Some of the AZ Labs folks just spent 10 days in artistic residency in Guimarães focusing on the theme of Creative Politics, how to bring the people back in touch with politics and engage them in political issues. Many ideas were discussed, you can access more info at our wiki.

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Some members of the AZ Labs community have been gathering in artistic residency in Guimarães once more, the topic for this residency is Creative Politics, meaning to come up ideas and projects connecting the citizens back with the political system. Complaining is easy, presenting solutions is harder. Citizens feel disconnected with politics and disengage themselves from these issues. We are trying to counter that with artistic or otherwise useful projects and proposals.

During the first weekend we had running at LCD a parallel event named Antropocode, part of the Atlantic Arc Summer of Labs 2012. During the weekend over a dozen artists and hackers from Portugal and Spain were gathered developing concepts and projects in a hackaton about the borderline of body and technology. Some of the projects were also related to the creative politics theme.

The hackaton is now over but the Creative Politics artistic residency continues with a dozen other folks, mostly folks from Portugal but also including some foreigners. The first days have been focused on brainstorming project ideas. You can find more information on our wiki.

Some examples of projects currently being developed:

• Reclaiming Data
  Research and documentation of open data initiatives in Portugal, the end goal is to develop a viral video calling for more active participation and involvement from the citizens or a webtool to request missing data.
• Hacking Urban Resources
  Research and documentation of ways to hack urban resources to improve the way of life at a local level in Guimarães, bringing back the control of the city to the citizens. A sample book on how to re-appropriate, re-use local resources and also on how to re-learn useful old skills.
• Political Manager
  A web based game where you play the role of a rising politician and have to improve your skills to build your career without succumbing to the pressures of the dark side.
• Comparative News
  The goal of this project is to help citizens understand the trends and tendencies in the political discourse that the media present to them everyday. The strategy is to compare different sources of information, like newspapers, radio and television using data visualization. The intuition behind this project is that comparing sources enable people to see the big picture, to identify what’s important and what’s not.

During the July project exhibit that occured at Guimarães some of us took the opportunity to also do a little get together and brainstorm some ideas for projects for upcoming events such as the Creative Politics Residency happening in October and Codebits happening in November.

Many issues were brought to the table that night thinking about why our society is in this crisis and how to fix it. Some claimed the problem lies on the elected officials, others stated the people were not interested in politics enough to cast well grounded votes, that the whole process was a propaganda façade. There is no accountability for void campaign promises. So every election boils down to another propaganda campaign and focus group promises. The truth is the majority of voters don’t have time, nor interest, to get to know what their representatives are doing while in office, nor do they know their real intentions. ARTV exists, but people don’t watch it.

One radical idea one of us had was to pass a law to make every member of parlament sing before speaking at the assembly. Singing brings joy. Soon the concept morphed into another, hack the ARTV stream and realtime songify everything that was being said, that is, making automated music out of what is being said. And yes, it’s possible. Might get a bit boring after the first few minutes though.

A few weeks later i found this app for iphone that did just that, turn realtime speech into song. It’s called Songify by Khush Inc. They also have a Rappify app which does the same but turning it into rap instead of pop. As soon as i tested the app an urge came over me to bring this idea into a concept album asap. And now that i finally found myself with a couple days of free time, here it is.

The concept slightly mutated to songify a televised talk about corruption in Portugal. To make things clear: the point is not to mock the talk about anti-corruption, but to bring more awareness to it.

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Summer was getting boring so i decided to make a new album and start a new netlabel.

The album is called “LCD Mostra-se” and is a collection of field recordings from the self-titled event that occured in Guimarães on the 21 and 22 of July, organized by our LCD brothers.

It’s available free for download as the first release of Audiência Zero Sound Archives, the newly formed netlabel dedicated to release audioworks related to our Audiência Zero labs network (LCD, xDA and altLab).

Planning

Following up the disapointment of Cyboman 5 placing so low at Stream i decided to try again with a new javascript intro. I had also recently finished work on the “Under a Seering Sky” javascript game. Another disapointing competiton result, this time from Atparty wild competition. The new target event was DemoJS, a demoparty in Paris focusing on javascript and browser technologies. DemoJS popped up last year sponsored by Mozilla during their 2011 campaign to get more demos for the browser with a few events across the world. Competition would probably be harder but atleast the attending audience would more likely know what they are voting on. Aimed again for pure canvas, no webgl. There are still lots of things on the canvas specification that folks don’t seem to be using that much, i wanted to explore that a bit.

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Under a Seering Sky

Is a web gamebook about a sci-fi world of cyberpunk hackers struggling to survive under big brother and a zombie outbreak. Click here to play.

Background

While growing up in my teens i used to read a lot of fantasy. In fact i almost had the complete series of Fighting Fantasy books. Used to spend evenings locked in my room with multiple fingers of one hand marking different pages on the book while the other hand would cheat a frustrated dice roll and pretend my 7/12 character was actually good enough to beat a 12/10 giant worm or something.

The imaginary of those books had a certain call and fascination about them. When i began coding on the ZX Spectrum one of the first games i developed was a haunted mansion interactive fiction type of game. I didn’t actually like playing that genre of games, I recall trying to play The Hobbit on the Spectrum and never getting very far. But i had just learned coding BASIC so the graphics of the good games was still unachievable. These kind of text based games were the ones i could invest my creativity into.

When i got a PC and started learning Turbo Pascal on MS-DOS, again those where the kind of games i developed before i started programming graphics. They were all crap, and i’m unsure if any copies of them are left anywhere, but i made them, they were mine, i invented the story, i invented the monsters, i decided the plot, i decided how the player would die! And that was a great feeling i had back then, the feeling i could create other worlds for people to explore.

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