NZFW6

Not as immersed in NZ Fashion Week as I was last year, but I'll be off to a few NZFW 2013 shows just to keep the creative mind sharp while writing a thesis.

Ticket to the show

The other night I got tickets to the Stolen Girlfriends Club show and as usual (rebelliously) they had an off-site show. It was quite different to shooting last year's show (or maybe it was because I was in the audience as opposed to the photographer's stand) but just as impressive. The style of the clothes were inspired by 'Dirty Magic' so think dark, grungy street style and some avant garde evening wear. It's great to see a mix of male and female clothing in a show, too.

A giant projection on the facade of the building.

Scale

An interesting article on Co.LABS highlights the significance of scale with platforms like Twitter. When you send one package of data off to another person, that seems like a pretty simple thing with the internet. But Twitter is a vastly upscaled version of that - 150 million active users (the most active ones probably fire off a tweet at every moment's whim). That's a lot of packages to send through.

When things fail, you end up with the 'fail whale' page and although the meme is cute, the situation of not being able to use the service definitely isn't.

Twitter is constantly upgrading its infrastructure to deal with this mass of tweets. You can imagine how many bits of data need to be sent if a big star with millions of followers drops a tweet, followed by a flurry of retweets, etc. There will always be a bottleneck and a bit of clever shifting allows the data base to cope.

In the same way, when cities become bigger (we talk of metropolises and megalopolis, with more to come, I'm sure), the infrastructure needs to change with it. How to transport, water and feed millions more people in a concentrated area is a big question with our current rate of growth. For instance, the plans for a future Auckland has sparked debate on many fronts - even a whole different scheme for our transport system created by transport enthusiasts on the Auckland Transport Blog. Careful thought has to go into infrastructure alongside any future growth.

We don't want our city becoming an urban fail whale.

Print

The device that helped a baby breathe again, custom designed and 3D printed.

3D printing is used often in the design world to model things that you couldn't model manually (i.e. by hand) and the printers are getting more and more affordable, with some even becoming 'open source', so you can make your own using a design on the internet. The range of applications stretch to even the 3D printing of most of a gun, which is shocking and slightly disturbing.

Now there is a story of a bioresorbable splint being made by much finer biomedical processes that involve the scanning and modelling of a baby's breathing tube. Thanks to the University of Michigan and Glenn Green, M.D, with the cast (shown above), a skeleton can be made to help the breathing tube not collapse and then in 3 years time it will be reabsorbed into the body. There's engineering, medical design and materiality playing a big part in this innovation.

What's more, this concept may be able to be applied to other medical conditions. The custom made nature of the technology means that it is adaptable and with bodies being different from one to the other it will be great to see where this all goes.

Thanks to +Alice Pan for the heads up. It's been a few weeks since I've blogged - yesterday I had my mid-year presentation. Hopefully I'll find time to blog about it though! For other blogs on Creative Collision about science (and it does exist here as a category), visit the Science section.

Transport

Auckland is going through an important phase of its planning development over the next few months with the consultation period for the Unitary Plan opening up to the public. Mayor Len Brown's Twitter account reports that the submission period has gotten off to a great start which is unsurprising with the long lead up and building tension in opinions.

If you're an Aucklander, particularly if you are a building practitioner or one with a vested interest and expertise in the Unitary Plan issues, make sure you make a submission as it is the first step to reforming a plan for wider Auckland (under the new 'Supercity' where several councils are now a single council).

Click the image to visit the site ~

A cool little site that is going in parallel to all this is the Alternative Transport Funding project that advises Auckland Council on long term transport issues. Aptly named Keep Auckland Moving, the site is partly a moving infographic with a neat first person birds-eye view of a car going down a road. The 'drive' takes you on many common Auckland driving scenarios, culminating in a forsaken traffic jam where you are invited to take part in a survey.

Along the way, bits of the drivers' thoughts (which many of us will be able to relate to) and some information bites pop up too. It's a much more interactive form of connecting with the survey audience - definitely better than reams of policy text. Have fun and make a submission - transport is one of the largest issues in this city.

SimCity

SimCity 2013 - as realistic as the screenshots?

As some of you might know, a new rendition of SimCity is coming out on March the 5th. After a momentary hype from the exclusively released beta, people are starting to see how detailed this age old simulation game has come.

Without sounding like an old man (unsuccessfully), when I was a young boy, SimCity was pretty awesome if a bit simplistic. I remember little black rectangles ('cars') marching along streets and thinking they were ants. In SimCity 3000, cars were already moving around with more automation - car crashes, traffic jams (tut tut, Mr Mayor), you name it - and by the time SimCity 4 came out, there were mini-game missions where you had to drive to different places, a great test of how extensive your road network had become. Graphics were also much more polished.

