The Magna Carta Unification Event might sound more like a Pay-Per-View American-Wrestling event but it was in fact an event at the British Library where the 4 remaining copies of the 1215 Magna Carta were brought together for the first time in their 800 year history.
Unfortunately, this event lasted for a single day and only then if you were one of the 1215 lottery winners selected at random. If you want to view these 4 originals you still can but you’ll have to travel to the British Library, Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral, as they each have their own exhibitions. (The British Library owns two 1215 copies – although one was badly damaged in the Cotton Library Fire of 1731.)
[Side Note: It’s all been a bit quiet on my website the past few months. As with most people – having a quiet website is actually a sign that they’re really busy. My main excuse is the arrival of a ‘little person’ but I’ve also been speaking at conferences, teaching touch-table development and working on a host of exciting projects. I’m going to try to get the website up-to-date in the next few weeks. First up is an early work-in-progress!]
WTF is a Diptych? 🙂 Just incase you’ve not come across it before. It generally used in the art world to refer to a pair of images that complement each other in some way. You might be more familiar with it’s more popular bigger-brother the Triptych. These are three panel paintings, and a famous example is the Francis Bacon work Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
This is something I’ve been keen on for a while – having people who use the table actually build something. Perhaps something they can take away physically or digitally. Generally these ideas have been things like curate their own exhibition, create a customised newspaper or create a top ten of favourite people / things.
Touch tables are fantastic for not only viewing photos, but also for manipulating them. So a natural fit is a collage application – although it’s taken me a while to get round to building on.
If you’ve not seen VanGoYourself before – stop reading right now and go check it out here. Definitely a fine example of ‘the best ideas are the simplest ideas’. The tagline is pretty much covers it: “recreate artwork with friends”.
It’s a website with classic (copyright free) works of art which you then use as inspiration to recreate yourselves. But… this doesn’t really do it justice. How about “Collaborative engagement with art in a social context” but I didn’t use the buzzwords “deep, meaningful connection”. Anyway it’s just a fantastic idea that legitimizes playing with art and produces masterpieces like this:
Photos always work fantastically well on large touch tables. They are natural for even a novice to handle, can be moved, expanded and generally just passed around. With the right content conversations between users comes automatically.
However there are two problems with this – curating the content in the first-place and secondly ensuring the content remains fresh. I’ve thought for a long time that you could solve both these problems if you connected to an existing ‘stream’ of photos – something like ColorizedHistory on Reddit or HistoryInPics on twitter. That was why I was delighted to meet @BeThirtySix who runs Birmingham’s very own BrumPic twitter account:
Introduction “Agent in a Box” (AiaB) is a project I’m working on with Katie Day of The Other Way Works and Alyson Fielding of Pyuda. It can be thought of as a prequel to Black Tonic, an existing Interactive Theatre Experience developed in 2008 by The Other Way Works.
It was originally envisioned as a single player, time-limited experience for the intended audience of a business traveler, trapped in a hotel away from home. As an alternative to watching hotel-room TV or replying to emails – why not take on your alter ego of a spy for an hour?
Introduction This project is based on an idea to build a budget-version of the ‘Star Trek Holodeck‘. This is not a particularly novel idea – it’s been the holy-grail of Virtual Reality for the past 30 years! There are a number of people working with a variety of tracking devices and budget virtual reality equipment to produce similar solutions. This version uses external infra-red cameras for tracking and the Oculus Rift for the headset.
Introduction On the 3rd September 2013, the new Library of Birmingham (LoB) opened and became Europe’s largest public library. As part of the Digital Heritage Demonstrator project we collaborated with the LoB staff to develop a novel touch table experience for the general public that showcases their varied collections.
The LoB is the custodian of a number of important archive collections. These include Wingate Bett Ticket Collection, Parker Children’s Books Collection, Great Western Railway Collection, USA postcard collection, Song Sheets and Silent Movie Scores Collection and numerous photographic collections. The design challenge, therefore, was to help make the public more aware of the vast array of collections available at the Library (as opposed to focusing on a single collection). In particular, it was decided that it should encourage discussion between multiple users and be a starting point for conversations with library staff instead of being a single-user research tool.
Introduction This work was a collaboration with Jez Collins who runs the Birmingham Music Archive (BMA). The project was to investigate whether it would be possible to build an Audio Tour guide based around the music heritage of Birmingham.
Birmingham Music Archive is an online resource that celebrates, preserves and shares Birmingham’s rich Music Heritage. Content includes photographs, ticket stubs, audio clips, videos, stories etc as described here:
_“_We believe music provides us with memories, individual and shared experiences and self expression. For us, these memories and meaning can be stirred by a vast array of music ephemera, it could be a song, it might be a photograph or a ticket stub or it could be someone else’s recollections that make a connection with you and trigger your music experiences. And we aren’t just interested in the ‘star’ names. We want to hear about ALL the music activity in the city."