On the blog this week we checked out a music vid that featured projection mapped bookshelves, took a close look at Broken Orchestra’s “To A Place” in LAYERS, were wowed by Sterling Crispin’s algorithmic landscapes, and found out how to measure the emotional makeup of a city. We also met Chinese artists UFO Media Lab, pondered why CES just gave us bigger screens instead of more immersive consoles, looked at HEALTH’s score for Max Payne 3, and took a detailed look at FIELD’s “LHC” story in their Energy Flow project.

And elsewhere…

· Do you know your ABC of architects? And if not, why not? If you’re unsure you can test your skill with this animation The ABC of Architects.

· Behold the most insane, ridiculous, and annoying CES keynote presentation ever.

· Travis Bickle with a smartphone? A homemade iPhone quick-draw contraption means this guy will never miss a call again.

· Meta-metal: Robots play Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” (above).

· Is the future of tablet devices flexible e-paper? Yes, if PaperTab has its way.

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Above: Future hackers Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma talking about their project Empire courtesy of Submarine Channel.

If a creative team is truly devoted to their project, they want it to reach as many people as possible. If said project happens to be series of documentary video installations about the unintended consequences of Dutch colonialism, this may not be the most realistic goal. Besides the seemingly daunting subject matter, there’s the difficulty of form to deal with. Installations are inherently sculptural—video is only part of the deal. You don’t rent or torrent a proper video installation. You visit one.

But do you have to? Perhaps there’s a way to adapt the experience of a video installation to a more accessible platform without compromising the immersive qualities that make installations so enjoyable to experience and so gratifying to create. If there is a way, we’d like to find it, as we’ve actually spent the past three years creating a series of documentary video installations about the unintended consequences of Dutch colonialism (it goes without saying that we want it to reach as many people as possible). Toward that goal, we will be spending the coming weekend working with a team of web developers to drag our sprawling, three dimensional creation kicking and screaming into the online space.

Tomorrow marks the start of the second POV Hackathon, a two-day collaborative free-for-all organized by PBS’s long-running documentary series POV. Eight creative teams of documentary filmmakers and tech experts have been invited to the Hackathon this time around, and each one of these teams will be tasked with creating a working online documentary prototype over the course of the weekend. Some teams will make apps, while others will create websites. Still others will attempt to bring entirely new digital storytelling forms to life.

A trailer for one of Empire’s many installations.

Our project, Empire, is one of the eight selected for the hackathon. Empire began in 2010 as a single video installation shot and edited in Sri Lanka. Since then, the project has swelled into a monster that has taken over our lives. In the three years we’ve worked on Empire, we’ve finished five more video installations. We’ve travelled over 140,000 kilometers by plane, train, and motorboat. We’ve slept in gold camps in central Suriname and attended Shabbat service on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. We’ve lived among white separatists in South Africa’s Northern Cape, and spent some serious time hanging out with a small enclave of Dutch descendants in the Brazilian mountains.

Shabbat service on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

We started making Empire because we wanted to explore how events and decisions from the past continue to reverberate into the present. We chose what we thought was a small target area for our research—Dutch corporate-colonialism—and went from there. The 17th century Dutch East India and West India Companies were privately controlled chartered companies, proto-multinationals. While other European colonists sailed under national flags, VOC and WIC ships sailed under corporate logos. Wherever the companies landed, their traders and colonists left traces in the architecture, culture, and bloodlines of the communities they touched.

Dutch descendants in the Brazilian mountains.

We now understand that our chosen target was not so small. Over time, Empire has become a case study of the long-term, human-scaled impact of global capitalism, and a catalogue of intangible cultural heritage. In 100 years, an artist duo could make a similar project about the traces of American influence in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In 200, perhaps a project will touch on China’s impact in Africa and South America.

Which all sounds great, of course, but how do you get that all online in one weekend?

Up next in Part 2: Rolling deep with the Hackathon gang.

Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma’s project Empire premiered at the 2012 edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. They joined Twitter five days ago, so throw them a sympathy follow @EmpireDoc.

Our Creators are a talented and prolific bunch, and our inbox is always overflowing with alerts of new remixes and mashups from the incredible DJs and producers in our line-up. We just couldn’t keep these fresh new tunes to ourselves because, after all, filesharing is caring. Here are our top picks from the past week. For past Creators Remix Roundups, click here.

A$AP Rocky feat. Florence Welch: “I Come Apart”

Heartbreak means something very different to A$AP Rocky and Florence Welch, respectively, or at least that’s the feeling we get from their creative personas. And while it may have been a poor choice to have Rocky flex his singing voice between two hooks of Welch’s refined croon, the song bangs pretty hard. We attribute a good part of it to that snare sound, like a tennis ball getting smacked down a subway tunnel.