Screenshots from this latest Simcity promise not only a much more insightful urban simulation, but graphics to be reckoned with. The producers seem to have upped their game  (excuse the pun), allowing different conditions to be shown atmospherically and in perspective (I think) - take an industrial town for example, you can't beat the smog to tell you there's air pollution.

A plethora of architectural forms beckons toward the urbanism of today - terraced housing, skyrise apartments, a range of medium rise. Strangely, towns in the screenshots seem oddly familiar, as if it wasn't a scene taken from a game, but from a real town with its own character. Urban design is really taking off these days and it's not only about the practical stuff. A sense of place is crucial to urban schemes and I'd be interested to see how a game with a limited palette of predefined items can make it seem like this is happening.

Of course, urban design in real life isn't really like SimCity. Although it is more entertainment oriented, there is a lot to be taken from this approach in our understanding of cities (see my blog about laypeople's understanding of architecture). Real urban design/planning is a lot of analysis and space creation - you have to have an in-depth understanding of people and society to create spaces for them. Games like this are completely out of context of course, no boundaries, a sandpit for creativity. So go wild!

Hand

What is this tiny device that is hailed to be the next big thing in computing? It's the Leap Motion, a gadget designed to be a human interface tool (ie like a mouse helps you do stuff in the computer) but in 3D. Feels as if we are leaping from one dimension to the other in technology - the mouse has had a long slow evolution, touch screens are now growing rapidly and then now, something that seems to come from science fiction.

What's even better, and much more productive on a proactive creative front, is that they have a software developers kit (SDK) that allows those inclined to do so to explore the possibilities offered by this device. A new way of interacting with electronics has already started showing some great uses - controlling a quadrotor, for instance. That's right, fly a thing with the sensitive control of your own hand.

It'll be interesting to see where this ends up - we never really see a revolution coming. Who knew that touch screens would be so popular and easily worked into our electronic repertoire? 

Fall

Creative journalism.

All too often we hear about the slow but sure fall of the printed news media in the 21st century. While this is debatable as a phenomenon, digital media is readily growing into 'traditional' media. Traditional media has reinvented itself so much that the two are inseparable and the gnarled boughs of printed media is worked in with the temporality of social media, the internet and multimedia.

Today I saw a superbly made multimedia project by +The New York Times  reporting a story that really went to the heart of the story. Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch reads like a novel at times in its composure and thorough research into its subject. Using current web design to integrate the multimedia components really helped with understanding the story which is epic in scale and tragedy. Fly-throughs of the mountain, simulations, videos and an assortment of bite sized supplements to the story really lend support to this feature.

The reporting for this article on the Feb. 19 avalanche at Tunnel Creek was done over six months. It involved interviews with every survivor, the families of the deceased, first responders at Tunnel Creek, officials at Stevens Pass and snow-science experts. It also included the examination of reports by the police, the medical examiner and the Stevens Pass Ski Patrol, as well as 40 calls to 911 made in the aftermath of the avalanche. The Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research provided a computer-generated simulation of the avalanche, based on data accumulated from the Stevens Pass accident report and witness accounts. Additional sources are: LIDAR data from King County GIS Center; Iowa Environmental Mesonet, Iowa State University; Mark Moore, U.S. Forest Service; National Avalanche Center.

As well as being a rare effort to report content that the likes of social media couldn't access, this project has an unusually long timeline. Keeping in mind that traditional media hardly ever breaks the news as news any more (that is if you utilise the hyperconnectivity of internet/social media), this is really breaking the box a bit - does traditional media, and its newer form on the digital platforms, allow this slow-cooked information to become a key part of its arsenal in the digital, fast-paced world?

A friend has an interesting observation. After reading the first line he immediately had the impression that it was a piece of fiction writing. Although the drama and writing is captivating, you wonder whether or not it is dramatised beyond belief. If only they put an acknowledgement of the real event and its seriousness before the drama kicked it. As you read on, each of the people's photos show up on the side, a nice touch that links it back to personal reality.

It could be said that only big media reputations could pull such a thing off. The sheer force of the name and the resources in the background offer a unique position to explore issues that deserve more than the double spread feature. And they look like they're milking this experimental format - an e-book is also available for purchase. It seems this media giant is treading a thin line, but which line is it?

