Category: Interactive

This 2-minute demonstration is of the ‘Sampling’ and ‘Lateral’ models made using the Mnemovie interactive engine.

Twelve 3-min mini-docs about the research in the Creativity & Cognition Studios in 2006 are sampled into a 50-second loop. By gesturing to the top of the screen, the item seen at that point is run from its head at normal speed. Gesturing to the left will run it backwards, to the right forwards; to the bottom of the screen, the titles of each movie are seen in succession each time the screen is touched. The choice is to review the work of this research group using images or words as a starting point.

In the second demonstration, using the same engine, a series of 60-sec loops of my son as he was growing up are linked laterally frame to frame: touching the top of the screen shows him older, the bottom of the screen, younger; and as before, touching the left makes the movie run in reverse.

Mnemovie is the title of a project commenced in 2004 to investigate the precept of interactive video installation, developing ideas demonstrated in Pathscape (2000) and Strangers on the Land (1999). The experimental interactive system Mnemovie, uses simple gestures to interact with memory images and events recorded as moving images and sounds as a basis for hyperlinking between digital video files. A short movie was made in 2006 to explain some theory, by way of demonstration, go to: http://vimeo.com/36948956 . The system has been developed using practice-based research methods, rather than user-centred problem-solving design approaches. The difference is that the former is similar to an art making process, where the concept is developed directly through the practitioner’s practice, applying knowledge, experience, skills and sense of creative enquiry (Schön 1983). The approach was extended with knowledge gathered from related research found in publications, together with an observation and evaluation process conducted toward completion of the PhD research in 2008. For more details see Text; for a brief demonstration of the principles, go to: https://vimeo.com/36808922

An interactive multimedia prototype of PathScape was developed in 1999/2000 with a small team of which I was project leader, in association with the Australian Film Commission. The prototype has an interface and navigation system giving access to ‘narratives’ by their association with a specific place or location or series of locations. The taxonomy is represented with images of contiguous cinematic space – individual photo images are pixilated to produce apparent motion in a forward direction, perceived as a movement ‘into’ the space recorded, a landscape. The movement is achieved by gesture, using a mouse in the prototype. The project led to further research and the development of the Mnemovie engine later in the decade. There are several articles about the project: the PDF on this page is extracted from and description and reflections on the project during later PhD research. There is also a book chapter Strangers on the Land – Place and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (2008), and the paper Towards a metadesign approach for building indigenous multimedia cultural archives that preceded it. Earlier papers include: Pathscape: Indexing Audio-Visual Media (2005) and PathScapes – Interface Options for Visual Indexing (2003)