Pantha du Prince& The Bell Laboratory: “Spectral Split”

Pantha du Prince’s fascination with bell sounds is about to hit a fever pitch this month with the release of his collaboration with The Bell Laboratory, an ensemble consisting of various melodic percussive instruments. “Spectral Split” is a little preview of their joint sound, that manages to stay pounding and dreamy all at once.

Forte: “Hot Mess” (Chromeo cover)

If you’re going to cover a Chromeo song, you should blow the dust off of that vocoder, and that’s exactly what happened in this sensual robotic cover of “Hot Mess.” How does it measure up with the original? You decide.

@CreatorsProject

Though it’s been used by industrial designers to create prototypes for decades, the process of rapid prototyping has only recently begun to benefit the masses, and Shapeways has been leading the way since 2007. As a platform for designing and actualizing 3D printed items, Shapeways has facilitated access to 3D printing technology so that anyone can develop and print their own designs.

In the video above, Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen describes how the concept of 3D printing is revolutionizing the market for custom-designed products, and we meet creatives who are applying the technology to their various disciplines. Gil Akos of creative coding group Modelab describes the potential for printing using a wide variety of materials, even biological ones that can be applied to medical science. Designer Mary Huang of Continuum Fashion shows us her N12 bikini, and 3D-printed strvct shoe collection.

These are just a few of the ways in which we’re seeing 3D printing entering into our daily lives and addressing our practical needs, while giving us a new creative outlet through which we can create any 3D shape imaginable.

@ImYourKid

There might not be an answer to the question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” But if you asked, “What is the sound of 294 cardboard boxes fitted with DC motors and cork balls?” you could get a definite answer. That answer is in the above video, which showcases one of the installations that was present at Zimoun‘s solo exhibition, Volume, at New York’s Bitforms gallery last year.

Zimoun creates room-sized kinetic sculptures from materials that most of us use to store stuff in our garage. By taking these ordinary objects and attaching motors to them, he elevates the humble cardboard box to mechanized sound sculptures that produce industrial-sounding music using a functional aesthetic.

Here’s what his studio says about the piece:

Part of a series that received its U.S. debut in a solo exhibition at the Ringling Museum of Art in Fall 2011, the installation at Bitforms galleryNYC emphasizes the grid as a method of visual organization. Precariously balanced rows of cardboard boxes form an architectural space containing a rumbling din produced by mechanical motors humming in unison.

Pulsing rhythmically, each unit in the system reverberates with its own sense of purpose and timing. Temporal microstructures emerge and shift, made visible by collective behavior. With minimalist and low-tech means, Zimoun constructs a blank zone of play utilizing repetition and the physical pressure of vibration.

@stewart23rd

After the disappointment of CES mostly showcasing bigger screens over mindblowing new gaming systems, it’s encouraging to know that some new innovative gaming hardware was there, if only as video snippets featured in keynotes.

One of those was Microsoft Research‘s proof of concept project the IllumiRoom, designed by Brett Jones, Hrvoje Benko, Eyal Ofek, and Andy Wilson. Using projection techniques, in this case a Kinect and a projector, that have been ruminated on by various people—not least Factory Fifteen’s Paul Nicholls in his speculative video Golden Age – Somewhere—it takes the gaming experience beyond the limitations of the TV screen to create an augmented reality gaming experience.

Microsoft are calling it an immersive gaming experience and, while it might not be the same kind of immersion as the virtual reality environment of an Oculus Rift, it’s still an intriguing concept and means you don’t have to put on cumbersome headwear—so that’s something. It’s not quite the fully immersive level you imagine it could get to—say, for instance, the immersion seen in Marshmallow Laser Feast’s realtime projection-mapped videos for Sony’s PS3—but it’s a start down that path.

And it’s another example of the encroachment of the digital into the physical world. Gaming is probably going to be one of the early mainstream adopters of this hybrid reality, because the benefits for the gamer and the enrichment of the gaming experience are obvious. We just need to be careful we don’t end up never leaving the house again, trapped in a projected prison cell of our own making—not dissimilar to how the characters live in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror episode 15 Million Merits.

[via Gizmag]

@stewart23rd

Every time AntiVJ’s Joanie Lemercier comes out with a new project, you can expect that it will achieve visual wonderment through color, geometry, and just the right application of tech. We recently spoke about a workshop Lemercier held at The Public gallery near Birmingham in the UK, where he taught a group of kids some of the tricks of his trade using a three-dimensional surface made from paper pyramids—a simple example with beautiful results.

