Alan01
The second edition of Alan01 engages the user in a dialogue with a fictional Alan, as if his consciousness had been coded into a machine at the time of his death.
The Turing Machine Cross Media Experimental Production investigates associational storytelling and interaction structures, demonstrating human-machine communication.
New Media for a New Millenium – NM2
Want a romantic version of Star Wars? Or your own cut of Big Brother? A new EU project aims to personalise our viewing and create a new media genre.
Hybrid of mobile phone messaging chat and black comedy series for television and broadband media
Lecture presentations introducing industry case histories, providing contextual, historical and cultural background for deeper understanding in game design.
SALERO aims at making cross media-production for games, movies and broadcast faster, better and cheaper.
INiCS
Interactive Narratives in Cross-media Systems explores interactive narrative concepts for digital media, including computer games, cinema, internet, digital TV and soundscapes.
Artistic research production and study project in the Crucible Studio and Media Lab.
RuneDance / RuneDrum is conceived as a chance-based multimedia work based on Finnish mythology and the traditional Singing of Tales.
Cross-media programme consisting of a TV-show, Internet and mobile media site that all utilize a common database.
As part of the IntelCities research and technological development project, the Crucible has developed the “Arkkikone” web application in collaboration with the City of Tampere.
Dance on Demand / Myths for the Day
Dance on Demand features a new content format and genre for interactive television and mobile devices.
IntelCities was a research and development project to pool knowledge of electronic government, planning systems and citizen participation from across Europe.
I became a lion wearing a crown! – IN THE HOOD researches city planning by the means of storytelling.
Bot Alchemy is Douwe-Sjoerd Boschman’s experiment to see what semi-random generated speech can do for interactive database narratives.
INICS – Interactive Narratives in Cross-media Systems
INiCS (Interactive Narratives in Cross-media Systems) explores and develops various interactive narrative concepts for multiple forms of digital media, including computer games, cinema, internet chatrooms, digital TV and soundscapes. The project proposes particular intelligent interaction concepts to be applied in managing interactive narrative structures across genres of interactive media art, based on experimental dramatic concepts. The Activation-based Recursive Self-Organizing Map algorithm is adopted as a means of representing narrative landscapes and trajectories, and as a technology to serve 1) as a nonlinear scripting concept allowing both conventional a priori authoring as well as dynamic online adaptivity to participants’ actions, 2) as a anticipatory control logic that puts the default linear narrative (director’s cut) into dialog with participants’ interactive choices, 3) maintains a continuous anticipatory drive, and 4) offers a spatial visualization for the basis of cognitively ergonomic interfacing the complex material.
The project builds on the theoretical premises of cognitive ecology or dynamism, claiming that the approach is commensurate with the character-driven narrative practice of the improvisation theatre Commedia dell’Arte. This approach allows us to investigate narrative systems that learn to anticipate certain sequences of events cross the narrative space.
For the design of interactive characters, the concept offers a rich technical platform to build dialogues on. Speech or actions can be programmed to react in relation to the direction on which the user-participant is moving in the narrative landscape while the narrative possibilities still remain in the control of the system and the author. The HCI domain offers methodology for standard information technology products, but methods for genuinely interactive and in particular anticipatory intelligence still remain to be captured.
The project’s research issues are closely related, contribute to and learn from several research productions (see Productions) in the Crucible Studio.
The research is financed by the Academy of Finland until 2006. Two degrees of doctor of art are expected to conclude at the end of the project.
Credits
The research team consists of
· Robert Ahonius, MA, doctoral student (human computer interaction)
· Leena Saarinen, MA, doctoral student (interaction design & cyber ethnography)
· Mika Tuomola, MA, artistic director, dramaturge/director (interactive and participatory drama)
· Mauri Kaipainen, PhD, professor, project coordinator (Research on complex adaptive systems, in particular the ARSOM algorithm)
· Rasmus Vuori, Researcher/System Designer (algorithmic and interface development)