Record

A tweet from Mt Eden Dubstep recently caught my attention:

@MtEdenOfficial: We never had anything except the bare minimum equipment since we started... finally getting up to industry standards feels good

Despite not having a huge amount of equipment for a genre of music that requires quite a bit of specialised equipment to make, Mt Eden has done so well in the local and now global dubstep scene. As they move into their first studio in NYC (from their humble 'bedroom studio'), we'll see how their style of music develops.

Many big name bands started out of garage studios with limited equipment but it should never be the limitation on creativity. Big bands such as Linkin Park started with grungy garage demo tapes before eventually expanding the empire. Now they have a fantastic studio which I believe has also changed their style of music as they experiment to their heart's content. For one, audio editing has removed the grit of a lot of today's music.

How much does a studio environment affect the creative process and outputs? Is it fair for a creative practitioner to blame a lack of tools and resources? However we go about it, it's the creative thinking and approach to one's art that really counts.

Shadows2

 

What better way is there to extrapolate a real life scenario than within a modern gaming environment. Despite the drama spinning of role-playing games, they can act like a simulation of the future human condition. What's more, these days we can already see the emphasis on digital data taking a larger role in society. Presidential campaigns in America have become increasingly data-saavy, with Obama's use of data analysis and Romney's low profile data-mining expedition. Does this mean the vote can be swayed just by aligning with the majority mindset? Is this manipulation or falsity?

See how interconnected and similar the physical world is with the digital world - Top: NASA’s satellite composite image of the earth at night.  Bottom: Eric Fischer’s map of Twitter interaction.

Watch Dogs is a game that follows characters that can exploit the data rich systems that are intertwined with our cities. I once wrote a paper about the urban design theory on the use of Twitter in cities and despite being a study of an emerging and fresh communication network, it seems primitive compared to the world described in Watch Dogs. It might not necessarily be a very different world physically but the dependence on a data network is both a great nod to technological efficiency and a huge amount of real time data waiting to be used for malevolence.

The 'shadow' which this game describes is not a physical shadow. The digital shadow that we all leave behind by writing blogs like this, using social media, filling in forms and even doing a simple Google search can drive anyone to manic paranoia if we think too hard about it. Other than being an exciting game with some awesome gimmicks (like hacking the electric grid from a cellphone), the setting is a very likely future condition that gives us all something to think about.

See the E3 Game Demo showing how personal data, the electricity grid and phone bugging is at one's fingertips. "I know how you think"...

Dojo

OPINION - The Hacker Dojo is a rather menacing name but in actual fact, it is a collective workspace for techies in Mountain View to do their thing, create start ups, conversations and great opportunities. It's where sites such as Pinterest took root, a place where innovation takes place. What could be better! 

Only thing is that the establishment is operating illegally and under fire from the local authorities, not for the work they do, but the building code infringements, mostly around fire egress and accessibility. Here, the worlds of creative tech and the age old limitations of architecture collide.

These code requirements (in particular the two mentioned) are strict for a good reason, but apparently to retrofit the old warehouse space to meet the code will cost more than what this organisation has available. Estimated to cost $250,000 dollars in upgrades (not surprising in the field of architecture and planning permissions), it's quite unfortunate to see such this community constricted by their shut down venues.

I hope there's a generous architect/planner who are helping them out pro bono and offer some expertise (makes life easier in these issues). Such spaces are valuable in how creative industries evolve, especially with the current trends in open source.

Help Hacker Dojo out - have a look at their website and cause. If you are interested in such spaces, or know of any, check out my previous blog post about collaborative creative spaces or leave a comment.

Assassins

Assassin's Creed III is coming out later this year and once again it's ready to trump the last game with various improvements and novelties. When seeing and playing the maiden game of the series, we were impressed, but look at it now!

There has always been an increasing importance on realism in gaming environments especially for actions games of a high console calibre. For continually successful titles such as Assassin's Creed, I'm guessing a lot of the budget goes into the artistic, phenomenal feel of the places you play within. Keeping in mind that the premise of the Assassin's Creed story is that you are reliving a past time to save the world, etc etc, it makes sense to have this emphasis on resemblance.

What impresses me is that all of these highly complex environments are based on real historical settings outside of any living person's real experience. Calling upon a tonne of research and a vivid dose of imagination, the game creators take on this challenge. Now, with the new AnvilNext (hope it's a developer's inside joke because it's not a catchy name..) game engine, apparently they're taking weather conditions, landscaping and atmospherics to the next level. They'll need a lot of that in colonial America - past Assassin's Creed games focussed on the Middle East, Florence and the ancient lands of Rome in it's heyday - filthy rich with elaborate, historically primed architecture and cities. Baby Colonial America wasn't even on the map yet.

