This Happened in Edinburgh #2

This happened Edinburgh #2
Originally uploaded by MK I attended the second This Happened event in Edinburgh on the 4th May. A great event that displays that there are a multitude of exciting things going on in the world of interaction design and art.

The free event gathers a collection of speakers to present work that they are currently working on/ have recently completed and then opens up for discussion. When booking the ticket the event was sold out within 2 hours of opening... which is quite incredible for such something like this. I managed to get on the waiting list and later was pleased to receive an email stating that I had a ticket.

There was a good range of speakers which included:

•  Possibly my favourite of the night, Jen Southern and Running Stitch. This project is an incredible mixture of gps technology that captures information and physical artistry that translates this into a real world piece of art. There are many applications that currently use gps technology to track user movements and create interesting mappings. However, this is the first piece of work I have seen that effectively translates this into the physical world. Her installation works with a beamer that traces participants movements in real time on a large canvas, whilst behind the canvas somebody works away at stitching this trace into the canvas. Creating a truly original and beautiful piece of art.

• Andrew Spitz, a sound designer who discussed his project tweet a sound which looks at the idea of social sound design, sharing and collaboration through the use of twitter.
•  Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, the co-founder of Tinker.it! . She discussed a project titled Hop which combines low tech visuals of a childhood game with technology to create an interesting interactions for the user. Her chalked on hopscotch is placed on top of an artificial floor with sensors that follow the users movements with light. It is a nice idea, which she presented in a gallery context and I would love to see how people reacted to this in a real life environment, without the pre-text of a gallery.
•  Ben Dembrowski, an artist currently studying a phd at the Glasgow School of Art who presented his project 2891, a project aimed at encouraging engaement and collaboration in art through different methods.

So overall a good night and certainly worth the effort.