Anni Albers - Original Op Artist?

I'm doing some research for a vj animation i'm currently working on for Slow Motion Heroes. It's for the upcoming "Wall of Sound" gig on the 28th of December. I'm doing a short projection animation of about 4 minutes, each minute reflecting one of their 4 eps, at the moment i'm working on the (soon to be released) "one liners" ep. My idea was to make something based on op-art, initially I had the work of Sol LeWitt in mind, the textile designs of Anni Albers (which I LOVE!) also sprang to mind as being very similar. I just wanted to share some of the images i've found here. If you're interested, Gunta Stolzl (her peer) also has some amazing textile designs, very inspirational stuff!

Crane Fascination - Rotterdam 2010

I was in Rotterdam last week for another MEP European project meeting with the NMCI. My colleagues in the NMCI are always great company, full of interesting stories about life at sea!

After the meeting was over we went on a short boattrip around the port, which is HUGE! 3rd biggest in the world apparently, there was all this huge machinery and massive, complicated cranes. They looked amazing! Like huge steel dinosaurs, or something from a George Lucas film, deadly!

More over on my flickr

SLOOP2Desc Interim Meeting / Slovenia 2010

I attended the SLOOP2Desc interim meeting in Ljubljana (finally learned how to spell that!) Slovenia last week. It is a EU Leonardo sponsored knowledge transfer project aimed at giving teachers new skills in development of web2.0 learning resources.

We have LOADS of work to do as it is approaching the interim report mark, DEIS is the evaluator in the project so i'll be writing the evaluation report of the project so far over the next few weeks.

Ljubljana is lovely! Beautiful city, very friendly people. It was bizarre there at night time, the streets were deserted, the architecture in the centre of town is really elaborate and ornate, so it was like wandering around in some empty, overblown, moonlit stage set. I also visited the Castle while I was there, it's been redesigned and is now a really interesting piece of modern architecture, coolest castle i've ever visited! Anyway, here are a few photos, more over on my flickr.

Lisbon, Elvin Meeting

Last week myself and a colleague, Shane Cronin traveled to Lisbon to attend the third ELVIN (European Languages Virtual Network) project meeting. ELVIN is a European Union (EU) Lifelong Learning Programme Project aimed at creating an informal social network to support and facilitate language learning.

DEIS has developed an online social network which will be opened up for piloting on the 1st of November (stay tuned for a link!). This meeting concentrated on developing pilot action plans for the upcoming usability tests.

In the meantime myself & Shane got to enjoy Lisbon, it's a fantastic city! It reminded me of an Edinburgh in the sun, it's very old with layers and layers of old streets and arches, quite the labyrinth! One of the highlights was spotting the Blu and Os Gemeos murals I blogged about a while back. So exciting to see them in real life! I'd love to know the process behind doing something like that. The black silhouette photo above is on the building next to the Blu and Os one. It's very striking as it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still under development. Here's a few photos from the weekend. More on my flickr.

Visualising ELVIN

I’ve been working today on visualising the ELVIN social networking platform, the different interactions and the different tools etc that will hopefully pair learners and learners as well as learners and content. We have a skype meeting tomorrow with all partners so hopefully these will go a long way in making sure everyone knows what we’re talking about!

There’s a lot to work out but visualising the process really helps!

Here’s an example of one of the diagrams.

BCO Asteroid Chaser

In DEIS we’re involved in serious games research. We designed, prototyped and piloted a game last year in partnership with the Blackrock Castle Observatory. More about it on my website here. We’re now modifying that game based on the pilot results and further feedback from the astronomers at Blackrock. My role involves designing all the graphic elements of the game and producing cut-scene and in-game animations in flash, which basically means drawing and animating spaceships and meteorites, nice one!

This storyboard panel was produced using illustrator, photoshop and poser3d. I used a nice and very simple comic book effect on the figure and the neon effect in illustrator also came in handy!

Mira Schendel + ELVIN Meeting

I'm just back from the ELVIN tech meeting in Madrid, it went well. We're basically designing, developing and piloting a system that uses social networks to teach language, we're at the very start of the project so loads of work to do yet!

