Temporal convergence in shared networked narratives: the case of Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines

types: Article© 2009 ISASTDay of the Figurines, developed by Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at Nottingham University, is a massively multiplayer board game for up to a thousand participants. Players can interact remotely with other participants via SMS through their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. Following an analysis of this games complex use of time, the authors introduce a framework structured around five layers of time, from authorial to perceived time, that will facilitate the management and investigation of networked narratives shared by mobile communities over prolonged periods of time

Temporal Trajectories in Shared Interactive Narratives

publication-status: Published© ACM, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI '08 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, {ISBN 9781605580111, 2008} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357067Temporal trajectories can represent the complex mappings between story time and clock time that are to be found in shared interactive narratives such as computer games and interactive performances. There are three kinds. Canonical trajectories express an author's intended mapping of story time onto clock time as part of the plot and schedule of an experience. Participant trajectories reflect a participant's actual journey through story time and clock time as they interact with the experience. Historic trajectories represent the subsequent selection and reuse of segments of recorded participant trajectories to create histories of past events. We show how temporal trajectories help us analyse the nature of time in existing experiences and can also generate new approaches to dealing with temporal issues such as: disengagement and reengagement, adapting to different paces of interaction, synchronising different participants, and enabling encounters and travel across time

Performing Nature's Footprint

publication-status: Published© 2011 The authors*RCUK funded Horizon projec

From interaction to trajectories: designing coherent journeys through user experience

notes: Best of CHI 2009 Awardpublication-status: PublishedThe idea of interactional trajectories through interfaces has emerged as a sensitizing concept from recent studies of tangible interfaces and interaction in museums and galleries. We put this concept to work as a lens to reflect on published studies of complex user experiences that extend over space and time and involve multiple roles and interfaces. We develop a conceptual framework in which trajectories explain these user experiences as journeys through hybrid structures, punctuated by transitions, and in which interactivity and collaboration are orchestrated. Our framework is intended to sensitize future studies, help distill craft knowledge into design guidelines and patterns, identify technology requirements, and provide a boundary object to connect HCI with performance studies

The documentation and archiving of mixed media experiences: the case of Rider Spoke

publication-status: PublishedThis paper introduces the early stages of the research conducted by an interdisciplinary team in Horizon, comprising staff from Computer Science and Performance Studies, who, in collaboration with artist company Blast Theory, Stanford Libraries, British Libraries, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research, and Sheffield University, have devised a new form of interactive archive, the CloudPad, for the documentation and archiving of mixed media experiences

CloudPad - a cloud-based documentation and archiving tool for mixed reality artworks

publication-status: AcceptedThis paper reflects on the process of designing and building a documentation and archiving tool named CloudPad on the basis of its first evaluation at Stanford Libraries and the San Francisco Art Institute in September 2010. The paper explores the value of CloudPad and its ability to document individual users’ replay of an artwork within the context of performance documentation and new media archiving, speculating on its possible use within a number of curatorial, educational and creative contexts that are relevant to digital humanities

Digital humanities and crowdsourcing: an exploration

publication-status: Published‘Crowdsourcing’ is a recent and evolving phenomenon, and the term has been broadly adopted to define different shades of public participation and contribution. Cultural institutions are progressively exploring crowdsourcing, and projects’ related research is increasing. Nonetheless, few studies in the digital humanities have investigated crowdsourcing as a whole. The aim of this paper is to shed light on crowdsourcing practices in the digital humanities, thus providing insights to design new paths of collaboration between cultural organisations and their audiences. A web survey was carried out on 36 crowdsourcing projects promoted by galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and education institutions. A variety of practices emerged from the research. Even though, it seems that there is no ‘one-solution-fits-all’ for crowdsourcing in the cultural domain, few reflections are presented to support the development of crowdsourcing initiatives.Horizon Digital Economy Research Hu

ArtMaps

PublishedConference presentation, NODEM 2014, Warsaw, PolandArt Maps was developed as part of an interdisciplinary collaborative project between three departments at Tate (Tate Learning, Tate Online and Tate Research) and researchers in Computer Science (University of Nottingham) and Performance and New Media (University of Exeter), funded by RCUK Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (2012-14). Art Maps consists of a web app that allows users to explore artworks in the Tate collection through a map interface which facilitates their analysis in relation to the places, sites, landscapes and environments that informed or led to their geotagging. The app can locate their user and bring up works in the Tate collection that are geotagged in relation to places near them. Users can then look at these works on the map and/or explore them in situ, reflecting on how what they see in the works relates to their surroundings. Alternatively, through a search function (by artist and by location), users can explore works in any locality. Users may then change the location of an artwork and add a comment reflecting on the reasons behind this change and/or what they think may be the relationship between a place and a work. In this paper we will describe aspects of the research that led to the development of ArtMaps between 2012 and 2014; analyze findings from observations of the user experience during the same period; and present our hypothesis as to the broader significance of this platform in terms of how to interpret and capture how we look at and place art in a world that is increasingly dominated by ubiquitous computing

Cinema-going trajectories in the digital age

The activity of cinema-going constantly evolves and gradually integrates the use of digital data and platforms to become more engaging for the audiences. Combining methods from the fields of Human Computer Interaction and Film Studies, we conducted two workshops seeking to understand cinema audiences’ digital practices and explore how the contemporary cinema-going experience is shaped in the digital age. Our findings suggest that going to the movies constitutes a trajectory during which cinemagoers interact with multiple digital platforms. At the same time, depending on their choices, they construct unique digital identities that represent a set of online behaviours and rituals that cinemagoers adopt before, while and after cinema-going. To inform the design of new, engaging cinemagoing experiences, this research establishes a preliminary map of contemporary cinema-going including digital data and platforms. We then discuss how audiences perceive the potential improvement of the experience and how that would lead to the construction of digital identities

Uncomfortable interactions

We argue for deliberately and systematically creating uncomfortable interactions as part of powerful cultural experiences. We identify the potential benefits of uncomfortable interactions under the general headings of entertainment, enlightenment and sociality. We then review artworks and performances that have employed discomfort, including two complementary examples from the worlds of entertainment and performance. From this, we articulate a suite of tactics for designing four primary forms of discomfort referred to as visceral, cultural, control and intimate. We discuss how moments of discomfort need to be embedded into an overall experience which requires a further consideration of the dramatic acts of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. Finally, we discuss an ethical framework for uncomfortable interactions which leads us to revisit key issues of consent, withdrawal, privacy and risk