Remember that this isn't the third game per se - Assassin's Creed II had two subsequent continuations. That they are breaking out this third official game with the snazzy new game engine also starts a new chapter of the narrative. Cue the new continent and miles more for gamers to explore... and virtually kill people in a variety of creative ways. Welcome to the Un-United States of America.

Harmony

In Bb 2.0 is a music collaboration that was prepared over the interwebs. It takes the form of a bunch of Youtube clips with their creators making a sound. Follow the instructions, turn them on and you get a symphony that somehow works. I'm afraid my musical knowledge only goes that far - perhaps they all use the key B flat? It's a key that I often enjoy when playing music, for its melancholic yet strong qualities.

Make sure you take a look and listen at http://wwww.inbflat.net/

Invisible

Nothing like a bit of great technology interacting with the city and people. And selling a car.

Before

Chairlift's 'choose your own adventure' music video is kind of fun. It also forces you to listen to the same dreaded song over and over in pursuit of less boring experiences. It captures the 'what if' scenarios that go on in real life - what if I did this or that, or went to that event would I have...? 

By clicking the arrows, guide the protagonist through a series of events ranging from yawnable to buzzy as (in a psychedelic sense). Funny to note, the hip fashion of nowadays fits really well in the retro days, even with the hair styles that you see around today. 

Imagine how much filming this would have taken. Have fun!

Robot

Flying robots playing the James Bond theme music. Sounds interesting right?

The last time I watched a robot play music was at the Shanghai World Expo in the Japanese Pavilion that literally took hours to snake into. A humanoid robot played the violin and that was the highlight of the show. Various other augmented reality and android demonstrations fitted around that and the future of Japan was made to seem like a really advanced and different place.

But still, it's not the music that is in any way impressive. It's the feat of programming these mechatronic dream children to coordinate that is amazing and, I think, still a developing art. The Japanese robot goes as far as trying to replicate the subtle humanesque features of musicality but it is still lacking qualities of human made music.

Shape

Books and the ideas contained within them are powerful. So is CNC technology, it seems.

Country

He who loves not his country can love nothing.
   - Samuel Johnson

Having had a quick look at my blog statistics (which I've never looked into before), I was surprised to see a lot more info than I expected. Although it felt a bit like Facebook treasuring away bits of your life into it's enormous database, I found it quite useful to see the readership on my blog.

Blogging is yet still a very one sided medium in the way that really there is little two-way interactions, discussions and debate in a way which actually fosters it. The image above shows the distribution of readers' countries for the last month. A good representation from Belgium and Germany. I see some people I actually know reading from Japan and Canada (shout out to Cocomino and tmasoo!), and of course, New Zealand. I guess readers from the USA is just a default net thing?

Thanks for all your support, I never knew this blog reached so far beyond my networks. I'd really like it if you leave a comment below and let me know where you are and why you're interested in Creative Collision.  I really enjoy comments - those who leave them know who they are - and the two way interaction is just the beginning!

Layered

Nobuhiro Nakanishi's Layered Drawings series attempts to capture the subtle changes that occur with passing time. I've seen something like this before - laser cut panels of clear acrylic overlaid, but never at this scale or with the eerie floating composition. It's alike to something in a digital space or augmented reality which seems to be a new fad these days with smartphones.

Elevation

A strange data plotting strategy - representing stats through 3D elevation of a map - reminds me a bit of Sim City when you go crazy with the terrain. However, it does highlight the severity of problems (in this case, crime) by creating a severe landscape.

Limbo

After having not blogged for about a month, it takes something really intriguing to get things going again. I'm always a sucker for shadow puppets, and having done an entire project on that theme before, Limbo really reminded me of what I really love about dark atmospheric sets.

The IGN reviewer writes:

Videogames are an art form made up of visuals, sound, and a mysterious little something we call gameplay. Limbo is the perfect example of these three crafts working together in harmony to create something astounding.

All done in grayscale, Limbo navigates a creepy forest with merely the contrast between light and silhouette, with perceived depth and intricate layering. It is set in the 2D space which further calls to the shadow puppet set in which such effects can all be achieved.

The visuals sit on the fence between bleak and powerfully chiaroscuro - more is hidden than you think in this shadow filled world. Other than adding to the thrill of gameplay, it tugs at our collective fear of darkness and the unknown, becoming nothing more than creatively psychological.

If you are interested in the contemporary use of shadow puppetry, the starting point of my shadow puppet exploration was Little Dragon's Twice MV, and the post Cinema illustrates some of the human scale exploration of shadows.