You can see the breathtaking results above. The texture created by the pyramids provides a break from the typically flat screens we deal with on a daily basis. As Lemercier explains:

Every day we stare at screens. We look at cinema screens, TV screens, phone screens, and it’s always a flat, rectangular projection or a flat rectangular image. What I like with projection mapping is that you can turn anything into a display, you can take a sculpture and project colors on it and really change the way it looks.

See images of the project below.

Check out our profile on Lemercier’s crew AntiVJ.

[via Colossal]

@ImYourKid

Each week we pay homage to a select “Original Creator”—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today’s creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields—bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Homestar Runner.

Cartoon Network is filled with animated shows like Adventure Time or The Amazing World of Gumball—cartoons that make knowing nods to popular culture and videos games and movies. They’re full of wacky characters in crazy situations and it’s a type of screwball animation that can be traced back to shows like Looney Tunes. But these modern variants also owe a debt to the Flash animations that appeared on the web before its maturity into Web 2.0 and beyond.

One of the most popular and influential of these early Flash animation sites was Homestar Runner, started back in 2000 by The Brothers Chaps, Mike and Matt Chapman. While it still exists online, it hasn’t had any new cartoons posted since 2010. But back in its heyday, it was a very popular destination for people looking to kill time at work and it didn’t only publish cartoons—like the eponymous Homestar Runner series—but also showcased games and had a store where you could buy merchandise.

Mike Chapman describes it as an “online experience akin to finding secrets in video games” and it was the kind of fervor and passion found in video game devotees that it seemed to draw from people. The geeky pleasure of discovering something hidden on the website, along with its slapstick and satirical humor, made it a success story. Also the fact that it didn’t have to bow to advertisers (or even advertise itself) meant it organically acquired a cult following. Sales of T-shirts and sweatshirts provided the funding, and word-of-mouth was all the marketing it needed. According to a Wired article, the brothers even turned down the chance to take the series to TV, citing that it would turn their character-driven comedy into a gag fest.

To gage just how popular it was, you only need to look over the comprehensiveness of the fan-made Wiki, to see the dedication and loyalty fans felt for it. It’s this immersion in the world of the characters, their interactions, and catchphrases—along with the references to old Atari games—that rewards the fans (one of whom is Joss Whedon) and creates the cult of Homestar Runner.

Homestar Runner


This was the title character, the main man. He wears a propellor cap, is armless, and is draped in red, white, and blue clothes. Like most of the characters, he has a very silly voice and is also a quite goofy, and a bit naive and confused about the world. He also has a girlfriend called Marzipan.

Strong Bad


One of the most popular characters, Strong Bad also has a part of the site (Strong Bad Email or sbemail) where he regularly responded to viewers’ emails in his own unimitable way. But, sometimes, not much responding actually went on. He wears a lucha libre-style wrestling mask and has boxing gloves for hands.

Pom Pom


Best friend of Homestar Runner, he looks like a giant yellow ball with stumpy arms and legs who, according to his Wiki page, knows martial arts.

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Above: Our profile on Takeshi Murata.

We’re quite familiar with Takeshi Murata‘s affinity for distorting and manipulating video into beautiful, chaotic clusters of color and glitchy geometry. His latest exhibition, Immortality at Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York, gathers a poignant sampling of Murata’s work, featuring pieces that span several years.

Pulling footage from old game shows like The Price Is Right, sitcoms like Three’s Company, and films like First Blood, Murata applies his techniques, deteriorating the footage to “highlight the decay of media narratives,” as MAD puts it on their site.

Below, see stills from some of the footage on the chopping block for Immortality.

Still from Melter 2 (2003)

Still from Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007)

Still from No Match (2010)

Still from Monster Movie (2005)

Still from Infinite Doors (2010)

Immortality runs January 22—June 4th at MAD.

@ImYourKid

For all its amenities, urban life lacks several aspects of nature that we don’t often consider while we’re caught in the daily rigamarole. The idiom claiming that New Yorkers never look up rings true for residents of almost any city. They would, however, be compelled to look up if all the sudden the night sky looked as it does in this series. Thierry Cohen’s Darkened Cities features images of cities like New York, Rio, and Tokyo submerged in pitch darkness, allowing starlight to seep back into view.

Cohen captured images of the night sky in remote areas that share the latitudes of his city subjects, and then placed them behind their respective skylines to provide the most accurate picture of what the night sky would look like in each location.

The images invoke a strange calm tinged with uneasiness as to why these famous urban centers are abandoned. This may be what it looks like all around the world if an EMP from outer space leaves all of our electronics lifeless. Adding to the effect of being rendered unable to do anything by a random cosmic occurrence, we’d suddenly be humbled further, reminded of how small we are relative to the vastness of the physical universe.

