About the Exhibition 

Location | Beta_space | Level 1 - Cyberworlds Gallery | Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 

Launch Date | Friday 27 August 2010 | 6-8:30pm | RSVP essential to Derek Williamson | (02 ) 9217 0381 | This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it  

*featured as part of Ultimo Science Festival* 

Exhibition Dates | 28 August - 15 October 2010

Public Programme | Art-Science Speed Dating | Friday 27 August 2010 | Speakers include Matthew Connell, Damian Hills, Matthew Huynh, and a special viewing of SEISX human seismograph installation, and Face two Face.

About the Artwork 

The assimilate project is an online collaborative environment that allows participants to visually construct narratives in a 3D virtual space. The installation at the Powerhouse Museum, at Beta_space in the Cyberworlds Gallery features an expressive and physical touch table interface, whereby up to four participants can collaboratively narrate an ongoing story using online media obtained through an internet keyword search.  Point and click morphs into a more physical drag and drop method, as interactivity is experienced on a new plane.

About the Research

How does narrative collaboration work? In this instance, Hills is exploring how search results can be styled into generative behaviours that visually self-organise while participants make choices about the narrative outcomes and their associated behaviours.  The playful interface promotes conversation and role-playing as meaning and connotation are cycled through a continuous process of search result feedback and narrative template selection.

Artist Biography 

Damian Hills is a multimedia developer with over 10 years industry experience. He has worked on a wide range of projects for industries including medicine, education, government, film, and games, in Australia, US and Europe. After completing a Graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing at UTS in 2006, Damian joined CCS as a PhD student in 2008 to research interactive narrative and storytelling systems and how they can be applied to conversational systems of a multi-modal collaborative nature.

Drawing on such diverse fields such as narratology, cybernetics, and multimodal interaction, this research aims to investigate a model for how multi-modal interface and conversational information systems can assist in the production of meaning and sense-making for collaborative storytelling applications. A key component is the development and evaluation of a storytelling system, assimilate.net. 

Acknowledgements

This research is funded by Australasian Center for Interaction Design (ACID) as a part of the 'Our Content' project which aims to develop a reusable framework for generative content systems.