Thursday, January 15, 2009

"Thank You!" to the Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore

Babbage Cabbage: Color changing cabbage raises awareness and empathy for the world's important issues.

dDNA: Glowing E. coli bacteria used to make an ambient living display and to explore the notion of telempathy.


Over the past two years, I have had the unique pleasure to work closely with the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore under Dr. Adrian David Cheok. In this time, we have worked on a number of award winning interactive systems including biological media installations such as the Babbage Cabbage (Nokia Mindtrek Winner 2008 and LAVAL Revolution Winner 2009) and the dDNA: Empathetic Living Media paper that I presented at the DIS2008 conference in Capetown, South Africa. I have moved on to explore the more theoretical aspects of bioart and biological media from another perspective and through a process of design-oriented research. Through the realization of biological media installations and interactive systems, I hope to uncover a new pattern language of bioart and biological media. I remain very grateful for the experiences in the Mixed Reality Lab and I hope to continue to collaborate with the great researchers in the future.

Sincerely,
Tim Merritt
Post Graduate Research Scholar
Communications and New Media Dept.
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences
National University of Singapore
ArsBiologica.org


References:

Mixed Reality Lab Website: http://www.mixedrealitylab.org

Mindtrek 2008 Nokia Ubimedia Award. Third Place. Babbage Cabbage: Empathetic Biological Media
http://www.mindtrek.org/2008/competition


LAVAL Revolution 2009 Winner:
http://www.laval-virtual.org/revolution/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid=66

A.D. Cheok, R.T.K.C. Tan, T. Merritt, O.N.N. Fernando, Y.P. Sen and D.T.K. Nguyen. 2008. Empathetic Living Media. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems DIS 2008, February 2008, Cape Town, South Africa, pp. 465-473.

Words to help search engines place this blog:
bioart bio-art biological-art biomedia bio-media biological media empathy telempathy ddna babbage cabbage mindtrek mxr interactive media insect art plant-based media