Uncategorized

Explore the Avatar Age!

As part of the Digital Shoreditch 2013 Great Digital Exhibition body>data>space presents a showcase version of ‘Visions of Our Communal Dreams’.

Join us on-site to explore this beautiful interactive virtual island and fly your avatar (gallery room B34 / basement).

You can also join us online and through Twitter @voocd

• Instil life in the virtual forest by tweeting bird, butterfly or flower to @voocd

• Create, customise and fly your avatar via the Robots and Avatars website www.robotsandavatars.net

Visitors in the gallery will be able to see your avatar flying on the screens and to interact with it!

Developed by internationally renowned artist Michael Takeo Magruder and associate experts, this immersive mixed-reality installation combines virtual, physical and networked space, and explores issues of hybridity, embodiment and collective creativity in the Avatar Age.

Read more the Exhibition here

Visions of Our Communal Dreams // Michael Takeo Magruder With Drew Baker, Erik Fleming and David Steele. Presented by body>data>space, long-term experts in virtual/physical interactivity, commissioned by Robots and Avatars this piece premiered at FACT (Liverpool/UK) and then presented at KIBLA (Maribor/Slovenia)

Final activities of our EU project Robots and Avatars will take place in May 2013, after 2 years of packed activities, including a fantastically successful touring exhibition from the UK to Slovenia and Romania, inspiring learning experiences and debates with international experts around future worlds of work, identity/representation and ethics.

Before that, body>data>space are now very glad to announce that Robots and Avatars final activities will take place from 9th to 13th May in Maribor/Slovenia with our partners KIBLA, AltArt and FACT.

A debate dedicated to ‘Women and Girls in Technology’ will take place on Thursday 9th May with top level women speakers and participants .  Across the 2 years of the project, this topic  has come up as an imperative and topical debate. It is clear that in the EU this debate is on the table and crucial – for women and girls to feel able to join in to the growing technology world as active artists, producers, educators, coders etc.

How do we approach these skills sets which are seen as a “boys domain” by many girls of school age?

How do we find ways to involve young women through skills development linked to solving problems and finding solutions?

How to encourage a feminine viewpoint to emerge in the next generations of arts and technologies ?

The future of design and creativity through software and hardware needs equally to be influenced and created by women to enable an equal feminine perspective to be integrated at the base of the new tools. Women need to be able to take up the opportunities and knowledge offered by the tech revolution equally to men.

Open and public meeting at KIBLA. More information coming soon!

Interesting article from The Economist, on how “Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers.”

“WATSON, an IBM supercomputer, spectacularly beat its human rivals in a 2011 edition of “Jeopardy!”, an American quiz show. It has got smarter since then. Its components have shrunk from room-size to briefcase-size; its processing speed has more than tripled. The sleeker, faster Watson is now being put to commercial use: its first application is suggesting treatments in cancer clinics. Many people fear that Watson exemplifies a trend toward the displacement of human workers by machines.”

Read full report  here

An inspiring conference “European Audiences: 2020 and beyond”  took place in October 2012, brought together some 800 culture professionals in Brussels, discussing on how to engage more meaningfully with the audiences of today and tomorrow.

Organised by the European Commission, the conference presented examples of projects such as Robots and Avatars that have taken their audiences very seriously, sometimes from the very early stages of the creative process.‘

The level of participation and debate clearly showed what is considered by some to be a new cultural revolution: audiences are hungry for engagement, for shared experiences, for a sense of community. There is thus a need to stimulate exchange of practice in this field, to support cultural organisations to learn faster by peer learning in order to adapt more quickly to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.’

Audience development is one of the priorities of the EU’s future funding programme for the cultural and creative sectors, “Creative Europe”, which will replace the current Culture programme in 2014.

Full Report available Here