Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design BA

I have had quite a few idea on different things which I would like to produce so far which you can see in the pages on my sketch books. They mainly revolve around creating a digitally controlled object. My ideas so far are:

• To create a gallery piece where two crt monitors displaying faces are set facing each other. People would be able to visit a website and take control of one of the monitors in order to have a conversation with people using the other monitor. The aim would be to create a way in which people can engage in "real" conversation digitally. It would try to explore ideas around privacy and our concepts on communicating over time. I could sum it up really basically by saying its annomous skyping with random people while others watch in a real location.
• To hack a type writer so that it would create a physical copy of digital tweets.
• To create a multiplayer web game where the course which the players act within is controlled by a physical object presented in a public or gallery space. A quick way in which I though of this working was to make a version of Astroids where instead of destroying Astroids the players work together to destroy objects which people using the physical gameworld controls are creating.
• As above but instead of generating a game it would create some form of dynamic art piece which could be both projected within the space and viewed online.
• I also thought of reversing the roles between online and physical space by creating some form of projection which online players could attack and distort, therefore having a direct impact on the work on display.

With this ideas I am quite worried that after looking at some Arduino tutorials and thinking about how I could go about creating them that I might be very technically challenging.

I spoke with one of my tutors about the first Idea and he was interested in the direction it was going but felt like it could be pushed even further. He suggested that I could play on the idea of control and dominance by altering the size and positions of the displays so to users it feels like one of them is "stronger".

Alot of these ideas have a common theme of a tangible web based element which is the same to all who are viewing it. I think this is really interesting and I plan to explore this idea more.