Swarm Toolkit

Swarm Toolkit is about enabling groups of individuals to use the power of their collective creativity to solve problems, create new experiences and have fun. We are exploring swarms: groups of many autonomous individuals, each with their own objectives, values and identities coming together to achieve a common goal or a shared behaviour.

The project is funded by the Pervasive Media Lab as part of the Media Sandbox Commissioning Scheme. The project is led by Simons Evans and Johnson in partnership with HP Labs. The project is looking at the dynamics of swarms, how they emerge and how they maintain coherence. Using this research data, the team are designing and developing a pervasive media tool-kit based upon HPs mscape pervasive media authoring environment. The objective is to enable game developers and media creators to work with swarms and the kind of distributed intelligence they represent. As part of designing and testing the tool-kit, the Swarm team are developing a Swarm game to be premiered at Come Out & Play in New York in June 2008.

Go to project website

Forest Food

Forest Food is an online sales channel and supply chain management system designed and developed for the Forest Food Producers Group, a co-operative of food producers in the Forest of Dean.

The website uses social software and community models to enable a low cost and highly efficient food sales and distribution business. Food producers create and upload their own product information, stock levels and prices. Customers create reviews, suggest developments and discuss food in the forums. The objective is to make buying local food as easy and cheap as using a major grocery website, and to create an emotional relationship between people and the food they eat.

Go to project website

The One Pound Shop

Live Art meets interactive on-line installation. Exhibited at FACT in April 2006.

The One Pound Shop creates an on-line landscape of contemporary Britain, a place in which the transaction model pervades cultural forms. In the piece, the pathetic combination of the endless repetition of trivial consumption and the absurd demands on the artist open up other, less rational, geographies and suggest experiences lying beyond consumption.

Go to project website

Where Are We Now?

Where Are We Now? opens up access to mobile phone technology to artists and social entrepreneurs.

The project developed a service that enables media creators to exploit the possibilities of mobile telephony, specifically the use of location data in the creation art works and services. Research partnership with Apsolute funded by The Arts Council and Nesta.

Go to project website

Together

Wide area mobile phone game. Players form ad hoc teams to hack mobile phone network location services, attempting to improve their accuracy in order to find treasure buried around Nottingham City. Proposal for Radiator Festival.

Read project Proposal - pdf document

Spirits

Sprits of the dead haunt Broadmead shopping center in Bristol, their voices heard over the mobile phones of shoppers. A bluejacking app with online interface provides an opportunity for public memorial and guerilla history exhibition.

Read project Proposal - pdf document

Market Square - Nottingham

Part of the Conran & Partners short-listed team entry to the competition to re-design The Old Market Square. Project contribution was based upon an entry for Fused Space and described a virtual chat space located quite precisely geographically, under a tree in Nottingham’s market square, accessed via mobile telephones.

Read project Proposal - pdf document 816kb.

Homage to Denis Oppenheim

Shockwave interactive. In the summer of 1973 Denis Oppenheim walked out onto a dry lake bed and, via radio link, guided a light aircraft pilot in drawing vapour trails in the sky. The meaning of the piece is barely present in the photo record of the event. The meaning arises out of a specific place and point in time, the act of standing on a dry lake communicating with a pilot. The homage is to the radicalism of 70s conceptualism; it's insistence on the de-materialisation of art and engagement with socio-political action.

Launch application. Please note this is a demo of work in progress; it is unstable and buggy. It has not been fully tested on a Mac and might require a couple of attemps to get it to play on that platform. One day I will finish this. In 3D.

The piece requires Shockwave. Go get it here if you don't have it.

Biography

I originally trained as an artist at Trent Poly in Nottingham, a kind of mixed media gig, although I have always been a ambivalent about the artist tag. I remember that even then I was interested in audience participation, delivering a degree show that consisted of a television serial and an audience quiz with ‘art works’ as prizes.

Inevitably I floated around the edge of the TV and film industries after graduating, designing pop promos, assisting camera, writing documentary film narrations and trying to get into the National Film and Television School. Then, back in the late Nineties, interactive TV seemed like a opportunity to get some purchase in the television industry so I enrolled on the MA in Hypermedia at the University of Westminster. The people and course were revelatory. Here was an emerging medium(s) that seemed to defy the old commercial/artistic dichotomy and a world where everything was up for grabs. I threw myself in with gusto and, whilst still studying for the MA, worked as a producer for Andy Cameron at Interactive pioneers Romandson. This was eclectic work embracing Flash superstitials, game and interactive exhibition design. Credits included in-store interactives for Paul Smith's Japanese stores and the Rod Arad retrospective at the V&A. Around this time I also experimented with wireless media, downloading the first WAP spec. and coding a locative text based RPG for phones.

From Romandson I was hired by a touch screen kiosk integration company Datasphere. By now my wife and I had three children and we needed the money. At Datasphere I took the creative and design principles I developed at Romandson and applied them to commercial applications for clients such as e-on, Clarins and the Open University. Despite a very commercial brief (I ended up Sales and Marketing Director) I found the work invaluable experience, particularly the business of turning technology innovation into products. Datasphere was a highly innovative company which, unusually, combined hardware and software development and was run by a very competent board. Shame it went bust.

We moved to the Forest of Dean in 2003. Here I have set-up a design studio and small farm. The studio specialises in design and development for the web, with an emphasis on integrating marketing channels into business process. I also do art stuff exhibiting at the ICA and Dana Centre London and undertaking a mobile media research project as part of the now defunct Diffraction art and technology partnership scheme. I am interested in sustainable food production (eating basically) and games that don't involve sitting in front of a screen.