Explore the Avatar Age!

As part of the Digital Shoreditch 2013 Great Digital Exhibition body>data>space presents a showcase version of ‘Visions of Our Communal Dreams’.

Join us on-site to explore this beautiful interactive virtual island and fly your avatar (gallery room B34 / basement).

You can also join us online and through Twitter @voocd

• Instil life in the virtual forest by tweeting bird, butterfly or flower to @voocd

• Create, customise and fly your avatar via the Robots and Avatars website www.robotsandavatars.net

Visitors in the gallery will be able to see your avatar flying on the screens and to interact with it!

Developed by internationally renowned artist Michael Takeo Magruder and associate experts, this immersive mixed-reality installation combines virtual, physical and networked space, and explores issues of hybridity, embodiment and collective creativity in the Avatar Age.

Digital Shoreditch Ticket Holder Exclusive Access: 20th-24th May 10am-3pm

Read more about the exhibition here

Visions of Our Communal Dreams // Michael Takeo Magruder With Drew Baker, Erik Fleming and David Steele. Presented by body>data>space, long term experts in virtual/physical interactivity, commissioned by Robots and Avatars this piece premiered at FACT (Liverpool/UK) and then presented at KIBLA (Maribor/Slovenia)

As part of Digital Shoreditch 2013 body>data>space will be presenting inspiring, future visions of virtual/physical collaborations on 3 occasions.

Digital Shoreditch  is a top level event celebrating the creative diversity and world-class talent within London’s digital community, so get your tickets!!

Tuesday 21st May

‘body>data>space sharing future scenarios of virtual / physical blended space’ / showcase

body>data>space work will be showcased at Tomorrow’s World, a day to explore the tomorrow of digital and technology along with the social and technological changes that are disrupting the digital space.

“This is a day about tomorrow. A day exploring the next big ideas in creativity and technology and their impact, a day looking beyond the tablet & instagram to the next transformational innovations. How will we be engaging each other in the future? And what does this mean for our businesses. With thought provoking talks and workshops by industry leaders, the day is designed to ignite a passion for emerging opportunities and challenges, and inspire you on what is to come.”

Get inspired by body>data>space cutting edge and long term experience in engaging audience and users through technologies! From 11 AM Read more here

Friday 24th May

‘Collaborations through Telepresence’ / presentation and debate

Ghislaine Boddington will be presenting bds work at Behavioural Design, an update on the fast evolving world of telepresence and its usage in collaboration, co-creation and collective activities. Amongst others medical, educational and artistic usages are emerging fast through connected screens, virtual platforms, motion capture and telepresence robotics. Using examples from several projects produced by body>data>space and other topical work and play scenarios, the talk will overview the present and vision future potentials. From 13.45 to 14.45. Read more here.

‘Telepresence and Avatars: Re-boot your Identity’ / workshop

Final activities of our EU project Robots and Avatars will take place in May 2013, after 2 years of packed activities, including a fantastically successful touring exhibition from the UK to Slovenia and Romania, inspiring learning experiences and debates with international experts around future worlds of work, identity/representation and ethics.

Before that, body>data>space are now very glad to announce that Robots and Avatars final activities will take place from 9th to 13th May in Maribor/Slovenia with our partners KIBLA, AltArt and FACT.

A debate dedicated to ‘Women and Girls in Technology’ will take place on Thursday 9th May with top level women speakers and participants.  Across the 2 years of the project, this topic  has come up as an imperative and topical debate. It is clear that in the EU this debate is on the table and crucial – for women and girls to feel able to join in to the growing technology world as active artists, producers, educators, coders etc.

How do we approach these skills sets which are seen as a “boys domain” by many girls of school age?

How do we find ways to involve young women through skills development linked to solving problems and finding solutions?

How to encourage a feminine viewpoint to emerge in the next generations of arts and technologies ?

The future of design and creativity through software and hardware needs equally to be influenced and created by women to enable an equal feminine perspective to be integrated at the base of the new tools. Women need to be able to take up the opportunities and knowledge offered by the tech revolution equally to men.

Open and public meeting at KIBLA. More information coming soon!

On 22 and 23 April body>data>space will run a Workshop/Lecture- “Creative Use of technologies in social processes- a future that starts today”

“The Role of Art in Socially Significant Processes” on April 22.

