Co-curated with Celia Pearce, Akira Thompson, John Sharp and Adam Rafinski.

This is an advanced production course that focuses on specific methods and techniques of editing images, motion picture, sound, or interactive experimental approaches in contemporary documentary-based practice. Various production and post-production strategies are reviewed. This is a hands-on course designed to prepare for graduate fieldwork and production of the MFA final project.

Course Website: http://shinyspinning.com/DM8106/

Recent years have seen a surge of interest and creative energy surrounding documentary and non-fiction media. In this course, students explore and challenge the conceptual, historic and technical factors that surround the representation of the real, with a particular focus on issues of performance, experience, indexicality, and interaction.

Taking the theme “experimental digital actuality,” we will re-envision documentary and non-fiction through experiences and experiments with both the formal and technological aspects of the mode: visualization, hybrid animation, sensor and data technologies, participatory culture, mixed reality, embodied interfaces, interactive storytelling, and videogames. Students will develop the critical, intellectual, and creative tools necessary to understand, work with, and re-imagine design at the intersection of documentary media and emerging technologies.

Syllabus

Cindy completed a PhD in interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal where she worked in association with the Centre for Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) . She holds an MASc in Interactive Arts from Simon Fraser University, as well as a BA from the University of Waterloo in Rhetoric & Professional Writing. Cindy is a former faculty member in Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), who has presented internationally at both conferences and invited lectures, and has published work in journals such as Eludamos and Games & Culture. She has also organized non-traditional exhibitions as an independent curator, including Joue le jeu/Play Along, a major exhibition of ground-breaking videogames in Paris, FR, and “new arcade” events as a member of the Kokoromi game art collective.

Cadere is the first game designed for Street Level.

In Cadere, players perform a series of slow gestures to create an abstract after-image linked to their physical movement. The performance is contextualized within the broader motion of falling, and is inspired by the following quote from Viktor Wynd:

“Decadence comes from the latin word cadere – which means to fall. It is the beautiful way to fall. It’s a very slow movement which has lots of beauty. It can be a kind of self-killing in a beautiful way, a tragic way.”

As players near the bottom of their descent, they have the option of performing a stop gesture, or hitting the ground. If players choose the later, the pattern they have created becomes part of a cumulative pattern left by all players making this choice but they cannot see it. Instead, projected beneath their feet is a black screen. If they choose the former, their fail slows dramatically and stops, revealing the cumulative designs of former players but the pattern created by the player is not added, and is discarded. What constitutes a winning condition, outside the instantiation of gestural patterns, is left intentionally ambiguous.

Cadere Development on Tumblr

The goals behind Street Level are as follows:

• To create persistent games playable, accessible, and engaging, from the sidewalk in front of a storefront window or similar glass wall; and
• To present game art in a public setting, in a manner that might help support urban renewal.

Street Level further explores work within the emerging “new arcade” movement: experimental videogames designed explicitly for public gatherings and arts venues.

http://justplayalong.info/

Curated by Lynn Hughes, Heather Kelley, and Cindy Poremba.

The playable exhibition Joue le jeu – Play along showcased games as the broad, rich cultural phenomenon they now are. A vibrant international community of artist-designers is inventing new narrative forms, play styles, and innovative visions which are radically different from more familiar video game stereotypes. We invited visitors to experience the new forms of gaming at the heart of the current golden age of creative game design.

Joue le jeu – Play along celebrated all types of playful interaction : from innovative, cutting edge video games, to mixed digital/physical, social and even board games. From the purely joyful to the radically experimental, from simple games to the most elaborate aesthetic experiences : the Gaité lyrique became an immense playworld.

Joue le jeu / Play along. Vernissage 2012. on Vimeo.

Discourse Engines for Art Mods (2010)

Game Art on a Dematerialized Web (2009)

Frames and Simulated Documents: Indexicality in Documentary Videogames (2009)

(with Ian Bogost)Can Games get Real? A Closer Look at ‘Documentary’ Digital Games (2008)

Critical Potential on the Brink of the Magic Circle (2007)

Play with Me: Exploring the Autobiographical in Digital Games (2007)

Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace (2007)

Kokoromi/Polytron, ported to Kinect by TAG
Role: Design (Supporting),  Project Lead (Kinect port)
Format: “New Arcade” videogame + Kinect
Length: 5 minutes

super HYPERCUBE @ GAMMA 3D on Vimeo.

Exhibition History:
Finalist, Indiecade 2011
VIA Audio / Visual Festival, Pittsburgh PA, October 01 – 03, 2010
Babycastles arcade gallery, Brooklyn NY, August 5, 2010
FILE – Electronic Language International Festival, São Paolo, Brazil, July 27-Aug 29, 2010
GAMMA 3D, La Société des arts technologiques [SAT], November 14, 2008
Parisian Laundry, Montréal, QC (non-curated BNL MTL fundraiser), May 1, 2009