Tom Revill drew a picture of the “scuttle bugs” that featured in Phil’s “Global Hockets” project. They were awesome, controlled by performers hidden above the stage, they interact with each other on stage.

There’s a clear case on top of wheels (so you can see the workings). The speaker on the top emitted sounds of night animals.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’m at the Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium (ada2009), which is being held at Victoria’s School of Architecture and Design.

ADA is a charitable trust (“We finally became charitable this April” says Zita, the chair) that has formed out of an email discussion list and a distributed support network populated by a group of digital artists here in New Zealand. The yearly ADA symposium is now in its 6th year. It helps keep build and nourish this “uncomfortably small but cozy community” (says Zita: “I don’t mean ‘uncomfortably small’ in a really uncomfortable way”) by facilitating a face-to-face get together of folks who are otherwise perfectly happy to converse and collaborate virtually.

The symposium also helps bring in new people to this community (like myself!), and they try to be as open as possible to new ideas and conversations. The three signature elements of the event seem to be: The free lunch (nom!), friendly and open events, conversational approach.

This ‘conversational model’  seems to me to be quite similar to what I’ve seen at several recent conferences – a growing trend towards interactive, participatory, short presentation sessions – encouraging as many people to get up and speak as possible. It can be challenging to compress your ideas down into 5 minute talk, but it also narrows the focus of talks down to the most important elements, and lowers the barrier of entry to those who might not otherwise feel like they can prepare for a full session.

The feel of the conference is very grass roots and comfortable (and I loved how the plates and mugs for lunch have been sourced from a local thrift store), and everyone is very friendly and happy to help. I went to workshop sessions yesterday on Arduino and Quartz Composer, and despite being such a newbie – there were great people to give me tips and get me started!

It’s still possible to just drop in on the conference (which still has today, tonight, and tomorrow left to go) for a very small fee – so check out the programme and see if anything takes your interest! (You can follow our conversations on twitter).

On Wednesday afternoon (along with staff and research students from Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Design) Elizabeth and I visited the Digital Media Design Lab to hear a selection of presenters showcasing their use of e-research technologies and demonstrating a number of cool projects they’d been involved with.

There were two visiting professors from other universities – Mark Gahegan (Auckland) and Neil Gemmell (Otago) – as well as six other academics from Victoria Uni. The general emphasis of the symposium was that e-research allows research to happen in new ways, using digital tools to enhance collaboration on a global scale. Research teams from around the world can benefit from each other’s work, share research data and even access (expensive) scientific equipment, across ultra-high speed digital network connections.

New Zealand’s “Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network” (KAREN) runs the length of the country, connecting most universities, and ties us into these international e-research networks.

For New Zealand, in the ‘corner’ of the world, the ability to borrow ‘number-crunching computing power’ or ‘telescope star-gazing time’ from other institutions with bigger budgets and more varied research environments is really exciting. Also, our own resources and data are just likely to be in great demand, due to their uniqueness and relative inaccessibility. By contributing our local research outputs to this global network we open up Kiwi ingenuity to the rest of the world.

Nationally, the “BestGRID” project has been run over the last 3 years to assess methods, applications, and infrastructure that could support a “fully-functional e-research ecosystem for New Zealand”. At Victoria, Sam Searle and John Hine from the school of Maths, Statistics and Computer Science are organizing equipment, facilities, friendships, and even programming know-how to help academics and post-graduate researchers make the most of this network of data and resources.

My favorite speaker was definitely Mark Gahegan, who spoke about his experience working in the US contributing to GEON, the Geosciences Network, and also about his more recent work developing visualization tools for geoscience resources. Gahegan is Director of e-Research and Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, at the University of Auckland (and an excellent speaker).

Gahegan described how, in the sciences and social sciences, a lot of time is often lost trying to interpret or re-interpret data previously acquired by other academics. How we understand come to understand the work we have created is tied up in the final research product itself, with few ways for us to convey quickly to the next person who comes along information such as:

• The process by which the research product was created,
• What other work the researcher was influenced by,
• Which scientific community ended up using the work,
• How that community used the work, etc.