During this day conference dedicated to education, body>data>space will run a presentation ‘Collective collaborations and the future world of work’ and take part to a discussion ‘How art can help in the socially significant processes?’.

body>data>space will be inputting on the behaviours and ethics needed for young people who will be working with new representational forms of themselves and others in their future careers. In this increasingly fluid future young people will need to be more self reliant, entrepreneurial and dynamic particularly in their working lives. They will have to deal with the new challenges and potential issues which might emerge out of their collaborations between robots, avatars, virtual worlds, telepresence and real-time presence. How do these developments impact upon the ways young people behave? What are the ethical considerations to think about if you are working with virtual/physical blended space?

Partners of this conference day include the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science, Microsoft Latvia, Soros Foundation Latvia and the British Council Latvia. The main goal of this conference is to discuss the future of the education and skills, knowledge, attitudes necessary for youngsters and next generation. In this framework, the Latvian Minister of Education will be announcing the annual Education Innovations Award.

On Wednesday 24th April body>data>space will give a special input to the UNESCO Latvian commission meeting at the Ministry of Education.

See the programme for more precisions on time and venue: http://www.radilatvija.lv/en

body>data>space is glad to announce and take part to the E-motional Bodies & Cities Festival!

Gabriela Tudor Foundation and the National Dance Centre in Bucharest present the “E-Motional Festival: moving bodies & cities”, to take place between April 12-14 at the Museum for Contemporary Arts in Bucharest, co-organising partner of the event, as well as at ZonaD – Serial Paradise studio. The festival closes the E-Motional Bodies & Cities, a two-year programme dedicated to mobility and artistic exchanges in the field of contemporary dance, organised between 2011-2013.

The festival will include video-installation vernisage, public events and process sharings dedicated to the E-Motional artistic research, performances from Romania, Latvia, Cyprus and Turkey, among which the premiere of two international co-productions. The event also hosts two roundatbles, one dedicated to Creative Europe, the upcoming EU funding programme for cultural projects, presented in partnership with the Cultural Contact Point of Romania, the second one dedicated to artistic collaboration at international level.

The festival will gather over 30 artists participating to the programme from Romania, Ireland, Lativia, Cyprus and Turkey along with the body>data>space team and UK Managers and Artists: Gemma Riggs video artist, Luke Pell performing artist, Haylet Durward, Irini Papadimitriou, Lydia Fraser-Ward.

The Festival guests also include artists and programmers from the project countries, as well as from Portugal, USA and Japan.

Read more here

More information here

In his essay for NESTA and The Guardian Mark  Ballrevisits some old predictions about the impact of digital technology on the cultural sector, and looks to what the future may look like.

Mark Ball is the first of four Clore fellows to contribute an article for Guardian Culture Professionals on arts and digital technologies ‘it is giving artists the tools to innovate and explore new ways of making theatre where the digital and live meet, and exceptional work in this area is being led by ‘transmedia’ artists and agencies like Coney, Blast Theory, body>data>space, and the Pervasive Media Lab.’

Full article available here

body>data>space produced and hosted ‘London – Mapping the E-Motional City’ Artistic Research with Watermans Art Centre from 14 to 26th January 2013, with an inter-disciplinary group of 5 artists exploring the ‘megatropolis’ and its underlying bodies and emotions.

The video is an inspiring review of  of their 2-week research in London. The artists began exploring the local neighbourhood of Brentford and some parts of London, interrogating the connections between these environments, human behaviours and the possibility to emotionally map a city. Through this inter-disciplinary and collective process, the artists began to collect words, gestures and impressions, but also images and sounds, that nurtured the final process.

Watch the video here

Video edited by:
Muzzamil Hasmi – (Flash light Arts)
Simon Green (Associated artist b>d>s, Eventful)

Organised by the European Commission, the conference presented examples of projects such as Robots and Avatars that have taken their audiences very seriously, sometimes from the very early stages of the creative process.‘

The level of participation and debate clearly showed what is considered by some to be a new cultural revolution: audiences are hungry for engagement, for shared experiences, for a sense of community. There is thus a need to stimulate exchange of practice in this field, to support cultural organisations to learn faster by peer learning in order to adapt more quickly to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.’

Audience development is one of the priorities of the EU’s future funding programme for the cultural and creative sectors, “Creative Europe”, which will replace the current Culture programme in 2014.

Full Report available Here