BNMI ART Lab Showcase

July 25, 26, 27, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building, Main Floor
Free

An exhibition of technology based works created by Banff New Media Institute alumni occurring in various locations, including the BNMI Advanced Research and Technology Visualization Lab and Banff National Park’s Hoodoo Trail.   » More

BNMI ART Collaboration Lab
Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building 221
July 25 - 27, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Sheelagh Carpendale — Revisionist Interaction

One can view a collaboration or previous project from many perspectives such as the progress of a particular person or changing focus of content themes. Revisionst Interaction is a temporally based visualization of ongoing research from the Innovis Group, Interactions Lab, at the University of Calgary Department of Computer Science. Project images, videos, and textual information about completed and ongoing projects are visually embedded within temporal and contextual flexible boundaries. People can explore projects of interest through direct-touch interaction. They can also reorganize research projects and themes by moving information or changing the course of boundaries. In this way Revisionist Interaction explores variable and subjective perspectives on research as they change over time.

Sara Diamond — Code Zebra: Psychology/Ecology

Code Zebra is a multi-year project premised on a social network and conversation visualization software: CodeZebraOS. It connects diverse species of human conversationalists such as artists and scientists, providing an analysis of both the content and the emotions behind the content in their postings. CodeZebraOS has mutated into multiple platforms — morphing into responsive garments, 24-hour endurance performances, scientific debates, web sites, language games, and clubbing rituals. Born between the UK and the wilds of Banff, CodeZebra has migrated to Finland, to Rotterdam, to Budapest, to Mexico City, to Sao Paolo, to Los Angeles, and back to Banff where the CodeZebra archive is revealed to audiences this summer. CodeZebraOS, videos, and garments were created in co-production with the Banff New Media Institute. The exhibition will include software, web site, digital prints, and video archives.

Skawennati Tricia Fragnito - CyberPowWow

CyberPowWow, a project initiated by Nation to Nation, a First Nations artist collective, was simple, yet sprawling. From 1997 to 2004, CyberPowWow used the Internet to bridge the vast geographical distances, both in Canada and around the world, that separate Aboriginal people, especially contemporary Aboriginal artists. Four themed exhibitions took place, topically exploring the intersection between technology, art and identity.

Each exhibition was launched with a simultaneous, distributed, on-line event. Roughly biannual, the events put the “pow wow” in CyberPowWow and took place both in cyberspace and at official, real-life Gathering Sites across Turtle Island. During these events, artists donned customized avatars and gave presentations about their work; on-line visitors asked questions, chatted, browsed, made new acquaintances or, often, realized they were flirting with an old friend. Explore a moment in time from one of these gatherings.

BNMI ART Visualization Lab
Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building 026
July 25 - 27, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Pamela Jennings — Constructed Narratives

Constructed Narratives is a collaborative game where players construct a world from pentomino shaped blocks (complex shapes assembled from five cubes) in which they provide the dynamic contextual materials that give form to the world that they are constructing. It has been designed as a collaborative game to facilitate discourse, exchange of ideas and negotiation of design intentions and choices between collaborating participants. Designed for adults and older teenagers, the game presents an open-ended construction metaphor to elicit childlike curiosity to explore through collaboration and negotiation. Constructed Narratives has been likened to a combination between Scrabble™ and the Rubik Cube™, a physical magnetic poetry or Exquisite Corpse. As both a mechanical puzzle and a language game, Constructed Narratives supports collaboration and social networking with other players as a strategic method of play. The game evolves over time as groups of people build, tear apart and rebuild structures with the blocks. The ideal number of players is two to four, although one player can certainly have fun exploring the physical interface. Players play until their curiosity is exhausted and new players can join the game whenever space at the game table becomes available.

Maria Lantin/Greg Judelman - flowerGarden

Inspired by Gustav Klimt's painting Flowergarden (1905), flowerGarden is an interactive visualization of social networking and concept sharing occurring within a group of 30 to 80 individuals.

FlowerGarden was deployed at the Bodies in Play Summit, a conference held at the Banff New Media Institute in May of 2005. Set up as a projected installation in the event space, participants entered information about the conversations and topics of discussion they had with others. Over the course of the event, flowerGarden grew from a few sparse flowers to a lush garden as the numbers of participants (flowers) and conversations (flower petals) increased.

The web application allows participants to input conversations information (grow mode), or navigate data (explore mode) visualized as an overlapping combination of a social network graph and a word cloud concept map. Each participant is represented as a flower with their initials in the centre and one petal for each conversation they have entered. A vine links participants who have had conversations. The frequency of concept entries is mapped to word size and position, showing commonly used terms in the centre of the circle and widely shared terms in bigger font. For the purposes of this exhibition, grow mode has been disabled but visitors can explore the garden grown by participants at the original conference in 2005.

Maria Lantin/Greg Judelman - Aurora

Inspired by the ebb and flow dance of the Northern Lights that frequent the skies above The Banff Centre, this image is a visualization of the evolution of the Banff New Media Institute discourse in their first decade.

Word frequency statistics were generated using text analysis software that analyzed the corpus of texts in BNMI's 1993-2004 archives (websites, summit agendas, press releases, etc.). These frequencies were mapped both to word size and glow intensity. Large words with a bright glow behind were important topics in the discourse in that year, while small words with a dark sky behind were less significant. Read the columns vertically to discover the popular topics for a particular year, read the rows horizontally to discover the evolution of particular topics over time.

Leila Sujir/Maria Lantin — Tulip Theory

This work explores the notion of cultural hybridity within technology and the social sphere, in particular with questions around the body and the state. Within the CAVE, Tulip Theory's intent is to explore a variety of constructions of poetic narratives using the video and audio signal within these 3D ephemeral virtual spaces, playing with "imbued" or subtle narratives which imply rather than tell a story, along with explorations where the narrative collapses, along with lateral narratives which tell multiple stories simultaneously.

BNMI ART Mobile Lab
July 25 and 26, 10 a.m - 3 p.m.
Meet at the Jeanne and Peter Lougheed main floor foyer

Tracklines GPS Guided Hiking Tour: Live Demonstrations!

Do you like to hike? Are you curious about the latest in outdoor technologies? If so, then come out and try a free two-hour self-guided tour of Banff’s scenic Hoodoo trail using the latest in GPS technology. Tracklines is a self-guided walking tour in which hikers use mobile phones and GPS to navigate a mountainous landscape seeded with stories about Banff’s natural history, co-authored in collaboration with Parks Canada. This interactive prototype represents our latest research exploring the use of mobile media for storytelling and public education in backcountry hiking areas. The tour will take approximately two hours on a nearby trail of moderate difficulty. Tours will be offered on a first-come, first served basis between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Space is limited, so we strongly recommend that you contact us ahead of time to reserve a tour time. Drop-ins are also welcome as space and scheduling allow. For more information or to book a time slot, call the Mobile Lab at 1-403-762-6246 or email mobilelab@banffcentre.ca . For more information, please visit www.artmobilelab.ca