Charitos, D

Kusch, M

Phillips, ML

Poulin, MC

Schnell, R

St-Arnault, L-P

This panel describes the activities and presents the outcomes of artistic research carried out on the EMDL European Mobile Dome Lab Project, an international collaboration funded by the European Culture Programme (Strand 1.3.5). E / M / D / L  has built an international network for the exchange of artistic and technological expertise, with the goal of researching and documenting a language and grammar unique to the full-dome medium. Bringing together four European and three Canadian institutions and cultural partners, all leaders in this field, the project aimed to share and expand skills, methodologies, strategies and content within this promising creative vehicle. Between February 2014 and September 2015, the participants took part in eight residencies and public presentations offered in five countries, where a mobile domic architectural structure equipped with cutting-edge technologies will be set up. This culminated a series of works at the world’s most sophisticated virtual theatre, the Satosphere in Montreal, Canada

Phillips, Mike

Plymouth Electronic Archive and Research Library

EMDL European Mobile Dome Lab for Artistic Research.Dimitris Charitos, Thomas Dumke, Martin Kusch, Mike Phillips, Marie-Claude Poulin, Ruth Schnell, Louis-Philippe St-ArnaultE / M / D / L [European Mobile Dome Lab], http://emdl.eu/Europe and Canadainfo@emdl.euAbstractThis panel describes the activities and presents the outcomes of artistic research carried out on the EMDL European Mobile Dome Lab Project, an international collaboration funded by the European Culture Programme (Strand 1.3.5). E / M / D / L  has built an international network for the exchange of artistic and technological expertise, with the goal of researching and documenting a language and grammar unique to the full-dome medium. Bringing together four European and three Canadian institutions and cultural partners, all leaders in this field, the project aimed to share and expand skills, methodologies, strategies and content within this promising creative vehicle. Between February 2014 and September 2015, the participants took part in eight residencies and public presentations offered in five countries, where a mobile domic architectural structure equipped with cutting-edge technologies will be set up. This culminated a series of works at the world’s most sophisticated virtual theatre, the Satosphere in Montreal, Canada.KeywordsFulldome, media art, artistic research, cultural exchange, immersive, interactive, transdisciplinary, performance, mobile labs. IntroductionEMDL was coordinated by and under the project Direction of Martin Kusch and Ruth Schnell of the Digital Art Department, University of Applied Arts Vienna [Austria] the international network of partners and collaborators included i-DAT, Plymouth University [England], Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau, CYNETART festival, Dresden [Germany], Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media (UoA NTLab), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens [Greece], Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] Montréal [Canada], kondition pluriel Montréal [Canada] and LANTISS University of Laval, Quebec City [Canada]. This partnership brought together, through a series of commissions, a international transdisciplinary group of artists to develop an international network for exchange of artistic and technological competencies, with the goal of developing and documenting new artistic languages and grammars and to explore modes of expression for the fulldome medium.	The European Mobile Dome Lab supported an interdisciplinary collaborative process, which foregrounds embodied immersive experiences. The project lies within the research and development area of new digital applications for 360º dome-shaped projections and aims to generate a diversity of artistic dramaturgies for this media. EMDL was tailored around the process of collaboratively creating immersive artworks and experiences for a dome environment. These immersive mediated environments involved real-time visualization (and sonification) software, ubiquitous computing, sensor networks, tracking technologies, pre-rendered material, mobile or locative technologies..	The community itself drew on practices from artists, scientists and theoreticians from Canada and EU who are active in creating media art or pursuing innovative interdisciplinary research and wish to collaborate in order to create (interactive) fulldome media artworks. This included members of the performance, software art, VJ, installation, video, audio and computing communities.Figure 1. EMDL at the Satosphere © Bruno Colpron, SAT.On FulldomesThe word “fulldome” refers to immersive dome-based projection environments. The dome, horizontal or tilted, is filled with real-time (interactive) or pre-rendered (linear) computer animation, live captured images, or composited environments. Although the current technology emerged in the early-to-mid 1990s, fulldome environments have evolved from numerous influences, including immersive art and storytelling, with technological roots in domed architecture, planetariums, multi-projector film environments, flight simulation, and virtual reality. The fulldome experience is one of the most immersive and engaging ways of supporting the interactive (or passive) synchronous presentation of 3D graphical environmental representations to relatively large groups of people, with a limitless scope of applications, including education, arts, games and wellness.	EMDL took as a premise that in the context of an immersive dome environment, the impact of immersion can be described as a physical, sensorial and emotional experience, through which the participants experience the very vivid illusion of playing an integral part in the image.	The project researched the phenomenon of perception in an immersive 360º environment, exploring vision without being objected to one singular focal point of view, directed in generating multi-sensory and kinesthetic feedback for the spectators. One of the specificities of this medium is to offer an environment in which the spectator’s senses are engaged in manifold ways.	From this perspective, EMDL built on the exploration of the narrative and dramaturgical possibilities and the aesthetic potential, to attempt to define certain rules and guidelines for creating such an audio-visual and multi-sensory fulldome artistic experience. Liberating the FulldomeThe power of the fulldome environment has been successfully exploited by the scientific community for decades, however, digital projection technologies are liberating immersive fulldome experiences from cosmological visualisation and enabling the evolution of a broad range of disciplinary content to be presented in the context of this medium. Transdisciplinary collaborations between media artists and scientific disciplines have produced rich immersive media content to support the public understanding of science and can be seen as influencing huge audiences around the globe through the rapid expansion of science centres equipped with ‘planetariums’. 	However, the rapid evolution of the fulldome as a ‘form’ of artistic expression has been contained by the formalities of these edutainment/infotainment models and the ‘planetarium’ style shows. Equally the evolution of the digital technologies underpinning the fulldome platform have been contained by the scale and repeatability required for the ‘planetarium’ format. Technological platforms emerging through parallel creative media communities, such as VJ and projection mapping practitioners, offer greater flexibility, accessibility and economical routes to production.	