Hong Kong

Tokyo

San Francisco

Rio

Paris

New York

[via EMPTYKINGDOM]

@ImYourKid

By internet standards, an eight minute video seems pretty long, particularly if it follows a single character in an unchanging setting. But Sigur Rós’ new music video for “Fjögur Píanó” from their latest album Valtari defies this stereotype. With its elegant portrayal of an internal struggle, the enthralling performance, Skinned, won the Valtari Film Competition last year, in which filmmakers created music videos for songs from Valtari.

The music video, created by Hong Kong-based photographer Ken Ngan, visual designer Dio Liu, and animator Anafelle Liu, features a faceless man shaping his own form, played by Adrian Heung. It seems that the harder he tries, the more of a mess he creates, ending up with burnt and melting flesh falling from his body. As a viewer, you are right there with him, cheering him on, anticipating his next move, and finally feeling his frustration and pain.

We caught up with director Dio Liu to find out what went into the making of Skinned.

Creators Project: Skinned is a minimal yet emotionally powerful film. Where did you get your inspiration from?
Dio Liu: I remember Ken [Ngan] once randomly brought up a video called Transfiguration, a stunning body art performance piece by Olivier de Sagazan. The tension and anxiety in it is really penetrating. We wanted to generate the same intensity of struggling but in a relatively serene way. To us, Sigur Rós’ music is always introspective. It’s like it creates a spiritual space inside us in which we feel safe. Safety not quite in the sense of being covered, but the reverse—it’s like an inner space in which you are naked and so you can confront your own naked self. So for the video, we wanted the energy to be pointing inward rather than out. My first thought was body modification—things like cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding, and all that. Those transfiguration techniques are nothing new, but the ideology behind them is always changing.

What was the creative process like? Did you know exactly what the end result would look like, or did it sort of just come together?
It was a rather organic process, almost like a sculpture that completed itself. As previously mentioned, the project was initially a reflection of body modification, for which I drafted a set of symbolic movements. After that our choreographer, Cliff Huen, insisted that we don’t dictate Adrian’s moves since he’s not trained for that. Instead, we just let him go. It was an interesting process. Most of the time Adrian was performing with his eyes closed. Cliff directed Adrian’s movements much like he was hypnotizing him. Sometimes Cliff illustrated an imaginary scene for him to go from, sometimes violently provoking him, sometimes calming him in a soft and comforting voice. When he was performing, the atmosphere in the studio seemed heavier. If I were Adrian I’d probably have gone mad.

Adrian Heung in dough.

What kind of material was used for the “skin”? Were there any CG elements involved?
It was actually dough. Quite a few people were curious about that. It gained that texture because the intense lighting dried the dough up fast. It was accidental, but we went with this texture during testing. Compared to the other options we got from industrial stores, flour turned out to be better. It’s much safer. We didn’t want to kill our friend!

We are all quite lo-fi after all. CG is always the last thing we’d go for. I ended up inverting the whole screen and radically altering the colors. It looked quite unreal and uncanny at the end. As much as the X-ray is a look inside one’s body, the inverted treatment is an attempt to bring up what’s behind one’s mind, the unconscious, or the unknown.

Adrian Heung in dough.

What was the hardest part of making Skinned?
The production itself is quite simple, as you can tell. We didn’t have too much budget to make it more complex. So the difficulty was all on Adrian really. We didn’t expect that it’d be that harsh for the performer because he’s an athlete with a trained body. For the texture and thickness that we were going for, the dough ended up being too dense and heavy. I’ve known Adrian since we were 14, and I’ve never seen him exhausted like that, not to mention the mental exhaustion we put him through. He kept silent the whole night after the shoot. I’m glad to know he didn’t need to see a psychoanalyst afterwards.

Before it went to editing, I was a little worried the video would look too heavy and intense for a Sigur Rós track, but Anafelle did a great job with it. It ends up that blending of visual and musical elements increased the depth of both. The way she handled the pace and rhythm retained the intensity of Adrian’s movements and also brought out the introspective quality of the track. All of us grew up on Sigur Rós’ music. Some of their songs mean a lot to us. Their music was the reason behind a trip to Iceland Anafelle and I took years ago, which was really important to us. You really can’t imagine how happy we are that the band picked our video!

@CreatorsProject

The field of robotics may use cutting edge technologies and thinking, but it still can’t quite leave behind the natural world. Imitating the organisms that walk, crawl, swim, and fly about the earth allows roboticists to utilize the near-perfect designs of Mother Nature in their work—after all, she’s been honing them for quite some time.

In this project by Mattias Jones for the Festival of the Mind in Sheffield, UK, he recruited the services of coders and mathematicians to create an installation called Mind Out which drew a large scale, room-covering image using robots which imitate the flight of a bee.

