On 15 November i.e. yesterday, I attended the “Prototyping for Ownership” workshop, run by

Klaus Birk (Media Design, DHBW & Information Environments, UAL London)
Roman Grasy (Intuity Media Lab). >Their company is based in Germany.

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The workshop had 2 groups. Our group of between 5-9 people (it varied!) spent the day choosing little pictures, noting down ideas to them, on creating media architecture on problems close to us. There was a Kinect and VVV (runs nicely with Kinect), augmented reality trackers, a 360 degree mouse, and a macbook pro with after affects (you can guess what I ended up doing).

Some of my ideas are in the slide show above.

My group chose my idea of a giant phonogram set into a square, people would run around tracks or grooves of the phonogram, which would start tracks of music, their speed and rhythm would be tracked, affecting the music, and gestures could affect the timbre. Small orchestral pits in the corners of the square would allow sound editing via mechanical or visual (projected) buttons. Also there would be exercise levers that would control the music just like dials on a sound editing desk (may attach sketch later). Shells or pipes in the side streets would faintly play current or past performances, to draw people to the square. We also thought of a catch the light or animated sprites game, that would be derived from the spinning carousal-musical tracks, on the surrounding urban facades, and there could be small lasers inside the tracks, broken by the shadows of the dancers.

There is also a video of us dancing to the start stop Fat Boy Slim track while being rotated. Too embarrassing to add here, to be honest. So I hope they don’t choose this video part of the prototype to show at the Biennale! (Edit: Klaus has, oh well, I am stuck in the office so if it is shown today I won’t know about it).

Part of our kinect interface for the “anti travelator” or “magic urban roundabout” prototype is below, it worked, you step into the light (the magic circle) and the music turns on, you step out, it stops. Ideally it would record your height and changing y position to change tracks in the music and pitch. Truly a magic circle!

NB the twitter handle for the conference is @MABiennale website address is http://mab12.mediaarchitecture.org/

It also runs on Saturday at Godsbanen, Aarhus (great venue for this sort of thing).