Frachitectures/Murmuration (E/M/D/L)

Frachitectures/Murmuration (E/M/D/L)

Frachitectures (2015)

Artists: Spatial Media Research Group (D. Charitos, I.Theona, C.Rizopoulos, P.Papageorgopoulou) and A. St-Onge

Performed at the Satosphere (SAT, Montreal) during and after the Immersion IX Symposium for the EMDL project  (emdl.eu)

Frachitectures was a part of the Murmuration piece, created by: Dimitris Charitos, Luke Christison, Phil Mayer, Cameron Micallef, Lee Nutbean, Alexandre St-Onge, Mike Phillips, Olivier Rhéaume, Haris Rizopoulos, Ben Stern, Iouliani Theona, Penny Papageorgopoulou

http://www.emdl.eu/activities/montreal-jun-15/show/article/part-3-murmur…

Organizations involved in the creation of Murmuration: Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media (UoA NTLab), Athens / i-DAT (Institute of Digital Art and Technology), Plymouth

Murmuration is an interactive performative immersive installation involving multiple members of the audience in interacting with and manipulating audio-visual objects, in a virtual environment projected onto the SAT FullDome environment, thus directing the way the experience evolves while being actively immersed int it. the Murmuration experience is about playful interaction with digital particle swarms and real-time manipulation of virtual/physical audio-visual objects.

Murmuration [muttering of low, indistinct, whispers / abnormal heart sounds / mass cloud like flocking] is a series of trans-scalar and recursive transitions from the imaginary to infinity: i∞. Constructed from bio-imaging technologies and modeled fractured architectures, the low-poly-aesthetic of Murmuration navigates its audience through playful interaction with particle swarms of digital detritus and real-time manipulation of virtual/physical audio-visual objects and the environmental experiences afforded by their continuously transforming arrangement. Algorithms of repulsion and attraction maintain the cohesion of nano/molecular landscapes harvested by atomic force. Bio-forms, like artificial organs, and boney architectures, temporarily seem to come to life, create cavities and cavernous voids, conjuring uncanny atmospheres of elation, intrigue and awe.

EMDL project website: http://www.emdl.eu/    

Detour

Detour

Coti K., Dimitris Charitos, Vasilis Bourdakis, Evelyn Gavrylou, Aris Tsagrasoulis, Andreas Andreou, Dimitris Skoufis

An interactive 10-channel audio, 4-channel video installation 

Exhibited at Thisseio in the context of the “Athens by Art” Public Space Exhibition, organized by the Municipality of Athens and AICA Hellas

Detour is an interactive multisensory environment, created by the interdisciplinary group VE_design and specifically designed for very busy area of the urban context. It functions as a detour from the crowdedness and introversion of city life towards an artificial wonderland; within this site-specific installation space, the visitor is invited to participate in a communication game with the “detour” system as well as with other visitors.

This artificial “landscape” has a memory. People are invited to interact and intentionally provide their voices and images to the system. These are then captured, processed, distorted and dynamically positioned, in real time, within the 8-channel audio system of the installation and on an appropriately placed projection. Consequently, differently processed versions of these sounds and images are randomly selected and communicated again to future visitors of the environment. In this sense, “Detour” is an artificial “landscape” which remembers the voices and images of people who visited it and randomly recalls them, thus redefining all captured raw audiovisual content. Visitors may also affect the way that sounds are being displayed by appropriately moving their body in relation to certain elements of the environment.

The real content of “Detour” is produced by the people themselves. Human presence and action activates a series of pre-designed processes which finally formulate the spatial experience afforded by the installation space. The material form of “detour” consists of a wooden platform, positioned along a very busy pedestrian walkway. “Slices” of this platform are being dislocated and risen in order to articulate a series of artificial, abstractly formed “trees”, which carry the input/output components for collecting and communicating audiovisual content. The end points of these “trees” spray particles of water, increasing the moisture of the installation’s atmosphere and creating a visually surreal result when combined with the lighting elements at night.

“Detour” is a sound-enhanced, interactive architectural environment, which activates the senses, functions as a behaviour amplifier and supports communication amongst its visitors, with the support of its lighting, microclimate, and video elements.

180°

180°

Dimitris Charitos, Coti K.

An audio-visual installation (5-channel video, CCTV and 4-channel audio)

Exhibited @ 4 Rooms exhibition, Kappatos Gallery, Athens, Greece, 2001

Curated by C. Galanopoulou

 

 

European Mobile Lab for Artistic Research (EMDL)

European Mobile Lab for Artistic Research (EMDL)

[CULTURE Programme 2007-13 – Cooperation], Projects with Third Countries (Strand 1.3.5), European Commission Education, Audiovisual& Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) (Jan 2014 – Sep 2015)

EMDL project website: http://www.emdl.eu/    

This project aimed to facilitate interdisciplinary research on the subject of creating interactive immersive experiences and narratives in digital FullDome environments. More specifically, the main objective of the project was the collaborative creation of experimental, artistic content and immersive experiences for FullDomes, by adopting a design research methodology and by involving an interdisciplinary teams of experts (artists, scientists and academics from universities and cultural organisations in Montreal, Vienna, Plymouth, Dresden, Berlin and Athens).

In the course of this project, several workshops have been held in various European cities and Montreal, Canada with the purpose of bringing together a number of experienced content creators and scientists for experimenting with the process of creating interactive, immersive FullDome experiences, ultimately aiming to investigate and understand the communicative potential and characteristics of the FullDome as a medium.