He explains it on his website: “The robots drew one line pattern solutions, the shortest line possible, derived from theories on how bees fly from flower to flower. It ended up covering three walls and the floor of a twenty foot cube in one unbroken line.” The result is a jagged, very intricate line drawing that creates a wonderful visual of the complex path of a bee in flight as it searches for pollen—something that would take a much longer time to do if you had to train a bee to hold a pencil.

[via CreateDigitalMotion]

@stewart23rd

French design collective La Mécanique du Plastique—Nicolas Liautaud, Alice Suret-Canale, Nicolas Dubois, Hugo Paquin—have created a metanarrative animation that plays with visual styles and the plot devices of your typical Hollywood blockbuster. Especially one that might involve the end of the world in some way, maybe through aliens or a meteorite, or aliens riding a meteorite.

Anyway, in Duku Spacemarines the story begins with a Chinese hacker—no, a Czech hacker—and continues with a bare-knuckle fight—no, a cock fight. You see, the problem is, as the narrator segues together movie tropes, he can’t quite make up his mind about what he wants in the film. So what we get is a confusing mishmash of plots that’s just as incomprehensible as, say, The Avengers, but with plenty of droll humor thrown in.

As the story builds and changes on the narrator’s whim, so too do the animation styles, evolving from a crude hand drawn aesthetic at the beginning into full-blown Michael Bay-esque CGI by the end. Check out some images from the piece below.

[via Vimeo]

@stewart23rd

If you’ve ever visited or lived in the UK, then you’ll know it lives up to the cliche of people always talking about the weather. We can’t help it. It’s just so damn interchangeable. Look, it’s overcast! (again). Nope, now it’s raining—hang on, no, I can see the sun coming through the clouds. It’s like a small child who can’t make up its mind. So wouldn’t it be great if we could change the weather by ourselves so we were no longer subjected to the tyranny of weather patterns?

Changing the weather through human intervention is by no means a new idea. Everyone from the US military to the Chinese government has gotten involved in some way or another. And now artist Karolina Sobecka is joining this long lineage with her project Cloud Machine, a “personal device for weather modification.”

Created as part of the Blowup: Speculative Realities event it allows you to create clouds by sending Sobecka’s Cloud Machine device up into the air using a weather balloon. Then when it’s reached a certain height it starts sending out cloud condensation nuclei (CCN)—integral to making clouds—heat, and water vapor, which reacts with air moisture to create little clouds. Yes, it’s insane.

Sobecka explains that the idea is based on a “geo-engineering technique proposed to create brighter, more reflective clouds which shield earth from sun’s radiation, and thus partly counteract the climate change.” Creative Applications explains how the device works in more detail and you can see it in action in the images below.

Images: Karolina Sobecka

[via Design Boom]

@stewart23rd

For the past three years, we’ve been working on Empire, a series of documentary video installations about the unintended consequences of Dutch colonialism. While exhibiting the Empire installations at museums and film festivals is our main focus, we also want to reach an audience outside of the art/film echo chamber. So the big question is: how do we bring a three-dimensional, video-based project like Empire online in a compelling way?

Our search for an answer to this question led us to the POV Hackathon, a two-day event where filmmakers team up with designers and developers to create web-based, non-fiction storytelling prototypes. Web development is new territory for us, and frankly, it’s pretty scary. If you drop us in the middle of nowhere with a camera and a laptop, we will find our way back with a film in our pocket. But when it comes to programming, we are unfrozen cavemen.

Here’s how we survived our 40-hour hackathon experience:

SATURDAY

Clint Beharry and his wireframes.

9:30 AM: We arrive at the offices of HUGE, the digital branding/ad agency in Dumbo that’s hosting the event. The place is simultaneously cavernous and comfortable, all fluorescent-lit concrete and soothing ventilator hum. A common space in the center of the office holds the cluster of eight tables that will be our scenery for most of the next 40 hours. The Empire table is empty, save for four POV totebags. It is suddenly clear that we are at a public broadcasting event.

Adnaan Wasey, POV’s Digital Director, gives a quick speech letting us know what we’re in for. Groups can stay overnight if they want to, and there will be food, etc. He also puts a Hackathon-wide ban on the use of the word “transmedia.”

More speakers. Sam Bailey, the architect behind Frontline‘s digital presence, has a warning for all of us. “Don’t go down a rabbit hole!” he says. He tells a story about his last hackathon, where a designer got obsessed with a few clouds on the prototype’s splash page and ended up wasting hours moving them around. Sam’s gruff and funny.

