It was with great delight that I found one of my favorite graphic novel series, entitled “Les Cités Obscures” by Benoit Peeters and François Shuiten, being expanded into a cross media concept. Interactive maps on the web site allow visitors to navigate among stories from the graphic novels and to see animations conveying the same surrealist spirit of the drawings. I read on a newspaper there is a theatrical work also in the works, based on the “Obscure Cities”, but I couldn’t find any traces of it on the Internet - does anybody know about it?

Several projects I have seen last week have pattern recognition as a basis - the lovely Funky Forest by Theodore Watson and Emily Gobeille lets you use you use body movements to regulate the growth of trees and the ecosystem (mainly butterflies) of a forest;

Levelhead, which I mentioned some posts ago, by Julian Oliver, is a visual puzzle where a virtual man goes up and down and in and out virtual ambiances, a very generic structure that can be adapted to thousands of different story sets; and Edge Bomber, in which black tape stripes can produce hundreds of different reactions, according to the script they are related to, and to the theme (content?) projected on top of them.
.
When it comes to narrative studies, most employ spatial metaphors to describe narrative structure and development (hypertext, quest games, 3D environment games); remembering my readings of narrative theory, it struck me how all these very simple systems could very well support stories, a thought unacceptable until a few years ago, when (literary) hypertext, videogames, netart, have been gaining more and more of “story status”.
This means that the notion of “story” is definitely getting stretched out of the post-structuralist theory to adapt to new, much more fluid, story systems.
Is pattern recognition going to be the next craze in “boundary” storytelling?

Perhaps you knew about it already, I didn’t : during the Mediamatic workshop Fredrich Kirschner mentioned an episode of South Park happening in War of Warcraft, episode 1008 (episode 8 of the 10th season) to be specific; take a look at the teaser here and then FIND the episode and watch it, if you hadn’t before - awesome

A lot of new projects appearing this month in this blog, maybe because for once I have been around a little more so I actually saw some of what is going on..
During the seminar on cross media at Cinekid Patrick Crowe introduced this brilliant project for teens, called Total Drama Island, by the multiple award winning Xenophile Media (interactive Emmy for alternate reality games Fallen and Regenesis. oops, sorry, Regenesis is an EXTENDED reality game). The interactive format makes fun of the various Survivor and Big Brother-style TV formats, and creates a highly ironic universe in which the system is basically the same, with a twist. The interaction architecture is all but obvious, and I found the ironic approach very educational, as irony may be the only defense left when one grows into a mature viewer.
If you wish to have your avatar selected for the Total Drama Island TV show, you should win a lot of games online - have fun!

Tomorrow night, at 10 pm eastern time, 7 pm SLT, CSI: NY “Down the Rabbithole” will go on the air - detective Mac Taylor / Gary Sinise will have to follow a killer in Second Life, but he won’t find him/her until spring. In the meanwhile all viewers have a shot to catch the techno-savy murderer in the CSI island, or working shoulder to shoulder with pros at the Crime lab in Second Life.
The interesting thing is that the CBS network had to build a simplified interface to Second Life because the main one was considered too difficult for the average TV viewer - the OnRez viewer will combine Second Life features, like chat and teleporting, with services such as virtual shopping.
Definitely worth attending, I ll be there

Technorati Tags: alternate reality games, cross media, event, virtual worlds

Some pictures I didn’t accidentally delete from the Cinekid Media Lab: among the many brilliant ideas, you can see Funky Forest in the first picture, a virtual forest you water with your feet and make grow by raising your arms (pattern detection technology); in the second you (barely) see in the middle an animation device that gives life and narrative value to very simple drawings.

This lovely project in which you select the part of the globe you want to see, and the time going back to Ice Ages, is basically a giant mouse, or trackpad (!)

The Cinekid festival was great - fantastic choice of films and seminars, and the main area at Westergasfabriek was lovely, a real children’s heaven (or maybe parents’?)
The area devoted to educational projects featured, together with chemistry, physics and biology, a preponderance of projects related to climate change and global warming (I wonder why….)

virtual tennis can be played indoors

here is how it feels to live at the North Pole

here is the “Climate Casino”

Last week in Amsterdam I had a very interesting conversation about the famous project by Sugata Mitra called Hole in the Wall.
Dr Mitra also compares it to a well, as people go and throw things (informations) in, or go and pull information out, when they need them.

The whole point is that our western conception of “personal computer” is totally socio-centric, and that other cultures, more depending on oral culture, on surviving micro-social structures like the village or the tribe, can benefit from a different approach to computer technology.
And while in the west you see Windows, Macintosh and Linux, maybe it could be possible to differentiate even more
Interesting how the only representative of a developing country in the group (thus maybe the only one with the right to have a strong opinion about it) warmly refused the idea of Negroponte 100$ laptop, as it would keep its users still out of the “mainstream” (that is, Western) internet culture.
I wonder how these cultural differences can be used to improve transmedial storytelling techniques, especially when the less technologically developed have a much larger wealth of oral storytelling tradition.

Anyway, if you feel like contributing, and also don’t like Negroponte’s $100 laptop, you can donate your (old) computer through Computer Aid

The project that struck me most when in Amsterdam is Julian Oliver’s amazing Levelhead, a game art project (and also THE must-have toy of 2009, I bet) employing pattern recognition technology to capture images from various sides of black and white cubes. The result is a lovely quest game, or moving puzzle, or doll’s house, possibilities are infinite - sometimes I seriously envy generation 2000. Here it is.

Technorati Tags: augmented reality, futuristic, games

Among the many presentations and films at Cinekid I manage to attend only one, a seminar moderated by Greg Childs entitled Cross Media Projects for Children.

Projects presented:
Get Close to the Sugarbabes - Endemol pursue their path of voyeurism even further engaging celebrities to film themselves with mobile phones backstage and in otherwise private situations, and answering the stupidest questions fans will ask; interesting how this creates a seriously interactive situation between the singers Sugarbabes and their audience, as the audience commentaries influence the live performance and even the concert dates.
Total Drama Island, by Xenophile Media, I found it so brilliant I must post about it later; anyway, it pokes fun at Survivor while educating teens about the superficiality of it all; they also manage to make a few bucks out of it, which is lovely too.
W@-D@ (what is dat!?), introduced as Tintin meets Michael Palin - is a wildly creative series of episodes between fiction and documentary in which two funny characters go to different continents to bring back some magic objects, and while there they encounter a lot of weird situations, all related to the cultural reality that the characters are exploring . Together with the TV series there where a website and a series of magazines/books each about one specific country.
Kika and Bob is a project for smaller children, by the dutch Submarine, about a cat, a little girl and a fireman, employing multiple choice narrative and a Tamagochi relationship with the online cat.