: June 22nd (Thursday), 2011
Time: 7-9pm.
The place: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), 
998 Market St. in the Warfield Building (@ the corner of Market St. and Taylor St.)
Bring: snack or drink to share would be appreciated.

For this meeting, we are exploring the topic of “Regionality”, which in new media art encompasses several concepts. We want to talk about how this applies to San Francisco, especially in the context of new media artwork and the rapid development of Internet culture.

Within the visual arts, regional art movements such as the Chicago Imagists* (1960s-70s) and The Royal Art Lodge** in Winnipeg (1990s-00s), celebrated their cities as important alternate sites of activity to the obvious cultural centers of New York, London and Paris.

As an art practice, new media has partitioned out its own territory through digital art organizations such as Rhizome, Turbulence and Furtherfield, establishing its own “regionality”, apart from visual arts institutions.

Lastly, how do questions of virtuality resolve themselves with respect to site? As tech industry giants thrive in the Bay Area, what kind of role do we play as artists located in the same city but often operating their tools in the “un-sitely” spaces of the Internet.

To start, we’ll have series of short presentations by speakers to get the dialogue going and then open up the discussion to the group.

We’d love to invite others into the group, but instead of posting this to the whole FB world, please only invite someone who is interested in these conversations and would like to participate.

Hope to see you there,

Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott & Tim Roseborough

** The Power of Myth: How Winnipeg and Its Art Became Such a Big Deal

* Jumin’ Backflash: Original Imagist Artwork, 1966-1969

art Meetings Online Museums open discussion

Next Upgrade! SF meeting, March 10th 7pm

Hi Everyone,

Just a reminder that the next Upgrade meeting is on Thursday, March 10th, 7-9pm.

Its the same location as last time: 3435 Cesar Chavez (@ Mission), San Francisco (Buzz 051# / M. Ho).
Please bring a snack or drink to share. Feel free to call me at 415-710-7563 if you get lost on the way in.

We’ve had two meetings so far with great attendance and participation - thanks again to Anu Vikram and Justin Hoover for being in the hot seat and sparking a compelling discussion last month.

This meeting, we’re going to look at some of the new online digital art initiatives from large computer companies such as Adobe and Google, who have thrown their hats into the new media dialogue, then turn back to the group for discussion.

It’d be worth it to read these two recent articles before the meeting as background:

An article by Michelle Kasprzak (new curator at V2, Rotterdam) regarding the Adobe Online Museum.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/feb/9/moving-museum-online/

And a posting by Jaime Austin (01SJ curator and new parent) on the Northern Lights blog, regarding the Google Art Project.

http://northern.lights.mn/2011/02/google-art-project/

This topic flows nicely into some of the conversation questions we’ve developed during the last meetings;
-How can new media artists be shown or exhibited in Bay area?
-How do we attract people to see new media art?
-Can NM art learn anything from the corporate NM ethos (especially about monetizing their work)?
-What does it mean to be a NM artist when most of the population is creating content with digital tools?

We hope to see you there!

Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott and Tim Roseborough

Events Meetings

Janurary Upgrade! SF Meeting on the 27th from 7pm-9pm


3435 Cesar Chavez, San Francisco, CA @ Mission (Buzz 051# / M. Ho)

Hi Everyone,

From the feedback that we got from last month’s successful gathering, we are going to keep this months meeting of The Upgrade SF informal and also build on the list of great questions we gathered at the last meeting (see bottom of this post). Matt has again generously offered his loft space for this meeting (Thanks Matt!)

This time around, we are going to experiment with posing our question list to two Bay Area curators: SOMArts Director Justin Hoover and Anuradha Vikram from the Worth Ryder Gallery at UC Berkeley.

It will be a group discussion and we’ll use the projector to bring up relevant sites and information while the two of them answer and illuminate questions on new media.

For those of you that were unable to make it to December’s meeting, we hope you can come to the Jan 27th get-together. We had a fantastic first meeting with a excellent turnout, good people and a general interest in asking questions of WHY of new media/technology in artwork, as opposed to the HOW.

** When and Where **
Where: January 27th (Thursday)
Time: 7-9pm.
The place: The same as before — 3435 Cesar Chavez (@ Mission), San Francisco (Buzz 051# / M. Ho)
Bring: snack or drink to share

We hope to see you there.
Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott and Tim Roseborough

Questions from December 2010 meeting:

  • How do you sketch with new media?
  • How to negotiate projects when you don’t have all the tech skills?
  • How to mix old and new technology? esp. when working/living in technology.
  • How to introduce art to a younger generation?
  • How do you keep the poetry in the forefront?
  • Why is the aspect of creating an art dialogue often overlooked?
  • How do you talk to people about new media art who are not in the field?
  • How does new media fit into art history?
  • How to address economic concerns/sustainability of art-making
  • Why (instead of how)?
  • How can new media artists be show or exhibited?
  • How do we attract people to see new media art?
  • Do I need a new taxonomy in new media art?
  • Where do the boundaries of art and science blur?
  • How do you handle issues of value? e.g. materiality and immateriality and credit/history.