We meet our team. Claire Mitchell, a grad student at NYU’s ITP program, is our first teammate to show up. She is apologetic about her programming skills, which she says are still developing. We have to take her word for it since we have no way of personally testing her statement. Our lead designer is Clint Beharry, a fast thinker with a brooding demeanor. We like them both immediately. We occupy a table together, with Claire and Clint on one side, and us on the other.

Adnaan takes the mic a final time and says something about awards at the end. The pressure is on.

11:30 AM: Instead of trying to adapt all of the Empire project in one weekend, we’ll focus on bringing one of the installations to the web. We choose Empire: Bakermat, a two-channel video piece we shot at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in 2012. Most of our conversation is about stripping down the installation to its core ideas. What’s the emotional journey that a viewer experiences in the installation and how do we approximate that journey in the online space? What is the central theme of the work, and how can the interface we develop reflect that theme?

We come up with a simple design with two strong interactive components. There’s only one issue to deal with: our team has no developer. Both Clint and Claire are designers. Code was never their highest priority, and their knowledge of JavaScript is limited.

2:30 PM: Sam Bailey has taken up residence at our table. He keeps telling us that he’s going to walk the Brooklyn Bridge to go get hand-pulled noodles, but instead he stays riveted to his chair. Much of the talk coming from the design/code side of the table sounds like “bleep bloop bleep bloopity bloo.” Every now and then we learn a new term, and it becomes less opaque: “bleep bloop bleep bloopity bloo functionality.” It is literally like learning another language.

We’re trying to make ourselves useful. We put together a copy deck for the Bakermat site. We correct stills in Photoshop, pop compressions out of Final Cut, and drink cup after cup of coffee. All talk in the office dissipates, as if by unilateral agreement. The only sound is the air vents and the clacking of fingers on keyboards.

5:00 PM: We’re starting to recognize a core pattern to the programming process. Everything works, and then it doesn’t. Specifics are discussed, Google is consulted, and code is changed. Everything works again. Repeat. The pattern continues until everything works for what seems like a very long time. Clint looks at Claire. “Do you want to exchange code?” he asks softly.

We all burst out laughing. It sounds like he’s asking her out.

Claire Mitchell makes our video and her code merge.

6:30 PM: Everyone has to stop working to do a dry run pitch for the group. The Empire group goes late in the rotation and we fall flat on our faces. It’s a disaster of epic proportions: our interface doesn’t work, and we talk in cliches about gamification and user experience. At a certain point in our demo, Claire’s laptop freezes, leaving the rest of the groups to contemplate a spinning pinwheel for a few minutes.

9:45 PM: A few groups are already starting to go home for the night. Sam Bailey has been gone for hours, and Claire and Clint are running into problems that their minds can’t handle this late in the work day. Adnaan enters with a few cases of beer. Everyone looks up from their screens and groans in appreciation. Normally we’re Brooklyn Brewery haters, but at this point in the process, their Pennant Ale tastes like the nectar of the gods.

11:45 PM: We go home exhausted, with no real oversight on where we are, or whether or not our prototype will work. We all silently pray for the return of Sam Bailey.

SUNDAY

Kel O’Neill gets interviewed by HUGE.

10:30 AM: We’ve been working for almost two hours when someone from POV approaches us about an interview. We talk in happy, peppy voices about how inspiring the hackathon is and are surprised to notice that we’re not bullshitting. Then, with the camera person still present, Clint starts taking us to task about the language in our pitch. The terms “gamification” and “time wasters” have to go. They cheapen the work he says.

“It’s art!” he insists. “It’s a piece of art!” There’s exasperation in his tone, exasperation with us. Sometime in the last day, Empire became his work too. The language disappears from the pitch and our respect for Clint grows.

Sam walks in. Cheers from everyone, coupled with relief.

3:00 PM: Clint’s looking really tired and his mood is going downhill. All prototypes will be locked in three hours, and there’s a lot more to do than just crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Major parts of the site don’t work, and major design elements are still missing. Sam doesn’t leave his side. “What are the z-indexes generated by the plug in?” he asks Clint. He might as well be talking Klingon, but Clint understands.

While Clint continues to wrestle with the code, Claire finishes her work. She stares at the screen, running the video over and over, perfecting her use of the interface for the live screening. She is calm, and her eyes are rimmed with red.

Claire’s eye after 15 hours of hacking.

5:09 PM: Keyboard Cat break. We’re losing it.

5:10 PM: Clint informs us that Keyboard Cat is dead. Google confirms.

6:00 PM: The prototype’s locked, but there’s no relief in sight. We have one hour before our pitch and the first live screening of our group’s creation.

7:15 PM: Our tables have been put away and the audience has arrived. The pitches begin.