The Spatial Media Research Group and the NTLab organized the first workshop in the series of events centred on dome content creation, and the members of the group actively participated in the creation process for the events that followed. Additionally, the Spatial Media Research Group team headed by D. Charitos, in collaboration with the research teams of the above organizations, conducted a series of studies on various aspects of the User Experience, as well as on the creative process and the characteristics of the FullDome as a medium. Finally the research team designed and implemented a multi-user virtual environment, as a performative, interactive installation, titled “Murmuration”, which was presented for 3 weeks in 2015, at the FullDome of the SAT center in Montreal and at the FullDomeUK festival in 2016 in England. 

MITOS

MITOS

In the context of the FP7 project SmartSantander, International collaboration with Mobics Ltd., (Oct.2012- Sept. 2013)

Project funded by the European Union through the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community for research and technological development.

The research team of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens worked on the design and evaluation of a mobile experiment in cooperation with Mobics (a start-up of the University of Athens) and the Transport and Transportation Infrastructure Department of the School of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), for the promotion of smart mobility. The application was developed for the city of Santander in Spain and uses the wide network of sensors that exist there to promote an ecological concept of moving within the city and to enhance the use of mass transportation media. It provides the possibility of smart parking, detailed monitoring of the MMM routes and complete information on road conditions so that the citizens could organize their travels more efficiently.

LOcation-based Communication Urban NETwork (LOCUNET)

LOcation-based Communication Urban NETwork (LOCUNET)

[Regional Operational Programme for Attica 2000-2006] (May 2006 – May 2008)

LOCUNET was a research project that aimed to investigate the novel forms of communication that emerge as a result of the convergence of geographical positioning services, mobile communications, and graphical user interfaces. The result of this convergence is the appearance of locative media. More specifically, the result of this research programme was a theoretical model of the use of locative media and the forms of social interaction that may take place during locative media use, within the contemporary urban context. This model is expected to inform the design and development of locative media. For the purposes of evaluating the proposed model, a location-based multi-user communication system was designed and developed and used for supporting an activity comprising numerous mobile users in a central location in the city of Athens.

Virtual Museum

Virtual Museum

In collaboration with the Virtual Reality Group of the Department of Informatics & Telecommunications of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens under the direction of Prof. C. Halatsis.

[Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology, EPET]
(1999 – 2001) Analysis, design and development of an immersive and a desktop virtual reality system as well as an on-line database, for presenting the content of 10 museums, under the title “Virtual Museum” (duration 30 months)

The aim of the project was the design and development of an immersive virtual environment (VE) that would function as a context within which the digitized content of 10 existing museums would be exhibited. The visitors of these museums would be able to interactively navigate through this virtual museum system, view the exhibits and interact with them. The project included the processes of exhibit digitisation, architectural design and exhibit presentation of ten museums with exhibits that varied from archaeological to geological and from hygiene to forensic. Through this project, the potential of a VE system as a context for exhibiting the content of a museum in a remote location was investigated, since it may afford a larger number of people the possibility of experiencing museum collections without having to be physically present at the exhibition space.

Furthermore, a second version (web-based) of the digital museum environment was created, featuring fewer representational and navigation capabilities, in order to be accessible through the web. This virtual environment could be used for educational, research and cultural purposes. Additionally, an administrative platform was developed in order to allow system administrators and museum curators to add and remove exhibits from the virtual museum.

VR Autism

VR Autism

[Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology, 1999-2000, 19 months]
Analysis, design and development of a desktop virtual reality system for educating autistic children in everyday tasks.

The aim of the project was the development of training and communication tools, functioning both in an autonomous manner and also available at the web, designed specifically for children with autistic syndrome, their trainers and training centers respectively. A group of specialized multimedia applications (employing video, video, speech and virtual reality) was designed and developed, aiming to meet the needs of people with autistic syndrome (that could be used with or without the help of trainers). In particular, a scenario describing the sequence of events and consequent requirements for an interactive application were described, in order to aid the organisation of autistic children’s behaviour in everyday activities. These requirements and scenario fed the design of a desktop virtual environment which afforded autistic children the interactive experience of navigating within a simulation of a home and participating in a realistic and embodied approximation of experiencing these everyday activities. Also, a web-based communication environment was designed and developed, in order to allow communication between the stakeholders.

European Mobile Lab for interactive media Artists” (e-MobiLArt)

European Mobile Lab for interactive media Artists” (e-MobiLArt)

[CULTURE Programme 2007-13, European Commission Education, Audiovisual & Culture Executive Agency (EACEA)] (Nov 2007 – Nov 2009)
www.media.uoa.gr/emobilart

e-MobilArt promoted interdisciplinary collaboration by experienced european artists toward the production of interactive art. For the purposes of this project, the UoA NTLab collaborated with the University of Lapland (Finland) and the University of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria), the State Museum of Contemporary Art in
Thessaloniki (Greece), the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (Poland), as well as with two hardware manufacturers and software developers (Cycling74, Making Things) and the acclaimed electronic art academic journal LEONARDO/OLATS. Each higher education institution involved in the project organised a workshop. The aim of these three (Greece, Finland, Austria) workshops was twofold: workshop participants were trained in the use of relevant hardware and software by scientists and qualified experts; in addition, cooperation among artists was supported at all stages of the creative process. The works produced by the artists were exhibited by the art galleries involved in the project.