• Halogi - Halloy: “Little forest” first mentioned in 850ad, but existing since the times of the celts (BC) * roman foundations found around the place, including a roman oven with goddess diana burried in the ashes
  • one of the first registered wars was the '1 cow war that lasted 12 years'
  • for centuries the castle was the summer residence of the prince of Liege
  • Omalius
  • the geologist and his discovery of the 'cretatious' stratum ( the period between the last large dinosaurs and the beginning of flowering plants)
  • the local broadminded scientist being religious, but also a supporter of the beginning theories of evolution
  • as a polititian reformed the school system and included girls education up to 12 years
  • as a doctor, he founded preventive medicine in the region (vaccination against pox)
  • as a scholar set up a massive library in the castle
  • died as an old savant (92 yrs old) in brussels studying local geological strata (can his age be attributed to drinking excellent local beer?)
  • after he died and his daughter married, her children fought over the division of the property and over 2 centuries brought the castle to a near ruin. some of these descendents were named 'socialist barons' for their policies in the 1920ies when the regions was politically progressive left.
  • the appearance of the train-line caused a massive move of the local people from Halloy to Braibant
  • in the 2nd WW, Margareta from Ieper (born of a secret love between a Flemish woman and a Brittish officer during the 1st WW), working for the Belgian secret service (resistance) was parachuted and dropped over a grass field close to the chateau to seek a noble man who turned out to be prince Charles of Belgium, with whom she spent several weeks having romantic walks in the forest
  • local gastronomy:
  • carbonades flamandes (???)
  • patate (from hungary!!?)

Leon's presentation was interesting to discover a certain (true/false) history that has changed the group's perception of the site

  • Cypher
  • Resurrection of the little match girl
  • (Flip's martial arts parody)
  • St John's Wort
  • looking for absurd stuff
  • contrast nature/human built structures (based on control)
  • light and darkness
  • schrijvertjes (surfing community of bugs on water) - interesting patterns of movement
  • bridge over the water
  • spiky plant
  • ferns growing out of a wall
  • tar smeared over plants to stop them growing through the road
  • iron wire through the branches
  • mushrooms as a dwarf village
  • contrast between dead and alive, idillic landscape with cows + barbed wire
  • a shadow play of branches on a canoe
  • experiences of near death (a dying fish in the pond)
  • human built objects embedded in nature
  • riven-line environment
  • electrical lines
  • moist wall inside tunnels
  • plants growing from a cracked wall
  • a sole branch as a separate entity floating in space
  • strange plant movements
  • “scanning” the environment in a limited way, looking at them as close-up surfaces, without figurative reference points
  • mediaeval feel of neglected garden furniture
  • overgrown paths
  • trees joined up with iron cables, with ivy drying up in contact with them
  • pointless bridges over dried up creek
  • strange formations of stones around the place
  • spider-webs with properties of a glass surface
  • waiting in vain for the dwarves around mushrooms
  • natural corridors made out of trees
  • organic shapes with rigid geometric structures (leaves)
  • branches growing on/in the water
  • long paths, corridors and tunnels through the forest
  • geometric patterns in fallen branches, forming beams with an abstract and complex structure
  • strange sized holes in the ground
  • vampire nails in beam structure of the barbecue place
  • flies everywhere (on cows, horses, people, plants and dead things (mouse, mushrooms)
  • waiting for the inhabitants living in human scale dwarf houses
  • can beer cans be contemporary mobile homes for dwarves?
  • dallas everywhere!
  • undulating lines through a wheat field, with mushrooms as landing platforms for dwarves or aliens
  • exercises in being a tripod
  • death everywhere (dead field mouse with green flies grazing on it)
  • miniature gothic church brown by trees
  • cows behind fences
  • ancient and massive chestnut trees
  • discovery of the dwarves wearing stars
  • forest ends in fences
  • private property warnings
  • a seductive dance of leaf-shadows and a neighbouring tree-trunk
  • a tree that dreams of being a fence
  • DD (designer dwarf) mushroom houses
  • fences
  • bridge leading to a fence
  • abstract signs in a forgotten language
  • plants growing through cracks of human built environments
  • 'prince charles frog'

Pablo, Eric, Sara, Tom, Flip and Marta have talked about their expectations and wishes for the workshop, have shown previous work and described their working processes

  • borders and fences
  • frontiers and limits
  • human control of nature (and vice versa)
  • flies, insects, mushrooms and death
  • green is the colour of death?
  • green flies and surfing mosquitoes
  • are things dead or alive depends on the scale
  • structure of spider webs resembling nests/miniature houses
  • mushrooms can be seen as drawf dwellings or holes for insects
  • geometric patterns as abstractions of the environment:
  • grassy fields
  • a branch hanging in the air
  • structures of trees, branches and leaves:
  • casting shadows on the world around them
  • encapsulating a path to form an infinite, intricate tunnel
  • a straight, noisy, infinite train-line
  • insects (ticks, flies, water-walkers)
  • different viewpoints on the world: snails, insect swarms, growing plant
  • entanglement of:
  • natural and artificial
  • grown and built
  • human and non-human structures
  • straight and curved lines (based on their perception and intention)

see: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ see: http://mmmaybe.gimp.org/tutorials/ for in depth tutorials see: Nebula Notes for quick overview of the relevant part of nebula for the MR media worlds workshop

