Workshops @ Future Places 2009 will take place October 13+14.

Since we can only offer a limited number of participants, access to workshops will require registration. This will be announced here in the very near future. The registration fee for each of the workshops will be €50.

The following workshops are scheduled for Future Places 2009:

• Open Cities with David Gunn and Guillermo Brown
• Computer Vision with Golan Levin Sold out!
• Uncovering Urban Stories: a mobile location aware approach with Valentina Nisi and Ian Oakley
• Interface Design for Mobile Devices with Nuno Correia and Mónica S. Mendes

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Workshop I: Open Cities

Instructors: David Gunn and Guillermo Brown
Incidental
Registration Fee: €20
Date: October 14
Time: 1-5pm–tentative
Presentation of work: October 16, PM
Location: University of Porto
Language: English

Summary: This workshop will operate as a collaborative recording session where we collect sounds to be used to create a show which will be presented by Gunn and Brown later in the festival schedule. It will be a loosely structured recording walk across a selected part of the city using mobile recording equipment.

David Gunn is the Director of Incidental, an organization specializing in cross-disciplinary work including websites, installations and performances. His work focuses upon using new media to explore notions of authorship, establishing forms of “diffuse creativity” where the lines between reading and writing, artist and audience are significantly blurred.

Guillermo E. Brown is a multidisciplinary performer (text, video, theatre), musician (drums, electronics, voice), and producer. Brown is featured on over 25 recordings, performing or recording with David S. Ware, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Dave Burrell, Anti-Pop Consortium, Anthony Braxton, DJ Spooky, Vernon Reid/DJ Logic’s Yohimbe Brothers, Mike Ladd, George Lewis, and Vijay Iyer, among others. His albums include “Soul at the Hands of the Machine,” “The Beat Kids’ Open Rhythm System,” “Black Dreams 1.0,” and “Handheld.” A graduate of Wesleyan University (BA) and Bard College (MFA), he is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music and Gallatin School of Independent Study.

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Workshop II: Computer Vision

Golan Levin

Carnegie Mellon University

Dates: All day, October 13 – 14

Hours (tentative): 9:30-12:30; 2-5:30

Presentation of work: October 16 (PM)

Location: University of Porto

Language: English

Registration Fee: €50 Sold out!

Summary: “Computer vision” refers to a broad collection of techniques that allow computers to make intelligent assertions about digital images and video. This workshop offers a practical introduction to using computer vision techniques to create interesting interactions in Processing, a free Java environment for arts programming. A hands-on session will ensure individual attention and learning. Topics will include: a brief review of programming in Processing; direct pixel access and image manipulation; motion detection, object tracking, blob segmentation, and face recognition. This workshop is ideal for students who have had a semester’s experience of programming in Processing, Java, or a C-like language.

Golan Levin is an artist/engineer interested in the exploration of new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into formal languages of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity. Levin is Director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Associate Professor of Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

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Workshop III: Uncovering Urban Stories: a mobile location aware approach

Valentina Nisi and Ian Oakley, Madeira-Interactive Technologies Institute and Carnegie Mellon University-Portugal program

Dates: All day, October 13 – 14
Hours (tentative): 9:30-12:30; 2-5:30
Presentation of work: October 16 (PM)
Location: University of Porto
Language: English
Maximum number of participants: 20
Registration Fee: €50

Summary: This workshop will explore video shown on the emerging medium of location-aware mobile devices. These are systems capable of selectively presenting media to an audience who is out and about, engaged and interacting with a dynamic urban environment. The distinguishing quality of this media format is its powerful ability to deliver narrative experiences that merge with an audience’s physical context – the environment immediately surrounding them. However, it is also experienced on small screens and viewed in conditions with varying light and sound pollution. Furthermore, structuring narratives into fragmented segments distributed spatially and temporally presents new challenges to conventional story-telling practices. This workshop will explore the balance among these constraints. Its participants will be guided through the process of authoring, structuring and designing mobile, spatially distributed narratives. Working in pairs they will explore the city of Porto to unearth one or more situated stories. The processes of storyboarding, scripting and filming will be tutored to suit presentation on mobile devices. The workshop will culminate with a walking tour and public exhibition showing the stories in context.

The Urban Stories workshop targets film-makers: professionals, semi-professionals and students.

Valentina Nisi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Madeira where she teaches Service Design as part of the Carnegie Mellon|Portugal Program. Her research interests focus on bringing digital stories out into real space, merging architecture, environment and landscape with multimedia narrative experience. She holds a Phd from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and worked for 4 years in MIT MediaLabEurope’s Story Networks research group investigating the potential of wireless mobile technologies in cinematic non-linear narratives.

Ian Oakley is an assistant professor at the University of Madeira and an adjunct assistant professor at the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the design, development and evaluation of multi-modal and embodied interfaces. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK and has spent three years doing post-doctoral research at MIT MediaLabEurope’s Palpable Machines group. He has also spent two enlightening years working in industrial R&D in South Korea.

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Workshop IV: Interface Design for Mobile Devices

Nuno Correia and Mónica Mendes

Dates: October 13 – 14
Hours (tentative): All day, 9:30-12:30; 2-5:30
Presentation of work: October 16 (PM)
Location: University of Porto
Language: TBA
Maximum number of participants: 20
Registration Fee: €50

Summary: Mobile devices and network infrastructures open the possibility for new forms of information access or storytelling while visiting physical places. This workshop addresses this new trend by exploring the user interface design opportunities and challenges for different devices, taking also into account the underlying information architecture or storyline. In the workshop participants will have the opportunity to develop a project in user interface design and information structuring for exploring a physical location.

This workshop is intended for designers, illustrators, programmers interested in information structure and visual design, and content producers including photographers, video artists and sound designers. Working knowledge of image processing and vector drawing using tools such as Photoshop or Illustrator is required. Knowledge of Flash or Flash Lite is a plus but not a necessity. Participants should bring their own equipment (e.g, personal computer and camera) but projects will be done in groups that can share resources.

Mónica Mendes is an Assistant at the Multimedia Arts degree of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL), and a member of the CIEAM research group on Interactive Environments. She’s now a researcher holding a PhD fellowship in Digital Media (UT Austin-Portugal Program), and she has a Masters in Multimedia Educational Communication and degree in Communication Design. As an educator, she was a lecturer of Interface Design for Mobile Devices seminars and Implied Technologies master courses, and also taught Models, Introduction to Multimedia, Multimedia Programming and Typography, among others. Additionally, she was a designer at Atelier B2 with José Brandão and a free-lancer design consultant. She has also participated in research projects on augmented environments and mobile storytelling of the IMG, and on experimentation in alternative media at altLab.
www.monicamendes.info

Nuno Correia is a Professor at the New University of Lisbon, where he teaches Multimedia Computing and Image Processing, and heads a research group on multimedia information processing and interaction – Interactive Multimedia Group (IMG). He was a researcher at Interval Research, Palo Alto, CA, and a researcher at INESC, Portugal. He participated in several EU funded projects, including Euromath, MADE that provided the foundation for the international standard PREMO (Programming Environment for Multimedia Objects) and D-ARTS (DVD Authoring Tools). He has worked and directed projects on augmented environments and mobile storytelling funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation and on multimedia for learning funded by HP. Nuno Correia is co-director of the national program on Digital Media in cooperation with UT Austin and member of the editorial board of the Computers and Graphics journal published by Elsevier. He will be Program Chair of MobileHCI 2010.