Social
Spaces

Our Social Spaces researchers had an active day yesterday making and sharing stories about their research and personal work and experiences. We joined a workshop on Cultural Probes and a Pecha Kucha evening.

Social Spaces will be present at the i-beta festival in Heerlen at the 11th of June to present MAPit, a mapping toolkit to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogues and creation processes. The mapping kit answers to the fact that people from different profiles, backgrounds and expertise do not necessarily share the same ‘language’. Adding a visual layer, that is open and adjustable to all participants, creates a different dialogue and enables everyone to join the conversation. Via the toolkit a group of people visualises thoughts and ideas in a playful way and in that way stimulates and guides cross-disciplinary creation processes. MAPit uses an open-source set of icons indicating people, things, activities. Empty icons are also available to create new icons during discussions. In this way, icons can be added and adjusted, implying that the system is never complete and is open to iterative refinement. The MAPit toolkit also contains ’strange’ or critical icons, like ‘bombs’ and ‘locks’, allowing people to disagree and enabling them to risk a step on uncommon ground, which is more conductive to creativity. On the i_beta event, we will discuss the role of mapping toolkits in moderating cross-disciplinary creation processes in the field of e-culture and creative industries. We will also work with our own MAPit toolkit, exploring the roles of creativity and e-culture in (the future of) the Meuse-Rhine Euregion.

More information on this project here

If Social Spaces would have been made in 1996, it would look like this: http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=8&url=www.socialspaces.be

With thanks to @nielshendriks for this suggestion

DIORAMATIZED #01 is the first of a series of experimental design explorations in the framework of the practice-based research project MULTIPLE voice/vision. It transposes the 19th century concept of the diorama to a contemporary interactive media formula in a miniature dramatized setting and will be presented the end of may 2010, as the result of a workingperiod in FLACC. I coined the word DIORAMATIZED because on the one hand it refers to the 19th century phenomenon of dioramas, and on the other hand it carries (some of) the meaning of the word ‘dramatized’.

The technical as well as the aesthetic approach of DIORAMATIZED #01 is a deconstruction of the multi-layered musical texture into its constituant parts, ‘rendering’ each individual layer with a limited perspective, both aurally and visually.

The picture below shows the 5 musicians – stills from testrecordings in februari:
no perspectival limitations in the images yet.

In fact DIORAMATIZED #01 thus will become a subversion of the traditional diorama concept, as it will also be a deconstruction of the use of the traditional single viewpoint of the 19th century diorama into a multiperspective experience that challenges the curiosity of the viewer/listener and invites him/her to explore these multiple perspectives.

More information about MULTIPLE voice/vision & DIORAMATIZED #01 can be found on my research blog www.huntingasnark.be