We’re second in the rotation. The site works beautifully, and the energy seems good. Adnaan asks the audience if they have any questions. There are none. This could either be a very bad sign, or a very good sign.

10:00 PM: It’s a good thing. We win “Participants Choice.” Kel cries. A lot. There are pictures on Twitter.

Coming up in part 3: Revealing Empire: Bakermat, the prototype.

Previously: Hacking The Shit Out Of Everything: Part 1

Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma are the directors of the Empire project. Follow them @EmpireDoc.

When is the Pac-Man video game not the Pac-Man video game? When it’s been turned into Not Pac-Man by Stabyourself, the same game designers—Maurice Guégan and Sašo Smolej—that brought the world the Mario/Portal mashup Mari0.

In this new game they’ve brought the concept of gravity into Pac-Man’s world, which means instead of controlling the yellow guy with a big appetite, you instead control the grid that him and the ghosts duke it out in.

The result is akin to the sensation of being caught in a vicious storm at sea, or being inside a washing machine (although this is purely guess work as I’ve never been caught in a storm at sea or been inside a washing machine), as you shift the screen from side-to-side and over and around, pulling the ghosts and Pac-Man wherever you want them. It’s a bit like one of those 3D maze puzzles where you have a ball in a cube and you have to get it through a maze from one side to the other by tilting the cube.

Here’s what they say about it:

Ever wondered how Pacman would be like with physics? No? Well, it’s revolutionary. This mashup of “Not” and “Pacman” puts The Pac and the Ghosts in a in a Pacworld cage, at mercy of gravity and the level’s shape, controlled solely by you. Ghosts still don’t like you very much, so you should be careful to make Pacman avoid them.

[via Nerdcore]

@stewart23rd

In this recurring column, Leigh Alexander visits exciting new creative frontiers in the video game space, which is seeing a period of incredible growth and diversification, attracting new talent and demonstrating intriguing innovation. Here she’ll cover emerging artists, trends, and so much more.

If Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn (of Tale of Tales video game development studio) are from anywhere, they’re “from the internet.” Actually, the pair live in Belgium, where they’ve said they appreciate the opportunity to invent their own idea of what a digital game is. A cryptic couple of outsider artists who work sometimes quietly, sometimes as vocal critics, at the fringe of the traditional independent game scene, they’ve made it clear they’re not that interested in the definitions that exist so far.

The pair met in 1999, when high-level interaction online was still the domain of only a relative few pioneers, especially in the realm of what was collectively known as net.art—interactive web installations and other visual or auditory experiences that used the internet itself as canvas. Many of them felt like mysterious creative portals to imagined worlds. These days it’s easy to see how that landscape connects to games and interactive entertainment, but back then it was very much its own universe, proudly so.

After an experiment in early video conferencing, Harvey and Samyn decided to start exploring, creating together through the collaborative installation skinonskinonskin—as a couple in love, the pair describes their further work as “intimate” and “exhibitionist.” That art laid the groundwork for what would ultimately become their first project together as game developers, The Endless Forest (2005).

They’ve done a number of independent games since. Among these, The Graveyard (2008), in which the player guides an elderly woman to sit peacefully in a cemetery, and The Path (2009), a haunting interpretation of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, have been nominated in the Independent Game Festival in their respective years.

In The Graveyard (2008) players guide an elderly woman to sit peacefully in a cemetery.

As partners, they’re unique within video games—a long-term couple in love with creating work they hope defies traditional boundaries. In fact, their dissatisfaction with traditional parameters for games and the design thereof is widely known. In a medium governed by genre constraints, definitions and best practices geared at universal appeal, Tale of Tales sticks out like a dark appendage.

The pair is fond of answering interviews as a collective “we” (“we basically function like a single person with a double-sized brain,” they’ve said), and the language they prefer tends to be as abstract and emotive as the imagery in their games. There’s something about their mien—their elected removal from commercial interests or popular trends, their idiosyncratic language, for example—that seems familiar or expected in the art world, but not common to the logic-governed gaming universe.

Tale of Tales’ latest title, Bientôt l’Été (2012), may be its most considered and piquant work yet, arguably with a new clarity of vision that hasn’t necessarily been available from their previous work. Cast as either a male or female figure, players find themselves at a serene seaside.

As the player walks, the day slowly cycles toward sunset, into night and to pale dawn again; strolling along the junction where the waves meet the shore unveils snippets of nostalgic conversation that hint at the the pain of a relationship ending, wistful love, and fear of mortality. But a little house on the beach is the real site of the game’s subtle, complex evolution: inside, players face their partner across a chessboard, where thoughts and feelings about conversation, connection, and absolution collide with the use of chess pieces and the logic—or lack thereof—of that simple partner game.

