User:Louisa/Final Presentation
Final Presentation
Background
I am a Rotterdam based digital artist working with themes around gaming and the effect of new technologies on the player's perception of reality. By analysing gameplay methods and implementing them into real-life settings, I am creating scenarios in which the viewer turns into the protagonist of an interactive fictional narrative.
Hybrid Games and Events
There's Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You
October 2020
As part of my event programming residency Hamburger Community of Live at Roodkapje, I supported artist in residency Gill Balwin with the production of her audio tour 'There's Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You', featuring a series of Interviews she recorded in conversation with people about the rise of surveillance, crowd control and tracking during lockdown times. As an architecture graduate, she was interested in coupling the content of the various interviews with sites around the center of Rotterdam that support the story. I suggested to set this up in a way that people could take the tour independently, with the help of a map and qr code stickers on location that link to an online audio file of the interview. The process of walking through the city and noticing the way that specific side streets or buildings make you feel while listening to the personal stories was super interesting and gave me inspiration on how to gamify this basic structure. Especially during lockdown, using the city as a venue was one of the only ways to program events aside from online platforms. With ever changing rules and restrictions, planning with the city itself instead of an institution was the only relativiely reliable way of working.
Climb the Firewall
December 2020
I Have No Idea Where We're Going/IRL ENERGY
April 2021
Earthrise
May 2021
Cybernetic Dreams
October 2021
EtherAxis
November 2021
Graduation
Thesis Research: Asphalt Spur
Project: 868 MHz
Narrative
XPUB Grad 868 MHz is a hybrid reality game running on the same standardized frequency as the LoRa gateways of The Things Network.
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Rotterdam is one of many cities world-wide in the process of building an Urban Data Platform (UDP), a sort of mirror world of real-time data collected in public space via smart devices. A major facilitator of this development is The Things Network, a global IoT Network connecting thousands of sensors through long range radio transmission. From lampposts to advertisement screens, sourced information is not only collected, but can be processed and fed back into the city streets to adjust spaces and manipulate citizens' movement through them. 868 MHz suggests a player's mod of this framework of scattered, hidden devices feeding into one central server.
Chase the electric currents of the asphalt to locate gateways and encounter a being which has nested itself beneath the city streets, all the way down the power lines woven amidst to its whirring epicentre. Encased in its concrete and metal armour, lie the keys to the pulsating veins of a mirror world. Whatever makes it inside its bloodstream, will travel fast and eternally through the nexus of time and space it occupies in that instant.