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to have some down time so I went to Reina Sofia, Madrid's modern art museum. It was a great way to spend a morning, stunning building filled with beautiful art. At the moment they have an exhibition of work by Mira Schendel and Leon Ferarri which I LOVED! Here's one of my favourite pieces from it, beautiful sense of light and delicacy, lovely arrangement of shapes/space as well. Letters are fundamentally abstract, but text itself allows very little room for abstraction, ie words have subscribed meanings, the re-abstraction of text here into graphic motifs to create refined and delicate compositions is captivating. It gives me an idea for a new portfolio website, which is typical because I just got a new one up online! It also makes me really want a letraset...

***edit*** Came across this really good post regarding some of the thought processes behind Schendel's work.

Zhou Fan Paintings

I just came across Zhou Fan’s portfolio site on Reform Revolution, it blows my mind. These images in particular are so fascinating and beautifully executed, apparently the series of paintings are based on dreams he had as a child, pretty intense dreams! I’d highly recommend checking out the whole gallery.

In other news, I’m off to Madrid Friday morning for an ELVIN technical meeting where we should hopefully decide which opensource social networking software we’ll be using, my money’s on elgg.

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking

I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.

Sloop2Desc kick off meeting + Essential French Demo

I'm just back from Sicily and the Sloop2Desc kick off meeting, we're evaluators for the project. I've never worked on evaluating an EU project before, so I guess i'll learn as I go along! I'll get a lot of help from my boss in DEIS, who has evaluated plenty of these projects. The project is based around developing an open source learning repository of reusable scorm compliant objects to help IT professionals achieve EUCIP qualifications. EUCIP is a new EU wide industry standard that was developed as part of the EQF.

Sicily was lovely and the partners were very hospitable! I had amazing food every day, good times!

Now it’s back to office work, this week I’m starting storyboards for the Essential French demo. We developed an online course using articulate for Essentail French last summer. A lot of work went into it and it’s very expansive, so now we need a demo to showcase the work!

As part of the work last summer we developed a new branding identity for Essential French, this image is of the new logos I submitted, they eventually choose the flag as it was closest to their original logo.

Rotterdam MEP Meeting

Preparing for the Rotterdam MEP meeting at the moment. Flying to Amsterdam at 5 from Cork, then a train to Rotterdam, i've never been there, there's meant to be amazing architecture so i'm looking forward to taking some nice pictures and seeing some cool buildings - that is if I get a chance to slip away between meetings!

DEIS is working with the NMCI on this project. It's an EU funded project, aimed at developing learning objects to be used in maritime courses. We completed one of the courses last April. It was html / css / flash based scorm module to teach learners about AIS (automated identification systems). We used reload to package the scorm modules. In my experience Reload is quite reliable, and has the bonus of being free!

The course itself was developed along a previous template we used for Citi. The template can be seen to be broadly based on Gagne's Nine Steps of Instruction, in that the focus is on providing learning objectives, reminding the learner of prior knowledge, recalling facts presented, providing opportunities for performance and feedback and priming the mind for further learning. Further learning supports are supplied in the form of links, references, etc. Articulate quizmaker was used to build learning activities for the course.

The Dutch partners are presenting their course at this meeting. It will be interesting to see what technology they used and if they are running a SCORM based course also. I'm not convinced that SCORM is necessarily superior to a straight forward html / css based course, especially at this stage of the project, where it is unclear if anyone will be tracking learners progress on the course.

We are using an LMS called Dokeos, which as far as I know is a descendant of Maricomp - a previous LMS used by the NMCI in EU funded projects. It seems to be much the same as maricomp, but there are some superficial differences in terms of labeling of tools and the interface itself. There were some difficulties with uploading the course to Dokeos. I thought it was a problem with the SCORM package itself so I packaged the course using several different versions of scorm and tested it in Moodle, SumTotal and Maricomp. The course was accepted in these LMS' but not Dokeos, it was quite frustrating and after many calls to our Dutch partners the problem was finally identified as being server related on their end. As is often the case the problem turned out to be quite basic and straight forward! The NMCI have subcontracted DEIS to develop a second course for the MEP project, so hopefully all server issues etc will be straightened out by then!

Just because a post with no pictures is a bit boring... here are some screen shots from the course we developed and packaged last April.