WEB3DART WORKSHOP 2006 @ EAF

May 10, 2006

Type: discussion

EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
WEB3DART WORKSHOP 5-9 JUNE 2006

KAREL DUDESEK - CONCEPTUAL GUIDANCE
MARTIN SCHMITZ - VRML
DIRK WALDIK - FLASH 3D

WORKSHOP LEADERS
KAREL DUDESEK - CONCEPTUAL GUIDANCE
Karel Dudesek is an ex-performance artist, TV activist, and
professor. He is presently Head of Postgraduate Studies at the
Ravensbourne College in Kent, UK. He deals with digital, experimental
and collaborative working to develop interaction strategies with
audiences.
He has organised and juried the Web3DArt exhibitions from 1999 and
was the founder of Van Gogh TV, a media collaborative, which has been
active in combining various media with live audiences for television,
radio and Internet since the early 1980s.
MARTIN SCHMITZ - VRML
Close collaborator of Karel Dudesek and Technical Director for
VanGoghTV, Martin Schmitz is also Senior Lecturer in Postgraduate
Studies at the Ravensbourne College of Communication and Design,
Kent, UK.
DIRK WALDIK - FLASH 3D
Dirk Waldik is a specialist in Interactive Technologies and has been
developing Information and Navigation Systems for the web and
interactive media for the past 6 years. He possesses a thorough
understanding of community-based websites, having worked on projects
such as the innovative online radio Last.fm. This site features a
complex mapping system, which learns from the musical tastes of the
site's visitors.
Dirk Waldik is also a Lecturer at the Ravensbourne College of
Communication and Design, Kent, UK.

VENUE
Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, cnr North Terrace and
Morphett Street, Adelaide

WORKSHOP Description
This workshop leads in to an understanding of the structure and
possibilities of interactive narratives. It also provides a means of
investigating and questioning the conventions of presentation and
navigation in contemporary interaction design. Interactive
narratives will be designed as hypertexts with relational links
requiring participants to organize content in non-linear and
innovative ways.
The combination of interaction, immersion, and the digital computer
make Virtual Reality a unique medium for interactive productions,
providing new opportunities, but also new challenges. VR offers
artists and designers a new world for their imagination and a new
field of expression-a tantalizing mix of absolute freedom and
niggling limitations. On the one hand you have a limitless 3D canvas
in which to create a visual effect. On the other the computer can
only redraw a very limited number of polygons and textures at the 20
or more frames-per-second needed to effectively preserve the virtual
illusion and while the viewer can wander at will through your world,
the artist can no longer so easily control visual surprise.
Visual immersion is only one aspect of this new medium. Equally
important is the user's interaction with the virtual environment.
Since, as humans, we live our whole lives in interactive
environments, we assume that it will be easy to create interactive,
virtual environments. But it proves difficult to build intuitive and
rich interaction in VR.
From a narratological perspective, a story consists of a complete
conceptualization of the world in which the narrative is set. This
includes all the characters, locations, conditions and actions or
events that take place during the story's temporal extent.
Two fundamental components of a narrative - its plot and its
characters - are defined within the story itself. Distinct from the
story, but closely tied to it, is the narrative discourse.
Memory Trace. Turning to memories, we assume that an item has been
accurately memorized, and we might ask what has happened over the
retention interval? What happens is forgetting; memory diminishes
over time, leading us to the time-dependency principle. Four
hypotheses underlie the time-dependency principle: decay,
consolidation, displacement, and interference.
Project:
Workshop participants will design a 3D virtual reality environment
that enables the visitor to experience one of the terms by using
interactive narrative, a virtual reality implemented story:
-Consolidation
-Displacement
-Interference
We often think of memory as involving storing stuff in the brain or
mind, but that's just a metaphor. In a very real sense, there is
'nothing' in the mind, no thing that is except relationships.
It is difficult to describe something so complex, fluid, and
ever-changing as these knowledge-relationships we have.
When we use these linguistic models, we talk about our cognitive
structure (or our construction system), and the components or 'basic
building blocks' of this cognitive structure we call concepts (or
constructs, contrasts, dimensions, categories…).
Concepts are ways we have of organizing what we have learned from
experience. Concepts treat a variety of experiences as equivalent in
some way: around features or qualities these experiences have in
common, or their general similarity to some 'prototype', or some way
in which we, the conceptualizers, relate to the experiences –
something like Gibson's affordances.
Birds' feathers are an example of a feature. Coins are gold or silver
colored – this is a quality of theirs. A robin or a sparrow are more
prototypical birds – ostriches and penguins are not so obvious. A
chair is anything we use to sit upon (something that affords
sitting-upon).
Please note that these concepts need not be verbal: A cat knows the
difference between the expensive cat food and the cheap stuff, yet
can't tell you about it; an infant knows who mommy is, long before he
or she can say the word; wild animals contrast safe areas and
dangerous ones, etc. Even adult humans sometimes 'just know' without
being about to say: What is it about that person that you like or
dislike? It may be quite difficult to put into words.
Concepts don't just float around independently, either. We
interrelate and organize them. For example, we can define some
category of things by combining various concepts: "Women are adult
female human beings." Or we can go a step further and organize things
into taxonomies, those tree-like structures we come across in
biology: A Siamese is a kind of cat, which is a kind of carnivore,
which is a kind of mammal, which is a kind of vertebrate…. Both of
these – definitions and taxonomies – are contained in what is
called semantic memory.

PARTICIPANTS NEED:
*A BASIC KNOW-HOW IN 3D AUTHORING TOOLS (3DSTUDIO MAX, MAYA OR
SOMETHING SIMILAR WHICH EXPORT INTO VRML).
*HAVE THEIR OWN LAPTOPS (PREF. WINXP SYSTEM) AND BE ABLE TO BRING
THEM TO THE WORKSHOP.

APPLICATIONS SHOULD INCLUDE:
*A SHORT BIOGRAPHY, A SHORT RATIONALE AND CONTACT DETAILS.
SEND TO [email protected] or PO BOX 8091 STATION ARCADE ADELAIDE 5000 S.A.

DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: 5PM 24 MAY 2006

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT
MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI: [email protected] OR +61 8 8211 7505
–
EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION curates its exhibition program to
represent new work that expands current debates and ideas in
contemporary visual art. The EAF incorporates a gallery space,
bookshop and artists studios.

Lion Arts Centre North Terrace at Morphett Street Adelaide * PO Box
8091 Station Arcade South Australia 5000 * Tel: +618 8211 7505 * Fax
+618 8211 7323 * [email protected] * Bookshop: [email protected] *
http://www.eaf.asn.au * Director: Melentie Pandilovski

The Experimental Art Foundation is assisted by the Commonwealth
Government through the Australia Council, it arts funding and
advisory body and by the South Australian Government through Arts SA.
The EAF is also supported through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy,
an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.