This project, explored the protocols and artistic potential offered by an immersive situation, a kinaesthetic, poly-sensorial and emotional experience in which the spectators are plunged. For this purpose, it will provide a number of selected European and Canadian media artists, coming from different cultural, technical and artistic backgrounds, with the opportunity to collaborate with other European and Canadian artists in order to explore and create immersive projection-based artworks, through a process which allows for intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue. The project is expected to produce via the creation of a series of immersive media artworks, new aesthetics and technological paradigms. The EMDL Panalists will present and demonstrate a range of technological, methodological and artistic research outcomes which provide a new set of templates for building Fulldome artistic research.Authors BiographiesDimitris Charitos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he teaches human-machine communication, interactive design, digital art and visual communication. He studied Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, and C.A.A.D. in the Department of Architecture, University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). He holds a PhD in interactive and virtual environments design. His artistic practice includes electronic music, audiovisual and interactive installations and virtual environments. He has participated in exhibitions in Greece, the UK and Cyprus. As a researcher or coordinator, he has participated in research projects (funded by Greek and European programs) on the subjects of virtual reality, locative media, digital art and multimedia.http://www.media.uoa.gr/~charitosThomas Dumke studied history and sociology from 1997–2002 at TU Dresden, postgraduate in culture & management. Self-employed cultural manager Since 1999 Thomas Dumke is part of the International Festival for Computer Based Arts CYNETART in Dresden at Festspielhaus Hellerau; from 2006 he has been the director of the CYNETART Festival; currently working for the EU-Network Project »E.C.A.S. - Tomorrow's Art For An Unknown Future« for TMA Hellerau, participation at TANDEM – Cultural Managers Exchange Ukraine – European Union – Moldova. Founding member of TMA Hellerau in 2001, nowadays board member of TMA Hellerau (co-chairman). - In 2000 he initiated together with DS-X.org the »microscope session«, an event for audio-visual concerts, and some other AV-related events and projects, last action: LP release of Ulf Langheinrich's Vol. 1 at dsx001, member of the project team »film and new media«, of the Dresden city office for culture and historic preservation.http://t-m-a.de/thomas-dumke/?lang=enMartin Kusch studied art history, philosophy and painting in Berlin, and media arts with Peter Weibel at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he has also been teaching since 1997. Founder and artistic co-director of the Media performance group kondition pluriel, he is particularly interested in the transformation processes of the electronic media inside performative contexts, and on how digital technologies influence our perception of the body and space. His works have been presented at numerous festivals and institutions, such as: Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Nagoya, Helsinki and Essen), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie – ZKM (Karlsruhe), Transmediale (Berlin), CYNETart (Dresden), Experimental Performing Arts Centre – EMPAC (Troy), Le Centre des arts d'Enghien les bains (Enghien), the Mois Multi (Quebec City) and the Museumsquartier Wien (Vienna).http://www.konditionpluriel.org/Mike Phillips, is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Plymouth University, the Director of Research at i-DAT.org and a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium. His R&D orbits a portfolio of projects that explore the ubiquity of data ‘harvested’ from an instrumentalised world and its potential as a material for revealing things that lie outside our normal frames of reference - things so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum. He manages the Fulldome Immersive Vision Theatre, a transdisciplinary instrument for manifesting (im)material and imaginary worlds and is co-editor of Ubiquity, The Journal of Pervasive Media.http://i-dat.org/mike-phillips/Marie-Claude Poulin is trained in dance and kinanthropology at the Université du Québec à Montréal and holds an MA in Choreography at the Inter-University Center for Dance in Berlin. Between 1985 and 2000, she has taught in the field of somatic education and has worked as a performer, notably with choreographers Benoît Lachambre and Meg Stuart. In 2000, she co-founded the digital performance group kondition pluriel. Her works have been presented at numerous festivals and institutions, such as: Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Nagoya, Helsinki and Essen), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie – ZKM (Karlsruhe), Transmediale (Berlin), CYNETart (Dresden), Experimental Performing Arts Centre – EMPAC (Troy), Le Centre des arts d'Enghien les bains (Enghien), the Mois Multi (Quebec City) and the Museumsquartier Wien (Vienna). Since 2013, she is a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.http://www.konditionpluriel.org/Ruth Schnell lives in Vienna. Her corpus of work, which includes video installations, interactive video environments, and light installations, explores the nature of human perception and the relationship between human perception and the human body. Ruth Schnell has been teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 1987; since 2010 she has been head of Digital Arts Department. Solo and group exhibitions include: Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011), Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla/Biacs 3 (2009), ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2010 and 2008), Akademie der Künste Berlin (2004/05), California Science Center, Los Angeles (2004), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2002), mumok - museum moderner kunst stiftung Ludwig wien (2000), 46. Biennale di Venezia / Austrian Pavillon (1995).http://digitalekunst.ac.at/Louis-Philippe St-Arnault has been directing the SAT [Immersion] Department at the Society for Arts and Technology since 2007. He was head of Satosphere project design and integration from 2008 to 2011 and now acts as program manager for its related immersive experiments and creations. In addition, he continues to design digital scenography and interactive installations, and to participate in collective creation processes. First and foremost a space and lighting designer, he has worked for the last 15 years on creating performance environments and experiential installations, and has collaborated with media artists, choreographers, designers and programmers in many countries. These projects have led him to develop a great interest in the intense physicality and the infinite space modularity of the immersive digital environment.http://sat.qc.ca/fr/satosphere

EMDL European Mobile Dome Lab for Artistic Research.

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EMDL European Mobile Dome Lab for Artistic Research.

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