Towards virtual communities on the Web: Actors and audience

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. Our environment models a theatre in our hometown. We discuss attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors, but also visitors that that are not sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multiagent environment to realize our goals. Since our environment models a theatre it is also interesting to investigate the roles of performers and audience in this environment. For that reason we discuss capabilities and personalities of agents. Some notes on the historical development of networked communities are included

Programs as Polypeptides

We describe a visual programming language for defining behaviors manifested by reified actors in a 2D virtual world that can be compiled into programs comprised of sequences of combinators that are themselves reified as actors. This makes it possible to build programs that build programs from components of a few fixed types delivered by diffusion using processes that resemble chemistry as much as computation.Comment: in European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL '15), York, UK, 201

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES and KEN OKIISHI: The Evolution and Representation of Experience

The two artists Ken Okiishi and Felix Gonzalez-Torres--though separated by a generation--both use physical objects to signify the loss of human presence, connection or connections. Both instill meaning into familiar physical objects such as candy, clocks, or television screens, and both are able to provoke feelings associated with the kinds of presence objects can represent – without that actual presence. Gonzalez-Torres worked during a time when digital technology was not yet an existent medium, while Okiishi worked during a time in which the technological world and its social effects are central to his work and message. In fact, a central point of his work gesture/data is to replicate our dependent relationship with technology and how people interact with the virtual world. This world is only available by viewing through a screen; it is unreachable, unlike the tangible objects, that we can physically feel, via which Gonzalez-Torres’ works often confronted viewers. These two artists demonstrate stark, pivotal generational differences: a world and society before technology, art before digital technology (Gonzalez-Torres), and the effects and experiences of art in a world engulfed by such technology entirely (Okiishi). One relies on physical interaction, and the other responds and relays the effects of infinite, intangible spectacles. Both speak to the importance and meaning of presence, or being, and what part that presence or absence plays in art experience during these juxtaposing time periods: before and after the Internet. In his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, French theorist Guy Debord wrote, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”.[1] Gonzalez-Torres’ and Okiishi’s artworks both could be said to exemplify this idea of evolution and generational transformation, but in Okiishi’s work, there is an increased disconnection, to the point that everything may be mere representation. This raises the question: has art changed with technology? Have we lost actual experience to mere representation? [1]Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Buchet-Chastel, 196

Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ Intellect Ltd 2010.The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production company's commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.Brunel University, the British Council, and the Japan Foundation

Avatar actors

In this text I wish to discuss, as well as illustrate through pictorial examples, how the Live Visuals of three dimensional online virtual worlds may be leading us into participatory and collaborative Play states during which we appear to become the creators as well as the actors of what may also be described as our own real-time cinematic output. One of the most compelling of these stages may be three dimensional, online virtual worlds in which avatars create and enact their own tales and conceptions, effectively bringing forth live, participatory cinema through Play

Collective awareness platforms and digital social innovation mediating consensus seeking in problem situations

In this paper we show the results of our studies carried out in the framework of the European Project SciCafe2.0 in the area of Participatory Engagement models. We present a methodological approach built on participative engagements models and holistic framework for problem situation clarification and solution impacts assessment. Several online platforms for social engagement have been analysed to extract the main patterns of participative engagement. We present our own experiments through the SciCafe2.0 Platform and our insights from requirements elicitation

Emergent Story Generation: Lessons from Improvisational Theater

An emergent approach to story generation by computer is characterized by a lack of predetermined plot and a focus on character interaction forming the material for stories. A potential problem is that no interesting story emerges. However, improvisational theater shows that – at least for human actors – a predetermined plot is not necessary for creating a compelling story. There are some principles that make a successful piece of improvisational theater more than a random interaction, and these principles may inform the type of computational processes that an emergent narrative architecture draws from. We therefore discuss some of these principles, and show how these are explicitly or implicitly used in story generation and interactive storytelling research. Finally we draw lessons from these principles and ask attention for two techniques that have been little investigated: believably incorporating directives, and late commitment

Open Innovations and Living Labs: Promises or Challenges to Regional Renewal

The paper brings to the foreground modes and strategies of organising purposeful action that may be conductive to local and regional actors’ successful coping in the more and more competitive environment. The paper is pragmatist by its approach in a sense that it emphasises preconditions and possibilities for making ideas work. However, to do this is a difficult task. In the maze of multifaceted information flows and revolutionary technologies for reaching them enterprises and public actors need to find and construct better structured information that really helps them to operate. The paper introduces two sets of case activities that build on open innovation and living lab approaches in their attempts to make the boundaries between organisations and their environment more permeable. Its findings support the structuralist idea that spatial attributes matter more than as a mere venue, platform, or even container of social action. The venues studied in the paper are unique: one of the oldest still remaining factory buildings in the innermost core of the city of Tampere and a re-used loghouse in a peri-urban landscape outside the city. They both serve now as true exploratory spaces with no functional or institutional lock-ins stemming from them to bond their present-day users

In the Truman show: generating dynamic scenarios in a driving simulator

All the devices, animals, and people make their decisions based on what you're doing, but you don't know it or even notice it. Your world is that of Truman Burbank, from the 1998 movie The Truman Show. With this idea in mind, we've taken the movie metaphor to implement a prototype simulation system where the user steps into Truman's shoes. The set of our "movie" is a driving simulator, and the user is learning to drive a car. During the driving lessons, users drive in a virtual world that lets them experience all kinds of traffic scenarios. The system generates the scenarios with the student as the focal point, and the other traffic entities respond to the student's behavior, without the student noticing. To control the traffic scenarios and make them more effective, our prototype employs an agent-based framework. In this framework, each entity in the simulator is an actor agent playing a role. The prototype also includes a hierarchy of directors that directs the main action and the behind-the-scenes activity. The advantage of the movie metaphor is that it helps separate scenario description from scenario playing. The agents can read their required information from a script and perform their actions based on that information. Using this framework lets us build software that's extensible, maintainable, and easy to understan