This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt.
Stay tuned — a new PLAYCUBE event at Dartmouth!
Friday, May 7th: AREA+the Playcube present
“This is my World”
The Spring Student Art Exhibition
Gallery opening from 5-7PM, with the Cube serenading the Top of the Hop
Music + refreshments provided!
(in the belly of the the CUBE=digital photography and short films from the Dartmouth community!)
Composer Pauline Oliveros joins us in our weekly variable_d salon via the
Dialogues. In Dialogues, students and members of the community come with ideas, themes, and questions and engage in a teleconferenced discussion of contemporary issues in the work. Past visitors have included Brenda Laurel, The Guerrilla Girls, and Katherine Hayles.
4pm, Jan 26th 2010
Tiltfactor lab
Additional links to Oliveros’ artifacts:
running electric charges through herself
Pauline Oliveros, composer, performer and humanitarian is an important pioneer in American Music. Acclaimed internationally, for four decades she has explored sound — forging new ground for herself and others.
Through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly effects those who experience it and eludes many who try to write about it. “On some level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would seem to be very close to that level.” John Rockwell Oliveros has been honored with awards, grants and concerts internationally. Whether performing at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., in an underground cavern, or in the studios of West German Radio, Oliveros’ commitment to interaction with the moment is unchanged. She can make the sound of a sweeping siren into another instrument of the ensemble.
Through Deep Listening Pieces and earlier Sonic Meditations Oliveros introduced the concept of incorporating all environmental sounds into musical performance. To make a pleasurable experience of this requires focused concentration, skilled musicianship and strong improvisational skills, which are the hallmarks of Oliveros’ form. In performance Oliveros uses an accordion which has been re-tuned in two different systems of her just intonation in addition to electronics to alter the sound of the accordion and to explore the individual characteristics of each room. (Tuning Chart)
Pauline Oliveros has built a loyal following through her concerts, recordings, publications and musical compositions that she has written for soloists and ensembles in music, dance, theater and interarts companies. She has also provided leadership within the music community from her early years as the first Director of the Center for Contemporary Music (formerly the Tape Music Center at Mills), director of the Center for Music Experiment during her 14 year tenure as professor of music at the University of California at San Diego to acting in an advisory capacity for organizations such as The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, and many private foundations. She now serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been vocal about representing the needs of individual artists, about the need for diversity and experimentation in the arts, and promoting cooperation and good will among people.
Indie Italian gamemaker Molleindustria’s release Every Day the Same Dream is a simple, elegant, exploration into the banalities of everyday corporate life.
While there are some glaring stereotypes that take away from its freshness and originality (especially in regard to gender; the character’s wife is in the kitchen with a frying pan in the morning and tells the character he is late for work; the office execs are all male, etc.), the game has a nice polish, another interpretation of the plight of the worker-drone already much explored in film (from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Mike Judge’s Office Space and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer.)
Made in about a week on a low budget, it sets a great example for other indie mini-game designers that with a strong design sensibility, good music, and clear choices. Congratulazioni!
Tonight, Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls joined the variable_d salon to discuss activism in a digital age. Formed in 1985, the artists assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their tastes adn personalities. Between 1985 and today, over 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, have produced posters, billboards, public actions, books and other projects bring gender issues to the forefront of public debate and discussion.
Our variable_d discussion centered around questions of anonymity, data, inequity, and strategy. How the group arrived at decisions, consensus, and maintained confidentiality were all subjects for lively debate. Ms. Kollwitz noted that at times, one will simply not know if something is an effective approach until she tries it. All the planning in the world can enter into a campaign, but it is always a little bit surprising what connects with people, and what does not. She suggests, “Try it!”
The DIALOGUES are student-conducted interviews and conversations with leading artists, scientists, and scholars of our time with the support of the Digital Humanities initiative. The conversations are digitally mediated via SKYPE software and held in the context of the weekly digital salon at Tiltfactor.
This just in from Tiltfactor at Sea correspondent E McNeill via games(TM) magazine.
Tiltfactor‘s Mary Flanagan will be visiting MIT’s Gambit lab on Monday 2nd November, for Introduction to Game Studies. Later in the day she is speaking at the MIT series Purple Blurb about her art practice as it relates to her theory of Critical Play.
On Tuesday 3rd November, Flanagan is speaking in a Lunchtime Gallery Talk at 12:30pm related to the exhibition currently on, The Art of Sonia Landy Sheridan.