The People's Smart Sculpture

The People’s Smart Sculpture (PS2) panel discusses future oriented approaches in smart media-art, developed, designed and exploited for artistic and public participation in the change and re-design of our living environment. The actual debate about a smart future is not taking into account any idea of media art as an instrument for to realize the social sculpture, mentioned by Beuys [1] or as social sculpture itself. The People’s Smart Sculpture is the only large scale Creative Europe media-art project (2014-2018) in this context. It fosters participative-art and collaborative media-art-processes. The artistic results and the open approaches of the project will be discussed by 5 panelists from 5 countries. The project itself is constituted by 12 project-partners in 8 European countries with more than 350 artists and creatives from 29 countries worlwide. The approach works on two levels: the implementation of cultural participation-projects by media-artists and the ongoing optimization of the art and participation aspects. PS2 integrates diverse groups of people to participate in the non-institutional set up of structures for the people´s re-design of their urban,societal and living environment. Artists, citizens, creatives with a new user's perception and new skills are able to „medialize“ the Cultural Revolution of art, culture, society and science: into spaces of a new public

Reliving past architecture: virtual heritage and the reproduction of history through creative modes of heritage visualisation

Virtual heritage is a modern technological application that aims to transfer the experience of historic buildings, urban spaces and cities into an engaging experience of real-life quality for the ordinary people. Computer-simulated environments can simulate physical presence in places in the real world offering digital display of lost heritage that conveys inherent values in the education process for students in both pre-university as well as graduate education. For architecture and archaeological students, in particular, it virtually transfers them to another world where they engage with architectonics and quality of architecture. For conservators, historians and archaeologists, it helps develop a rich library and digital archive of details, information and data necessary in restoring historical sites, as well as heritage preservation where the 3D virtual models contain accurate data and help for restoration. This paper reports on recently completed research project on the development of virtual heritage platforms for medieval culture. It uncovers a conceptual framework for the development of virtual heritage platforms as a research, educational and engagement tool that brings historic spaces and buildings back to the recognition of the public eye of the ordinary user. It not only reproduces historical scenes through physical modelling of archaeological sites or data, but, more importantly, through serial narratives where life is explored and practised in motion, and where cultural-feed brings meaning, experiences and understanding to the socio-cultural context. The paper introduces a brief analysis of virtual heritage platforms that offer a variety of methods, techniques, contexts, and outputs that are suitable to different purposes and audiences. It offers a brief conclusion on how virtual heritage offer unique and unprecedented insights into historic architecture that would be otherwise invisible or unimaginable

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

"You Tube and I Find" - personalizing multimedia content access

Recent growth in broadband access and proliferation of small personal devices that capture images and videos has led to explosive growth of multimedia content available everywhereVfrom personal disks to the Web. While digital media capture and upload has become nearly universal with newer device technology, there is still a need for better tools and technologies to search large collections of multimedia data and to find and deliver the right content to a user according to her current needs and preferences. A renewed focus on the subjective dimension in the multimedia lifecycle, fromcreation, distribution, to delivery and consumption, is required to address this need beyond what is feasible today. Integration of the subjective aspects of the media itselfVits affective, perceptual, and physiological potential (both intended and achieved), together with those of the users themselves will allow for personalizing the content access, beyond today’s facility. This integration, transforming the traditional multimedia information retrieval (MIR) indexes to more effectively answer specific user needs, will allow a richer degree of personalization predicated on user intention and mode of interaction, relationship to the producer, content of the media, and their history and lifestyle. In this paper, we identify the challenges in achieving this integration, current approaches to interpreting content creation processes, to user modelling and profiling, and to personalized content selection, and we detail future directions. The structure of the paper is as follows: In Section I, we introduce the problem and present some definitions. In Section II, we present a review of the aspects of personalized content and current approaches for the same. Section III discusses the problem of obtaining metadata that is required for personalized media creation and present eMediate as a case study of an integrated media capture environment. Section IV presents the MAGIC system as a case study of capturing effective descriptive data and putting users first in distributed learning delivery. The aspects of modelling the user are presented as a case study in using user’s personality as a way to personalize summaries in Section V. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper with a discussion on the emerging challenges and the open problems

Virtual Heritage

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments

Learning About Metadata and Machines: Teaching Students Using a Novel Structured Database Activity

Machines produce and operate using complex systems of metadata that need to be catalogued, sorted, and processed. Many students lack the experience with metadata and sufficient knowledge about it to understand it as part of their data literacy skills. This paper describes an educational and interactive database activity designed for teaching undergraduate communication students about the creation, value, and logic of structured data. Through a set of virtual instructional videos and interactive visualizations, the paper describes how students can gain experience with structured data and apply that knowledge to successfully find, curate, and classify a digital archive of media artifacts. The pedagogical activity, teaching materials, and archives are facilitated through and housed in an online resource called Fabric of Digital Life (fabricofdigitallife.com). We end by discussing the activity’s relevance for the emerging field of human-machine communication

Mobile Historical

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) seeks NEH Level II Start-Up support for work leading toward the release of Mobile Historical, an open-source (and, optionally, hosted) software application (app) that allows cultural institutions, K-16 teachers, and university-based humanists to publish humanities information to mobile devices. The proposed project builds and extends (dramatically so) an existing mobile app development project aimed at curating the city, Cleveland Historical. We seek funding to scale up, revise, and extend our previous work toward the creation of the open-source tool Mobile Historical. Thus, the principal activities of this proposal are focused on creating a new vehicle for interpretive humanities publishing in mobile environments via innovative technologies and guidance on how to curate humanities content, including especially developing approaches to state-of-the-art interactive humanistic learning for broad public audiences and users