Me (as a blond) and Kyle at Pitchfork Fest 08

But this year, don’t forget your iPhone. Web 2.0, social media, new media… musicians, concert venues, and music festivals are all jumping on the ‘interactive’ bandwagon.

As if crowd surfing wasn’t interactive enough.

Obviously, SXSW has been the leader in merging music and technology (click here to read Daniel’s post from 2008’s festival), but more and more, other fests are forced to think out of the proverbial box.

Voice too hoarse to shout your request? No worries, Pitchfork Fest is giving ticket buyers the opportunity to name the set list of their favorite bands online. This year’s headliners The Flaming Lips said they “will do their best to accommodate the wildest and most obscure of request– covers included.”

Photo by David Donovan Evans

And from what I’ve read in the news, it all seems to be working. Despite the recession, music festivals are thriving.

Photo by David Donovan Evans

To what do they attribute this success? According to this internet marketing blog, “MySpace has long been a popular social network within the music industry. Artists often preview new albums on the site, for example. When it comes to these concerts, however, MySpace doesn’t generate nearly the engagement of Facebook, or even Twitter or email.”

One of my most favorite new media + music mash ups of all time is the All Eyes series from CurrentTV. Check out the fan-sourced video of My Morning Jacket at Lollapalooza.

This really gets my gears turning about possible ways we can apply these new media/social media stategies to the programming here at the IMA for The Toby and Summer Nights, or other events at the museum. How have you seen social media used effectivley at a concert, festival, or event?

Are video games art?

Some of our readers may still have some Superbowl adrenaline left in their system, but today I want to talk about another kind of game… video games. Like contact sports, these games sometimes get a bad rap, but having grown up in the 80’s with my trusty Atari, Nintendo, and Sega Genesis, the games I played served as creative inspiration. In fact, without those games, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now. Inspired by Noelle’s post last week, I thought I would explore the various ways that creativity can be expressed in a video game. I’ll take the framework that has been used by game reviewers in the past and break it down into the facets of graphics, audio, gameplay, and story. I’m also going to focus mostly on console games.

Starting off with perhaps the most obvious, graphics in video games have evolved considerably since the 80’s. Pong, one of the earliest arcade games (from the 70’s actually), graphically consisted solely of linear elements; two rectangular paddles, a square ball, a dashed line for the “net”, and numerals for keeping score. Progressing from there, Asteroids (another 70’s game) made use of 2D polygonal shapes. The games that I played on the Atari, Nintendo, and Genesis made heavy use of sprites, which Matt covered earlier in his great post on Pixel Art. That pixel art is what inspired me to sketch my own sprites and those of my favorite games on graph paper, in order to use in my own attempts at making games on the family’s 286 generation PC. I then had my first taste of computer science. The next big shift that I experienced was with Star Fox, which made use of 3D polygonal objects for the first time. The beefier graphics processing power of the Playstation made these games more commonplace. Because the storage medium for the Playstation was a CD, it also had the capacity to play pre-rendered full motion video. From there on out, graphics hardware improvements in consoles and PCs have been providing more and more options for performing advanced texturing and shading techniques, to the point where it can now be difficult to determine which video clips from a game preview are pre-rendered and which are in-game, and almost any special effect imaginable can be achieved.

The ability to express creativity via audio has progressed in much the same way. The earliest games only made use of sound effects, while most games from the Nintendo generation had background music. Although these systems were not capable of playing truly natural-sounding tones, background tracks from games such as Megaman and Castlevania had their own distinctive timber. When the Playstation came along, CD-quality music could be played as a background track, and since then the biggest improvement has been the addition of Dolby Digital quality output on the PS2 generation of systems. Now, the Video Games Live concert celebrates the rich diversity of video game music.

While video and audio quality have steadily progressed, gameplay is a tricky beast. Some might argue that the early generations of games thrived in the golden era of gameplay. If the controls were not well thought out or the tactics uninteresting, a game didn’t have much else to rely on. Pac Man, Frogger, Dig Dug, Tetris, and Breakout are a few great examples. These days, it seems that gameplay can get lost in the dazzle of sound effects and eye candy. On the flip side, I also gained great respect for game designers and developers when I realized how difficult it is to combine an idea for a game with graphic design, sound effects, and background music. Gameplay has seen advances recently as new peripherals have come out. Key examples are the Dance Dance Revolution pad (allowing players to “dance” to music), microphones, Taiko drums, guitar controllers, and the Wii Remote and Balance Board. In the most modern games, online multiplayer interaction is becoming a must-have feature. As a result of these new modes of interaction, Rock Band has actually improved my appreciation of rock music, and the Wii has opened up a new realm of creative flexibility. I have to admit that the thought of all of those plastic peripherals is a little unsettling, from an ecological perspective. When they become obsolete, will they be recycled? Can manufacturers take a cradle-to-cradle approach to design in the future?

