Putting the man in the machine – an overview of performance capture at the Imaginarium

Rich Holleworth – CTO, The Imaginarium

Performance Capture is the technique and technology of transferring an Actor’s dramatic interpretation of a role into that of a Digital Character. In this talk Rich Holleworth will present an overview of the history and rationale of performance capture throughout the ages- touching on rotoscoping, the late Ray Harryhausen (and dynamation), Motion Capture, Video Games, and of course the Imaginarium’s own Andy Serkis. Next we will address the practicalities and principles of modern performance capture and its growing adoption and integration into film processes. Finally we will examine the future directions opening at both large scale “Industrial” Performance Capture facilities such as the Imaginarium or WETA, and off-the-shelf “Domestic” systems such as the Kinect and even your own mobile phone.

Mind and Body: Engaging Humans with Play

Heather Kelley - Designer at Perfect Plum and Assistant Teaching Professor, Entertainment Technology Centre, Carnegie Mellon University, USA 

New directions in digital, physical, social and blended reality games highlight the ability of play to continually engage the human senses. Games have an outstanding capacity to direct human attention toward particular dynamics (social, psychological, power, etc), and to READ MORE

Engaged Human – A spectrum of academic research and innovation

Chair: Professor Atau Tanaka – Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London

Dislocated Presence

Dr. Freida Abtan – Programme Convenor, Music Computing, Department of Music, Goldsmiths, University of London

Technologies which capture and represent human gestures don’t all function the same way and reduce human engagement and performance to different essential properties. What is human presence when it’s no longer centred on the body?  How do different kinds of
representations speak about their origins?

Creative Feedback

Professor Mark d’Inverno – Pro-Warden for Research and Enterprise, Goldsmiths, University of London

Arguably one of the most important activities of universities is to provide environments where students develop the wide variety of social and intellectual skills necessary for giving and receiving feedback. We are not talking here about the rather dreary compliance-inflected
pre-existing notions of feedback but the profoundly creative and human act of giving and receiving feedback in order to validate, challenge and inspire. So as to emphasise we are talking about this kind of feedback, we coin the term “creative feedback”.

In this talk I will aim to characterise its qualities and take a historical look at the concepts of creativity/creative in order to ground our use of this specific term. I will then present Music Circle – that has been developed as part of a large European grant – which is an innovative technology supporting creative feedback in communities of learners that has been successfully employed with several thousand engaged users.

Data Dramatization

Memo Akten – Goldsmiths IGGI Centre for Doctoral Training, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London

Inspired by the processes that shape our lives, Memo uses the tools of science as a lens to the world. Through visual, sonic and behavioural metaphors he creates artefacts that reveal, extract, amplify and abstract the unseen harmonies, tensions and poetry found within these
phenomena. His work plays at the boundaries between abstract and figurative, and spans multiple disciplines including images, videos, sound, light, digital sculptures, dance, large scale installations, performances, software and online works.