Gahegan wants to capture and visualize geoscience research data in such a way that it is “semantically interoperable between people with different points of view, differences of opinions”.

More elaborate visualisation tools, like ConceptVista, an open source project that Gahegan has been developing, will enable researchers to view research data situated within the context of its creation and use. As a researcher works on her own project, she could be notified by the interface of previous outputs which match her method of data collection, or have been been used extensively by her target community in the past – and this could help her make better decisions about which resources in this vast global co-laboratory to make use of.

Slides from the speakers at the symposium should be available on the EResearch webpages shortly. Photos of the event should appear on the DMDN News blog soon as well.

Doug Easterly, the course coordinator, invited me to say a few words to the students who are just beginning group projects in which they will work together to create their own original flash videogame title.

Doug told the students that he hopes to see projects that reflect an understanding of some of the deeper theory explored by game designers, as well as showing a grasp of the technical skills needed for flash game development. He hopes that some of the resources held at our library will enable them to further explore and critique their design ideas.

For my part, I showed the students Ernest Adam’s “50 Books For Everyone In The Game Industry” list from the IGDA wiki (see the more detailed article here), claiming that most of these recommended titles could be found in the University Library already, either at A&D, or at another branch. I’ve checked in more detail this evening, and I’m pleased to say that we actually have 32 out of the 50 titles, with 8 more on order. I encouraged the students to stop by and visit me in the library, and handed out my business card with links to the 50 Books list, my LibraryThing catalog (which is very DMDN heavy), and my contact details.

After this, I sat down at the back of the class and looked on as the students presented and discussed their second game design project of the course, and Doug and Kah Chan (the course tutor) gave feedback and critiques of their work. I got to see all of the projects (partly because I left my moleskine notebook up at the front of the room, and was too embarrassed to go up and get it again – a good excuse to stay on) and was blown away by the range of interesting creative perspectives these students were applying to their work. Their project was to experiment with the creation of different game environments – most students seemed to use this as an opportunity to continue to use characters they had created with their first project.

A few of the game environments stood out for me in particular:

One student, Melanie, created an endearing environment for what Kah called a “Square Wheel” character – a little creature whose mission was it is to make red angry blocks turn into blue happy blocks by rolling and bumping into them. While it was quite a simple graphical style, I really liked this environment because the general ‘purpose’ or ‘vocation’ of the game was immediately accessible and something that I could get on board with: This happy thing wants to make other things happy- Let’s go!

The game seemed to effortlessly envoke a catchy happy atmosphere, and I could almost imagine it being played to a katamari-eqsue soundtrack. I gave the game to Michelle to play this evening, and she happily cleared all the angry blocks, but seemed quite disappointed when nothing happened at the end.

Another student, Silard, created a great game environment that used an interesting olde tyme film effect (complete with vaudville style piano track). The style of the game – the way it was animated from drawings on paper, and the way the character was animated – also reminded me of “And Yet It Moves” (winner of the 07 Indepenant Games Festival student showcase). Silard’s character travelled through the environment, which evolved around him from black and white sketches to brighter colours and straight line pen drawings as he went.

Tom, who came to visit us at the library at the beginning of the break, talked about how he’d incorporated his interest in the Art Deco style into his game evironments. Of course I have nothing but praise for Tom’s work, as he’d gotten some of his reference material on Art Deco from the library! Tom spoke about how he was inspired by the famous Tim Schaffer game, Grim Fandango which also has an Art Deco feel to it. Unfortunately though, anyone who doesn’t hear this from him is probably going to think he’s been inspired instead by Ken Levine’s Bioshock, instead, which – released just this month – prominently features Art Deco architecture. Bioshock is certainly not a bad game to be associated with, though! Doug pointed out how Tom’s use of Art Deco patterns helped to somewhat differentiate between the different spaces in which his character appeared, and encouraged students to think about how their characters would appear against various backgrounds.

The student’s final projects, a complete flash game (including packaging!), will be due on the October 10. I really hope they do well, and I’m looking forward to playing their games.