OdysseyNow

OdysseyNow is a multi-year, large-scale media archaeology project to study the world’s first video game console by re-creating its social, cultural, and technical conditions of emergence. The Odyssey inaugurated a major shift in the history of media that forever changed the relationship between large-scale information infrastructure and local interface, generating a new form of interaction with others in both actual and virtual environments. It was developed in the late 1960s and released to the public in 1972. Incredibly sophisticated in comparison to the second generation of video games that are much better known today (including Atari, Intellivision, etc.), the Odyssey “hacked the living room” by reversing the polarity of the television-viewer relationship, creating a circuit that was both electronic and social: it required multiple players and elaborate analog interfaces including decks of cards, gameboards, physical tokens, dice, etc. This complexity, and the melding of digital and analog modes, domestic and virtual spaces, and technological and social dynamics, have made the Odyssey very difficult to understand today.  OdysseyNow dives deeply into the thick context of the Odyssey’s emergence, asking students to peel away the lens of subsequent video game culture to fully engage in media history.  This experimental project includes archiving and restoration, gameplay recreation and documentation, new game development, hardware reverse engineering, the production of new hardware, emulator coding, and the curation of a public-facing web archive.  You can visit our Youtube channel for more!

Glowing Games

Glowing Games is an initiative to recreate the earliest known video and computer games, from the 1950s and 1960s. Long before video games were produced for commercial purposes, they were developed within advanced research labs and academic institutions during the Cold War as experiments in human-machine interaction, demonstrations of cutting edge computer research, and public relations gambits. Created before the advent of standardized hardware or software platforms, these gaming devices had to reinvent the wheel each time, cobbling together experimental vector displays often repurposed from military hardware. Produced on massive hardware, these games were animated by glowing vacuum tubes. Glowing Games is bringing these long lost games back to life using vintage, rebuilt hardware and original schematics and notes from various archival sources. Currently we are focusing on the first real-time computer game, Tennis For Two (1957) and the experimenting with the technology behind the first commercially available computer monitor (1959), which enabled the groundbreaking game Spacewar. Glowing Games is housed in Pitt’s Vibrant Media Lab. It is open to any interested faculty, graduate students, and undergrads.

Archipelago

Archipelago is an open world, exploration-based, miniatures tabletop game that enables players to design complex physical environments to explore and interact within. Inspired by the 1986 classic, Fireball Island, which reproduced an intriguing three-dimensional island landscape for players to explore, Archipelago consists of a generalized ruleset to enable fast-paced exploration-based play in any number of three-dimensional landscapes. The system’s open-ended nature makes it possible for players to design and sculpt their own worlds, with their own histories and dynamics. Gamemasters can design narrative scenarios for their friends and family to play. Unlike roleplaying games, however, Archipelago is based on exploring actually sculpted environments and interacting kinetically with them. The system incorporates real-time and simultaneous play to allow large player counts (2-12 players) to embark on complex adventures without being bogged down by stats or complex rules. Decisions are made quickly and most events are based on physical interactions between miniature figures and features of the island landscapes. Games can scale from a single island to multiple islands that can be traveled between during the course of the game.

The Archipelago project has produced four complex island environments that have been optimized for 3D printing, along with all necessary components and figures. Each island environment (which sometimes consists of multiple smaller islands connected in some way) comes with a setup guide, all 3D models needed for players to print them out, and painting examples in 2D and 3D for players with ambitious aesthetic goals. All files, including hundreds of 3D models, cards, and instructions, will be freely available to anyone to download, build, and play. Guides to designing entirely new islands are also being created to help players create their own complex environments, sculpted digitally or with analog materials.

Archipelago is created by students in classes, VML lab assistants, the game design input of professor Zachary Horton, and graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh. The project began in 2018 and is ongoing.

Scale Explorer

The Scale Explorer is an online platform for the aggregation of scale-encoded image sets that document ecosystems either real or imagined.  Users will be able to upload a set of interrelated images that represent either a real set of entities, a representation of a work of literature, art, or media, or a world of their own invention.  The online platform will then allow such ecosystems to be viewed contiguously (as a telescoping set of scales), as a network of interrelated scales, or as a scalar slice across many different image sets.  The platform thus allows many cultural objects to be encoded, viewed, and analyzed from the standpoint of scale.  Perhaps most radically, it also utilizes scale as the connective tissue to analyze relationships, entities and regions across multiple knowledge domains, from art to science, from the past to the future, from the actual to the virtual.  Visit it here.
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“Song of Myself” Object Ecology Visualization

This digital humanities study of Walt Whitman’s masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” presents three views of the poem: as an interactive, categorical set of nested objects presented in an interactive sunburst visualization, as a set of object distributions over the length of the poem (visualized as a series of time-based graphs), and as marked-up text.  This site is currently down for maintenance.

Vulnerable Earth Media

This ongoing project has so far involved the curation of an annotated database and media archive of films produced in the United States, throughout the history of cinema, thematizing the vulnerability of the earth as a system. Future phases will involve large-scale image analytics (Earth imagery), data visualization of genre, aesthetic, and thematic trends over the history of American media, and a visual and textual genealogy of the history of planetary representation from the early modern period onward.

Scanner Praxis

Scanner Praxis has been an ongoing collaborative maker project designed to investigate book scanning techniques, protocols, and practices.  The project has resulted in the building of an extremely fast prototype book scanner, using an open source frame design and a self-fabricated DSLR triggering and downloading/processing system.

Here is a short introduction to the project, made initially as part of the UCSB English Department’s Graduate Outreach initiative:

For more details, please visit the project page.

Collaborative Media Commons

The CMC seeks to integrate traditional academic theory-based work with collaborative art creation, blurring the lines between narrative and theory, ideas and media objects, and ultimately the academy and the public.  Zach founded the CMC in 2010.  Since that time, collaborative film projects have been integrated into several pilot classes within the Department of English at UC Santa Barbara.  In addition, the CMC has hosted the multi-year, multi-disciplinary Swerve project.

For more information, please visit the CMC site here.