  • what is the emotional temperature of the world?
  • what is the scale of the world? - can you see its limits?
  • no photorealistic modelling
  • using movement, behaviour of objects and light from the physical world to animate transparent shapes and surfaces
  • morphing between realistic/non realistic
  • garden as a minefield of truths
  • coming with an expectation, gathering information bits based on that expectation
  • a gallery of images that one can choose from
  • limiting the experience of the physical space
  • finding out what is interesting to experience in the virtual world
  • a world with constantly changing positions (as leon showed us, history is a relative phenomenon
  • travelling through the space as travelling through the archives of historical information. the path becomes the re-interpretation of different elements that are constantly rearranging themselves
  • an alive archive in which everyone passing through the chateau (both physical and virtual should place a new media element in the world, generating a large amount of paths through the 'truths'
  • movement as a journey through different strata (metaphor for history); the movement needs the space to be manipulated (requires a large amount of energy)
  • an archive (database) of memories in different media come to life in animated bitmaps
  • every stratum is one person's experience, a three dimensional cube surrounded by other strata (needs an immersive projection system with at least 2 faces
  • a dense space, filled with particles, moving from empty to full
  • simplicity: a claustrofobic world made up from a swarm of particles
  • when you stand still, the world shrinks and sticks to your skin (like a swarm of fireflies)
  • when you move and increase the energy in the system, the world becomes sparser, lighter and more comfortable
  • discovering things, being drawn to details, in an otherwise not too exciting surrounding. elements of wonder inside normalised reality
  • the discovered objects are passages, new realities that you can discover through interaction
  • light inside a tunnel can suck you into another space
  • feeling of surprise and enchantment, seduced by the richness of the world underneath, behind…
  • creating a fantastic world within the everyday reality, in a constant morph between reality and fiction
  • a tunnel: environment in which i'm limited, i can only see inaccessible realities that are not immediately evident, a tunnel is constructed from the density of the forest that i can't go through
  • feeling the navigation of insects under the floor - recognising the action only through its effects on the environment
  • inviting, inaccessible realities
  • the tunnel is created by different creatures passing through it. if the movement stops, the tunnel closes. the forest is continuously trying to take back its posession of the tunnel
  • tunnel: an eco-system of invisible beings
  • emotion: frustration, imagination
  • finding your own scale in different dimensions, a cozy situation in an otherwise threatening environment
  • coherence of infinite tunnels through a diversity of media
  • no physical boundaries (walls)
  • limits are changing atmosphere: border, connection
  • walls as particle systems, movables, changing direction, becoming ceilings, floors, walls again
  • changes remain until the next intervention
  • the world is a representation of the site and history of the chateau seen through personal experiences of the group; translated into a virtual topology; reorganised reality, a dynamic trace
  • a dense, infinite tunnel built out of tiny elements (particles). every particle of the tunnel is alive
  • when the player scales the particles s/he can discover:
  • bits of historical sediment
  • flying insects
  • visual and sonic seeds
  • fully grown flora
  • when the train passes in the physical world (should be detected by its sound), the world is temporarily washed away:
  • the player looses control over the interaction with the world, the colours and objects disappear
  • the space vibrates and its physical properties temporarily change
  • the player can be teleported to another region of the tunnel
  • increasing the energy in the system allows the player tokeep the environment from taking posession of the tunnel, as well as to move through different spaces and emotional temperatures
  • the world responds differently depending on the amount of time spent in it. It moves from being unfriendly to friendly, or from interested to ignoring. the world is a forgetful place, so that after some time, it will treat a familiar player as a novice again

introduction to accelerometers, cerfs, OSC and OZ (foam's sensor data transmission and analysis system (in max)) real and pseudo sensors possible to use in the design:

  • raw data (x,y or xyz)
  • smoothed data/bias
  • average over time
  • leaky accumulator
  • peak detection
  • zero crossing
  • delta/threshold
  • energy levels (x,y,z)
  • correlation
  • mixing between forms
  • manipulating textures
  • changing the size of a form
  • non-linear scaling
  • rotating forms
  • growing forms
  • appearing and disappearing
  • minimalising light position and light colour
  • moving forms
  • concluded with an introduction to tlc scripting in nebula
  • in fijuuu: a cave (one thick part of the tunnel) with:
  • 1 interactive object in it (swarm of fireflies)
  • 3 animated objects (historic sediment, visual seed, branch)
  • rich texture visualising the idea of the tunnel being constructed out of media particles
  • interaction consists of: (1) looking around the cave by rotating around 2 different axis of the accelerometer and (2) shattering the swarm of fireflies by using the 'leaky accumulator' (accumulating data across 3 axis with a small 'leakage')
  • in blender: a richer visualisation of the tunnel, with lots more textured objects, moving lights and camera + an intro sequence of a dynamic map of the region of halloy
  • in max: a passing train detector, to be treated as a sensor in fijuuu
  • in after effects: compositing of the blender tunnel with a swarm of butterflies
  • in the physical world: a semi-transparent screen placed in front of a tunnel, creating an illusion of depth, projection on different surfaces to create an additional texture (walls, stairs, grass, trees, corners, people…)
  • production of assets in blender and gimp and runtime scripts in nebula
  • programming the interaction
  • alternative visualisation in blender, max and after effects
  • feasibility check and evaluation of the process
  • finishing touches
  • physical displays
  • public experiment
  • blow-ball tournament
  • closing brunch and departures

some workshop notes from an xmedk workshop