A lot of what was presented is things we work on in the Mobile Life Centre, but also some new insight into what others are up to. Among the “new stuff” I found Mike Kuniavsky’s talk on “the Internet of people: integrating Internet of Things technologies is not a technical problem” the most interesting. He focused on IoT not being about connecting machines, but about finding what people are interested in and among his ideas was a focus on services, not machines. In his example he mentioned how people visit services from multiple different machines, but want to find a similar experience in all of them. The loyalty is to the service, not to the artefact. It doesn’t matter if you’re at your phone, your laptop or your TV; the service is viewed as the same entity in all of them.

Now, lets just see how to connect this to our view of pervasive gaming…

Oh, and it’s in Swedish…

 Prolog Making a LARP is to Design ans Activity (to create an Experience)

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During the convention among other things I presented my view on larp as a designed activity, and that’s one of the reasons for writing this now, even though I’m really tired. I promised my audience to put something up, and I will… tomorrow. But for now it will have to do with this short comment. And you are most welcome to comment back to me if you want to get in touch or discuss something around what we talked about!

Other interesting things during the conventions: I visited several gender discussions, some body language and power technique workshops, and I got to run a test on our new game Codename:Heroes. The link to the game work, but the page is mainly for mobile phone, and you won’t be able to run the game unless we are there running it with you… But if you sign up you will get an email telling you when we have something more compleated!

Links:

• Global No Pants Subway Ride 2012 | Improv Everywhere

• ifttt / Put the internet to work for you.

• Automate your Dropbox

• Seriebloggen – Bloggosfären – UNT.se

Medspel is dead! Long live Lets-Play.se!

Staging Illusions

A two day, yearly, conference on staging illusions. Mostly people from culture, media and gender studies, also some historians and some with a bit of a technical background. And quite many practicing magicians, nice! This is not really my field, but it was a great way to broaden my mind and find new angles on what I’m doing. If I should really distil the main content from the conference I would say Vanessa Toulmin’s keynote gave a good overview, from pantasmagoria and Peppers ghost to George Méliès movies and Dark Rides.

Other talks I found interesting was:

Jacquelin Hylkema’s speech on history and how the public focus changed from the deciever to the victim around the change of the century 1800 – 1900.

Max Schneider‘s overview of directing miracles and magic effects. Mainly the three roles of a magician:

• Playing the magician, a superior being, an alpha male.
• Magician playing a role, in a story.
• Magic in a play, without one clear magician

Also the split into three types of magicians is interesting:

• Killer
• Victim
• Witness

Kate Genevieve presented “Give me your hand” where the participant is blinded, but with a video showing the surroundings. This builds upon the idea of relating to a rubber hand if you treat it the same way as your real hand (Google it).

Jon Armstrong presented his idea of magic in theatre performance. He’s got a different vocabulary but a lot of thought connect well to what I’m thinking, and especially to the project I call ‘Spooks’ (yes, I’m talking to you Arkadia).

Adam Bee presented an art project called Telekinesis, this I need to delve deeper int before i give my judgement :-)

Astrid Enslin had a lot of good ideas around metalepsis as a transmedia phenomenon. How levels of story collide and different ways of looking at it. There was a lot of good references and I need to look more closely at her work in the future. Among other things she compared:

• Mimesis, the illusion of experience reality (Plato, Aristotel, Averbach, Ricouéur, Genette, Wolf)
• Fourth wall (Diderot, Auter & Davis)
• Willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge, Ferri)
• Immersion (Murray, Marinelli, Salen & Zimmermann, Boellstorff)

Also there were some talk around Bergson’s intuitive method that was quite interesting

I don’t really have the time right now to write a full post, but this is good and I want to spread it, so here’s a short, and not that well thought through rant: It’s about the new economy, the role of design and the consumer as producer. But, even though she doesn’t really say it directly,  it’s also about feminism and the overthrowing of an old system that gave power to the people already in power. Looking at feminism from that perspective turns it into more than gender equality. uit’s about equal power, it’s about ‘we are the 99%’. And yes, I may be putting more words in there than she would admit or agree upon. I’ll just put a quote here, hope you’ll take 15 minutes to watch it, and decide for yourselves :

Josephine Green talks about the change of age from one way of thinking, of being and of doing in the world to another and the challenges in the 21st century. She explores social innovation, the decentralization and distribution of creativity and capacity through the system and stimulates thinking and insights around the future of innovation and design.

If you’re more interested check: Pyramids 2 Pancakes (I haven’t really had the time to read through it myself yet)

• November (xkcd.com)
  

• MTV Generation (xkcd.com)
  

• Alternative Literature (xkcd.com)