[spectre] CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS WEB3DART WORKSHOP @ EAF

[EAF Director]

EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION

CALL  FOR  PARTICIPANTS
WEB3DART WORKSHOP 5-9 JUNE 2006

KAREL DUDESEK - CONCEPTUAL GUIDANCE
MARTIN SCHMITZ - VRML
DIRK WALDIK - FLASH 3D

WORKSHOP LEADERS
KAREL DUDESEK - CONCEPTUAL GUIDANCE
Karel Dudesek is an ex-performance artist, TV activist, and 
professor. He is presently Head of Postgraduate Studies at the 
Ravensbourne College in Kent, UK. He deals with digital, experimental 
and collaborative working to develop interaction strategies with 
audiences.
He has organised and juried the Web3DArt exhibitions from 1999 and 
was the founder of Van Gogh TV, a media collaborative, which has been 
active in combining various media with live audiences for television, 
radio and Internet since the early 1980s.
MARTIN SCHMITZ - VRML
Close collaborator of Karel Dudesek and Technical Director for 
VanGoghTV, Martin Schmitz is also Senior Lecturer in Postgraduate 
Studies at the Ravensbourne College of Communication and Design, 
Kent, UK.
DIRK WALDIK - FLASH 3D
Dirk Waldik is a specialist in Interactive Technologies and has been 
developing Information and Navigation Systems for the web and 
interactive media for the past 6 years. He possesses a thorough 
understanding of community-based websites, having worked on projects 
such as the innovative online radio Last.fm. This site features a 
complex mapping system, which learns from the musical tastes of the 
site's visitors.
Dirk Waldik is also a Lecturer at the Ravensbourne College of 
Communication and Design, Kent, UK.

VENUE
Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, cnr North Terrace and 
Morphett Street, Adelaide

WORKSHOP Description
This workshop leads in to an understanding of the structure and 
possibilities of interactive narratives.  It also provides a means of 
investigating and questioning the conventions of presentation and 
navigation in contemporary interaction design.  Interactive 
narratives will be designed as hypertexts with relational links 
requiring participants to organize content in non-linear and 
innovative ways.
The combination of interaction, immersion, and the digital computer 
make Virtual Reality a unique medium for interactive productions, 
providing new opportunities, but also new challenges. VR offers 
artists and designers a new world for their imagination and a new 
field of expression-a tantalizing mix of absolute freedom and 
niggling limitations. On the one hand you have a limitless 3D canvas 
in which to create a visual effect. On the other the computer can 
only redraw a very limited number of polygons and textures at the 20 
or more frames-per-second needed to effectively preserve the virtual 
illusion and while the viewer can wander at will through your world, 
the artist can no longer so easily control visual surprise.
Visual immersion is only one aspect of this new medium. Equally 
important is the user's interaction with the virtual environment. 
Since, as humans, we live our whole lives in interactive 
environments, we assume that it will be easy to create interactive, 
virtual environments. But it proves difficult to build intuitive and 
rich interaction in VR.
 From a narratological perspective, a story consists of a complete 
conceptualization of the world in which the narrative is set.  This 
includes all the characters, locations, conditions and actions or 
events that take place during the story's temporal extent.
Two fundamental components of a narrative - its plot and its 
characters - are defined within the story itself.   Distinct from the 
story, but closely tied to it, is the narrative discourse.
Memory Trace. Turning to memories, we assume that an item has been 
accurately memorized, and we might ask what has happened over the 
retention interval? What happens is forgetting; memory diminishes 
over time, leading us to the time-dependency principle. Four 
hypotheses underlie the time-dependency principle: decay, 
consolidation, displacement, and interference.
Project:
Workshop participants will design a 3D virtual reality environment 
that enables the visitor to experience one of the terms by using 
interactive narrative, a virtual reality implemented story:
-	Consolidation
-	Displacement
-	Interference
We often think of memory as involving storing stuff in the brain or 
mind, but that's just a metaphor. In a very real sense, there is 
'nothing' in the mind, no thing that is except relationships.
It is difficult to describe something so complex, fluid, and 
ever-changing as these knowledge-relationships we have.
When we use these linguistic models, we talk about our cognitive 
structure (or our construction system), and the components or 'basic 
building blocks' of this cognitive structure we call concepts (or 
constructs, contrasts, dimensions, categories...).
Concepts are ways we have of organizing what we have learned from 
experience. Concepts treat a variety of experiences as equivalent in 
some way: around features or qualities these experiences have in 
common, or their general similarity to some 'prototype', or some way 
in which we, the conceptualizers, relate to the experiences -- 
something like Gibson's affordances.
Birds' feathers are an example of a feature. Coins are gold or silver 
colored -- this is a quality of theirs. A robin or a sparrow are more 
prototypical birds -- ostriches and penguins are not so obvious. A 
chair is anything we use to sit upon (something that affords 
sitting-upon).
Please note that these concepts need not be verbal: A cat knows the 
difference between the expensive cat food and the cheap stuff, yet 
can't tell you about it; an infant knows who mommy is, long before he 
or she can say the word; wild animals contrast safe areas and 
dangerous ones, etc. Even adult humans sometimes 'just know' without 
being about to say: What is it about that person that you like or 
dislike?  It may be quite difficult to put into words.
Concepts don't just float around independently, either. We 
interrelate and organize them.  For example, we can define some 
category of things by combining various concepts: "Women are adult 
female human beings." Or we can go a step further and organize things 
into taxonomies, those tree-like structures we come across in 
biology: A Siamese is a kind of cat, which is a kind of carnivore, 
which is a kind of mammal, which is a kind of vertebrate.... Both of 
these -- definitions and taxonomies -- are contained in what is 
called semantic memory.

PARTICIPANTS NEED:
*A BASIC KNOW-HOW IN 3D AUTHORING TOOLS (3DSTUDIO MAX, MAYA OR 
SOMETHING SIMILAR WHICH EXPORT INTO VRML).
*HAVE THEIR OWN LAPTOPS (PREF. WINXP SYSTEM) AND BE ABLE TO BRING 
THEM TO THE WORKSHOP.

APPLICATIONS SHOULD INCLUDE:
*A SHORT BIOGRAPHY, A SHORT RATIONALE AND CONTACT DETAILS.
SEND TO director at eaf.asn.au or PO BOX 8091 STATION ARCADE ADELAIDE 5000 S.A.

DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: 5PM 24 MAY 2006

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT
MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI: director at eaf.asn.au OR +61 8 8211 7505

-- 
EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION curates its exhibition program to 
represent new work that expands current debates and ideas in 
contemporary visual art. The EAF incorporates a gallery space, 
bookshop and artists studios.

Lion Arts Centre North Terrace at Morphett Street Adelaide * PO Box 
8091 Station Arcade South Australia 5000 * Tel: +618 8211 7505  * Fax 
+618 8211 7323 * eaf at eaf.asn.au  * Bookshop: eafbooks at eaf.asn.au * 
http://www.eaf.asn.au * Director: Melentie Pandilovski

The Experimental Art Foundation is assisted by the Commonwealth 
Government through the Australia Council, it arts funding and 
advisory body and by the South Australian Government through Arts SA. 
The EAF is also supported through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, 
an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.