DorkbotBRU#6

Special Students!

iMAL invites 3 schools with a multimedia or digital art section to present some of their best projects. This first Special Students will features productions made at the Design & Media Academie (Genk), Ecole de Recherche Graphique (Brussels) and ESAPV (Mons). On the menu: a game with haptic feedback, an interactive social music creature, a participative photographic sculpture, computed clocks and a communicating jacket.

MDA (Genk) presents Skindeep & The Blob / Danny Leen

Danny Leen is a certified welder, mechanic and master student in Communication & Media Design (CMD) at the Media & Design Academy, Genk. For his thesis project he researches and builds haptic interfaces for digital music creation.

Danny will demo several prototypes: ‘Skindeep’, an educational game with haptic feedback and ‘the Blob’, an interactive social music creature. It lives in bar tables and uses RFID tags to get Last.fm data from surrounding people. It then adapts its own personal musical taste to the most popular music genres around and controls the playlist of the pub, by selecting the people’s favourite songs. If someone does not like the current song, they can request another one by touching, pinching and massaging the Blob. That is, if it allows them to…

ERG (Brussels) presents CUBE / Vincent Evrard

CUBE is an animal.
An animal without the sense of displacement.
Some call it a parasite, because it needs a host to get around.
Without host, CUBE is nothing. With, it becomes a witness of the space. He remembers each image that his host gives him to discover.

Created by Vincent Evrard, CUBE is a project born in the digital art section of ERG in 2009. This is a cubic structure (60cm of side) with a photo camera. When the sculpture is moved, the camera is triggered automatically. In the future, CUBE will be equipped with a lighter structure (plastic, fiberglass…) and will send the captured images directly on the web.

ESAPV (Mons) presents:
Communicating Jacket / David Bormans & Ivan Razine

This jacket allows the “wearer” to express the relationship he wants to have with the people around him. He has the ability to display small animations on LED matrixes and to produce sounds. These sounds and images vary depending on the proximity of people in the area defined by the wearer. The distances are calculated using ultrasonic rangefinders.

Horloges / Timothée Zammattio

Timothée Zammattio questions the Western representation of the fragmented time in hours, minutes and seconds. Jacques Attali in his History of the time described the historical development of the measurement of time that has never stopped changing at different ages, civilizations and technologies. With his clocks programmed with Processing, Timothy Zammattio offers innovative and sometimes ironic visualizations adapted to the digital age.