Invited workshop
Creating Agency through Telepresence:
How to stimulate an Internet of things into Rhetorical Action

《網絡遙距創作入門》工作坊

Conducted by Douglas Easterly

Date: October 25, 2008 (Saturday)
Venue: Videotage
Time: 10am-5pm
Workshop Capacity: 18
Materials Fee: HK$280 / HK$180 (Discount price for students and members)
Please note that the fee is to help cover the cost of an Arduino microcontroller (US$36) that participants get to keep.

*seats are available on a first-come first-served basis

To sign up, please download the form here and send it to info@videotage.org.hk. The sign-up deadline is October 17, 2008 (Friday).
For further enquiries, please call (852) 2573 1869.

Description:

Most of us use ubiquitous computing (cell phones, PDA’s, etc.) for conducting what has become standard routine for everyday living in the 21st century. But how can ubiquitous computing be used more creatively than simply providing email and web browsing in a portable package? With the help of a few methods we can employ these technologies towards creating telepresence artworks: a participant can engage an interface, causing an effect on the Web, but also causing a physical action somewhere else on planet Earth. Here lies an amazing potential for expression that has been utilized by artists like Eduardo Kac, Ken Goldberg, Masaki Fujihata and the Centre for Metahuman Exploration.

Objectives:

Creating Agency through Telepresence is designed as a hands-on workshop that examines three crucial areas for creating telepresence artwork and design: ubiquitous computing, tangible media, and web databases. While the basic principles of these topics are discussed, students will be guided through prepared materials that will connect these practices in an educational way.

Creating Agency through Telepresence will cover more than just technical steps; the workshop will discuss ideas for how this technology can give currency to expressive ideas. More specifically, we will use the topic of human ecology and sustainability as a guide for directing our experiments.

Methods:

The workshop will be broken into modules that represent each of these areas – ubiquitous computing, tangible media and web databases.

Ubiquitous Computing
We will be using Hewlett Packard’s iPaq PDA, along with their freely available development suite called Mscapers <http://www.mscapers.com/>. This coding environment easily taps into the powerful and compact technologies embedded in many of todays PDA’s and cell phones; things like GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.

Tangible Media
Students will be working with the increasingly popular Arduino microcontroller. This cheap and opensource portal to the world of tangible media has brought incredible agency into art/design studios across the world. To control this device we will cover coding technicques in both the Arduino and Processing programming environements. We will also do some basic circuit building and soldering.

Databases
The glue between our iPaq PDA programs and our Arduino circuitry will be a MySQL database. This essential feature of dynamic websites has often been considered territory only for the most adept backend programmers. But getting a simple, yet powerful, database set up is easy to do. In addition, we will cover PHP – the favorite way of ushering data in and out of the database.

Schedule of Events:

The class will be grouped into 3 teams (A, B, C) and each will have the opportunity to learn from each lesson. The reason for the teams is partially due to the number of devices we have for the workshop – but also because we will have one team always wandering about the city with an iPaq device, activating GPS hotspots and delivering real-time data to our server that will be viewed and controlled by those still in the workshop.

Materials and Tools:

You are advised to bring a notebook (PC or Mac). This will allow you to customize your own machine for future practice with the technologies covered.

Outcomes:

Students will complete the workshop having a firm understanding of the principles underlying each of the topics covered. Additionally, they will have considered the possibilities for creating procedural rhetoric using these technologies; as we will be doing so with our own experiments, addressing human ecology and sustainability with these tools. Students should then have the capabilities of bringing this knowledge back into their own creative practices to explore with further depth and conceptual consideration.

Biography:

Douglas Easterly was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. He has a BA from the University of Dallas and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. His teaching career began as an Assistant Professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. From there, he went on to earn an Associate Professorship with tenure at Syracuse University. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer of Interaction Design in the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is also a founding member of SWAMP <www.swamp.nu> whose artwork has been exhibited at ARCO in Madrid, SIGGRAPH 2005 - 2007, published in numerous magazines such as ReadyMade, and winner of awards, such as 1st prize from the VIDA Art and Artificial Life foundation in 2004. In 2007, his book Best Practice: The Pros on Adobe Flash was released by Cengage Learning and is available for purchase from most booksellers.

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Videotage
Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village
63 Ma Tau Kok Road
To Kwa Wan, Kowloon
Hong Kong

tel: 852 2573 1869
contact@videotage.org.hk