Screen shot from Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn’s Bientôt l’Été.

Bientôt l’Été is fundamentally best as a two-player game—there’s a singular incredible thrill when the lonely atmosphere, as lovely as it is sad, allows the spectre of a real person to coalesce across that beach house table from you, there to resolve the complex lattice of your sudden shared history. An AI simulation can play the role of your partner if necessary. What happened between these lovers, and can it be mended?

“Walk and look,” the game instructs simply; “this is not a game to be ‘won’,” it also asserts, in classic Tale of Tales form.

There’s more to it than that: a network of discoverable mementos, and an oddly machine-like inner world to be discovered at the fringes of the seaside and behind the player’s own shut eyelids. Walk too close to the edge of the known world and mad, celestial bodies hum and vibrate; a shimmering border wall appears.

In the context of a game about love, conversation, and memory, Tale of Tales may largely remove itself from the world of traditional game development and its tech-obsessed rules—but those science-fiction tinged elements seem intentionally jarring and thought-provoking, a hint that they may have something to say about gaming nonetheless.

Tale of Tales’ work is often received with fascination and appreciation, deep critical analysis and sometimes bewilderment; at other times its rebellious refusal to adhere to the cut-and-dry idea that a game is a system with a clear goal or “win condition” leads purists to dismiss it. That the pair has different priorities than what most gamers and creators may be familiar frequently upends the entire (young) matrix for game criticism.

That’s what makes Tale of Tales a special presence in the indie gaming community, which badly needs anti-folk, disruptive fringe artists to stimulate the still-adolescent discussions and ideas about what and for whom games are.

Previously:Gamer’s Paradise: Indie As In “Individual” Gaming

@leighalexander

The ringing of bells carries a distinct form, attacking hard, sustaining long, and decaying slowly. No matter if they’re wood or metal, from one musical culture or another, bells have a soothing, nostalgic nature to them. In his new collaborative album with the ensemble known as The Bell Laboratory, Pantha du Prince juxtaposes this sentimental sound with the hard edge of his minimal techno beats.

Elements of Light drops today, featuring five new songs that all fit the vibe set forth by Pantha u Prince and the Bell crew’s monk outfits—meditative, yet stimulating. It’s fascinating to watch their hooded figures playing on their arsenal of instruments, creating a massively dense wall of sound.

Not many producers have ventured to participate in such a collaboration (save for Aphex Twin and his Remote Orchestra), and based on Pantha du Prince’s most recent solo effort, 2010’s Black Noise, it wasn’t the most obvious choice for a project. But it’s certainly eye-opening for fans of his brand of electronic music, and perhaps a novelty for serious bell enthusiasts as well.

Elements of Light is out today on Rough Trade.

Below, see our profile on Pantha du Prince.

Of the many fictionalized, futuristic innovations shown in the Back to the Future movies, one of the most beneficial belonged to the DeLorean at the center of it all, and I don’t mean the ability to time travel. Rather, if even regular engines could run on garbage, we’d solve the issues of fuel availability and waste disposal in one fell swoop. That’s why it’s nice to see that this concept has come into existence right at the upswing of the 3D printing phenomenon.

FilaBot is a desktop device that breaks down various types of plastics and processes them into filament that you can use for your home 3D printer. That includes your botched 3D printed experiments, so you won’t be wasting filament when you’re testing out a design.

Their Kickstarter campaign, which closed in early 2012, clocked three times its goal, and should prove to be a great accompanying device for home 3D printers like MakerBot. Founder Tyler McNaney plans to create a whole range of products that offer this functionality, some with great potential for customization.

FilaBot is a welcome arrival to a burgeoning world of creativity that threatens to create an immense amount of waste, something that we’re already pretty good at rapidly creating in large volumes. Now, instead of adding to the garbage pile, we can process some of our existing waste into something useful… well, depending what you’ll be designing and fabricating.

[via The Guardian]

@ImYourKid

Kaleb Lechowski is 22 years’ old and he’s just one man, as his name would suggest. One man who’s managed to write, direct, and animate this great sci-fi short, which took him seven months to complete. It begins with a torture scene as a machine entity tries to extract information from an alien creature, hinting at a wider war that pits the mechanical against the biological.

The dynamics of the interrogation crank up the tension, intercut with stunning visuals of the alien creature’s home planet. What makes the piece remarkable is not only the young age of its maker, but also how accomplished it feels considering it’s film student Lechowski’s debut. The visuals look great, the narrative grips you and it has a nice cliffhanger. And, in just five days of being uploaded to Vimeo, it’s accumulated over 805,000 views.

Next stop, Hollywood.

[via Vimeo]

@stewart23rd