Activities:

1. Initial planning meeting
2. Ian Murray sets up Gesture Warden avatar & Gesture Cloud group

Initial Planning Meeting:

• Presented turkey idea - robot with swiveling head
• Inspiration from Phantom House
  • Temporal instability
    • Characters - Girl and Cat
      Girl: morphs across various ages
      Cat: can phase between different forms of animal
• Second life component
  • Gesture Cloud (hand gestures)
  • Permeability (parallels to Phantom House)
  • Use of media textures
• Use of multiple screens for projections
• What themes would relate to the cultural context of China?
  • Construction (cranes, destruction vs creation, assembly-disassembly)
  • Labour - physical labour in real world is translated/ transformed into behavior/ effects in the virtual world
  • Utopias and dystopias
• Other themes:
  • Returnable data and spaces
  • Intermixing of public, private, virtual, and data spaces
  • Residue of devices and their use
  • Instability of time
  • Caching and replaying of data/ actions
• Need to assemble an inventory of samples -- sounds, textures, videos, images -- from Beijing sites (construction sites, factories)
• Research needed: How can we capture physical gestures as BVH files, and apply them to gesture objects (hands) in Second Life?
  • Discussed using Poser to create a model of the hand to which a BVH file (from motion capture) could be applied. This could then be exported Second Life -this might simplify the process. (consult artist Lynn Heller to gain insight into her methods for importing motion capture data into SL objects)
• Branding and iconography for the project
• Explored Gesture Cloud Studio created by Ian Murray. Location: OCAD Campus (164, 155, 679)
• Discussed arrangement of visits to factories and construction sites in the Beijing area
• Database of Gestures
  • A gesture 'vocabulary'
  • Stringing together of gestures
• Lego Mind-storms as possible platform for robotics (Fei Jun will talk to friend, Shang Weng, who has experience working with this technology)
• Decide roughly what components we need (actuators, sensors, Arduino); Fei Jun suggested local electronics vendors where we can procure these parts, and will also search CAFA's inventory for components

Second Life:

• Ian Murray created new 'Gesture Warden' avatar in the OCAD Second Life Campus, to be used for experiments/ iterations in the Gesture Cloud Studio.
• Finalized Gesture Cloud virtual studio space in Second Life
• Gesture Cloud Group was also set up, to facilitate collaboration between members of the Gesture Cloud team in Toronto, Halifax, and Beijing.

References:

Books:

Utopias and Dystopias

Projects:

Phantom House (Judith Doyle, 2010)
http://www.ocad.ca/about_ocad/articles/news_releases/20100225_project31.htm

All About The Village (Fei Jun, 2009)
http://feijun.net/wordpress/?page_id=17

Hybrid Space Lab (Frans Vogelaar, Elizabeth Sikiaridi, 2010)
http://dmy-berlin.com/en/festival/2010/exhibition/hybrid-space-lab-elizabeth-sikiaridi-frans-vogelaar/

Websites:

Eyes Web
(Gesture analysis software)
http://musart.dist.unige.it/EyesWeb/EywPlatform.html

Contacts:

Fei Jun
Associate Professor
CAFA Media Lab
School of Design
Central Academy of Fine Arts
Beijing, China
http://www.feijun.net

Ma Gang
Vice Dean of School of Design
Professor and Director of Digital Media LAB
Digital Media Lab, School of Design
Central Academy of Fine Arts
Beijing, China

Lynne Heller
contact@lynneheller.com
http://www.lynneheller.com/