The last aspect I’ll mention here is story. It doesn’t apply to all game genres, but I couldn’t leave it out because just about every game from my favorite series, Final Fantasy, excels in all of the categories I mentioned previously in addition to weaving some of the most interesting and moving tales in game history. While my impression is that most fans go nuts for Final Fantasy VII, I can’t get over the way in which Final Fantasy VI wove together the paths of fourteen distinctive characters. Another series known for fine storytelling is The Legend of Zelda, although the character development is not quite as deep. I’m wary of losing myself in another Final Fantasy story (they tend to suck you in for hours at a time), but I’m very tempted to pick up the next installment.

I hope this has been enlightening to some of our readers. As I mentioned earlier, video games inspired my interest in computer science, as well as my interest in Japan, which led to my interest in Japanese art, language, and culture. So who knows what I’d be doing if not for their influence? If there are any other video game fans out there amongst our readers… what are your favorites?

“This is really cool,” he said timidly, referring to the space. Daniel showed him the new animated trailer for ArtBabble, to which he replied, “That was not cool…I mean that was not long enough.” 

Another visitor asked if he could take a nap in the corner because he found the furniture and atmosphere so relaxing. It was a pleasure to watch kids, teens, parents and docents use the computers and ArtBabble video Web site as tools for learning and for fun.

This leads me to a larger question I’ve been asking myself (and some of you): What are the pros and cons of interactive games in art museums, and how far should we go with the concept? The Davis LAB doesn’t include games per se, but getting on a computer and exploring ArtBabble is, like a game, a lot of fun. For the purpose of this post, I’ll classify interactivity as anything from paper scavenger hunts to computer kiosks in the galleries. All these activities turn upside down the traditional museum experience of walking through galleries and looking at the art on the walls with an element of relational interactivity between the visitor and the art.

NPR recently explored the topic in a piece called “Interactive Games Make Museums a Play to Play”, by Elizabeth Blair, which highlighted the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center for an alternative reality game they created. A teacher I know testified that interactive games in museums prompted her students to look more closely at the artwork. NPR noted happiness, clear instructions, feedback, shared experience and being part of something bigger as benefits to interactivity.

I wonder if some museum visitors find interactive games disruptive or cause them to focus less on the physical art as they attempt to check off a work they just found through the interactive game and rush off to the next masterpiece. Should museums use interactive technology like video or audio tours as a revenue generator at the risk of taking attention away from the physical piece of art? Or is it our duty as museum professionals to ensure that the technology only enhances the connection? Are games a marketing tool to woo new audiences to art, or are they the future of art? I have heard the argument that “high brow” art clashes with “low brow” games. Do we need to be entertained at an art museum by something else, or do we go to let the art entertain us?

I love Texas. I always have. So it’s good to be in Austin for SXSW. It’s my first visit but honestly, I’ve never been a big conference fan. I’ve always appreciated the opportunity for professional development, the chance to meet new colleagues and of course learn something new, but I must admit, they can be boring. Is SXSW boring? No way. Keep SXSW weird.

The future of web is here. The people at SXSW Interactive are shaping the online environment of tomorrow. It’s mind boggling. I’ve sat in tons of sessions (some terrible, most great, a couple truly inspiring) and I feel refreshed, motivated and full of new ideas. My role at the IMA is to produce digital content – to tell stories in innovative ways. This experience has shown me we can do much, much more. We will.

It is a weird conference and I mean that as the biggest possible complement. I have sat next to a variety of characters – CEO’s, marketers, artists, developers, rock star bloggers, and pretty much who knows. I’ve walked out of some useless sessions, but mostly have been soaking it all in. There have been two magical moments…

Anyone that knows me, knows I love uncomfortable situations, especially humour. I love the British Office and Little Britain. One of my favorite films is Made (it made me squirm). So imagine my glee when the keynote event, featuring Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, descended into chaos, with the crowd revolting and the interviewer, Sarah Lacy talking smack back to the crowd! I have never seen anything like it – read it about here or relive it here. Part of me wanted to hide, but in the end, I sat there with a big smile on my face exchanging quips with the people around me. Thank you SXSW!

I want to be the guys from icanhascheezburger. They put captions on picture of cats and other animals. They do what they want in a strategic, intelligent way. It is their job! And they get 1.5 million hits a day. Are you kidding me? Their session was brilliant, funny, educational and to beat this word to death: inspiring. They have built and cultivated an online community that is loyal, vocal and immense. We (the IMA we) are trying to do the same thing, but without the lolcats. They had cheeseburgers delivered to the session and afterwards I had the site founder, Eric Nakagawa, sign an autograph for my sister. I also asked if he wanted to be a guest blogger. Stay tuned.

I’m now sitting in a session about the future of video content online. It’s good and incredibly technical and it confirms we should be pursuing H.264 for our future video compression, especially for our next big project IMA TV. But I must be honest, I am looking forward to the next weird moment. Uncomfortable or not.

The other day I sat in a bar drinking a Texan beer, listening to a German-French-Scottish folk band. I love Texas. (clap clap clap clap) *deep in teh hart of Tecksus.