Because of the bank holiday, this months ‘Super Monday’ was somewhat strangely on a Tuesday, and to confuse us still further, it was in a different part of the university. …but regarless of the day it lived up to its regular high standards.
We were lucky enough to be invited to the ‘Culture lab’. Headed up by Atau Tanaka, this a unique research facility with academics and practitioners working alongside artists, creatives and scientists developing innovative research and digital tools. I’m not altogether unfamiliar, with this part of the university having been amongst the first people to use its resources (I was involved in the recording of Candice Brietz “working Class hero” project for BALTIC in 2006), and I’ve made several visits since.
The normal teas and coffee’s part of the evening took place in ‘space2’on the ground floor, where we had an opportunity to meet some of the culture labs residents and see some of the projects they are working on, from gadget enabled ‘ambient kitchens’, design to aid people with a wide range of medical conditions, to internet enabled jewellery, and multi touch control surfaces. There were also an opportunities to take a closer look at some of the latest technologies like the fantastic 3d printer.
Much of the research itself looks at the interactions between users and technologies, and in someways the people I spoke to weren’t that bothered by the actual technology itself. Many of the projects in fact used surprisingly simple technologies, but used it in incredibly clever ways. I looked at two projects in particular that were very interesting to my work at BALTIC.
The first dealt with the problem of interpretation material. One of the problems that galleries generally face is, visitors often have different levels of art knowledge, and artists don’t generally like having too much information on display next to the artwork – as this can be very distracting. So it was interesting to see how both rfid and scan able labels could be used with mobile phones, image readers and kiosks to provide information points.
The second interesting project involved a homemade ‘surface’ like touch screen. It would seem that a major problem with multi touch technologies is keeping track of multiple users, the solution involved using multiple cameras to track not only the touches, but also users between touches. Some of the possible applications were quite interesting, allowing visitors to collaborate in new , innovative and creative ways.
The second part of the evening took place upstairs in one of the lecture theatres, with a more formal talk from Patrick Oliver and Dr Jayne Wallace on some of the bigger projects taking place in culture lab.
The final speaker of the evening was Andrew Waite, Andrew introduced us to the concept of ‘honeypotting’. As an IT manager, network security is really interesting to me, so I for one found Andrews talk fascinating. Andrew uses Nepenthes, a low interaction honeypot which emulates several known vulnerabilities to security, allowing him to monitor and detect attacks on his systems. The ultimate goal is to capture live malware samples, in the safety of the honeypot, which he can then be examined to get an insight into what they are doing and how they work.
