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Description (in English)

Dark Matter' is a fully immersive, physically interactive, three-dimensional digital projection environment. The artwork explores whether the body might be perceived as an absence, inferred from the physical and cultural information around it. In this context, employing multi-agent interaction, people are proposed as emergent 'co-readers' within the context of a dynamic assemblage. The artwork employs the metaphor of dark matter; not only that of a physical character but also cultural. Just as dark matter is believed to bind the universe together it can be proposed that our society is bound by cultural 'dark matter'. In 'Dark Matter' textual material directly linked to events at Abu Ghraib and, specifically, Guantanamo Bay, is employed to explore the nature of the things we "don't know we know", representing a kind of cultural dark matter. Readers physically interact with the textual fragments (within a full physics simulation), their bodies revealed in the subsequent actions and interactions of the text objects. Depending on the number of viewers the the 3D space is rendered from first, second or third person points of view, creating a shifting experience of the immersive environment and proposing varying models of active readership.

(Source: https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/general/work/dark-matter-1.ht… and ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs) 

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Dark Matter
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Description (in English)

IVANHOE is a pedagogical environment for interpreting textual and other cultural materials. It is designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which we understand and study humanities documents. An online collaborative playspace, IVANHOE exposes the indeterminacy of humanities texts to role-play and performative intervention by students at all levels.

While we often refer to IVANHOE as a ?game,? it is important to understand that the concept has broader implications for humanities pedagogy and research, and that many modes of sophisticated, scholarly gamesmanship are possible in the IVANHOE environment. The ?rules? of the game are up to its players and initiators. IVANHOE can foster both competitive and collaborative interaction, well suited to research and teaching.

No, really: what is IVANHOE?

In simple terms, IVANHOE is a digital space in which players take on alternate identities in order to collaborate in expanding and making changes to a ?discourse field,? the documentary manifestation of a set of ideas that people want to investigate collaboratively.

Conceived at SpecLab and developed by ARP, IVANHOE was released to open-source developers under an Educational Community License in late 2006.

(Source: http://www.ivanhoegame.org/?page_id=21)

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