Manta and friends flying to London

We have had an abstract accepted for the (re)Actor: The First International Conference on Digital Live Art September 11, 2006 in London, which looks like great fun.

The conference will include both day time presentations and evening ambient after party.
Performances and presentations were solicited in all areas of Digital Live Art, including but not limited to:

• Creative clubbing and the playful arena
• Space, body, machine
• Inputs and outputs – co-creation and the dialogic exchange within digital live arts practice
• Computing for the experiential and cerebral
• Performance and the design of interactive interfaces
• Experimental music technology
• Creative displays and projections
• Tools for performers, participants and observers
• Networking, open-source clubbing and the free party
• Models and formal methods of interaction
• Her-story and his-story of computing and clubbing

It sounds as if we'll give an academic talk and have our work flying the 3-story vaulted ceiling of a Reading Room at University of London.

Physical Flight through Cyberspace: an Interactive Ultra-Light Cable Array Mobile with Novel Input Methods

Jon Schull
Brian Ballsun-Stanton
Rochester Institute of Technology

Increasingly we all swim through a transparent sea of cyberspace. An important function of both digital Art and HCI design is to help us navigate, perceive and feel at home in this “strange new land”. This spring a graduate class on “Innovation and Invention” at Rochester Institute of Technology deployed an ultra-light cable-array robot, a projection of cyberspace, and a fiberglass mobile of a manta ray, all controlled by a human operator with a data glove (http://www.vrealities.com/P5.html). Made of flexible fiberglass kite rods and suspended by fishing line to 4 computer-controlled motors, this “wireframe” apparition moved with surprising vigor through a 3-story atrium accompanied by projected digital images snatched from the ambient ether of local wifi networks. The project itself taught us some interesting lessons about the role of intuition and muscle memory in computer-mediated tele-operation.

Even in its first rendition, the artistic piece made an interesting artistic statement and was an entertaining accompaniment to a social event. It would fit in perfectly with the after-party but we would also welcome an opportunity to speak more academically about some technical and artistic issues that arise.

A 11 minute video of the manta's debut is at http://jonschull.blogspot.com/2006/06/fanfare-for-common-manta.html