• Halogi - Halloy: “Little forest” first mentioned in 850ad, but existing since the times of the celts (BC) * roman foundations found around the place, including a roman oven with goddess diana burried in the ashes
• one of the first registered wars was the '1 cow war that lasted 12 years'
• for centuries the castle was the summer residence of the prince of Liege

• Omalius
• the geologist and his discovery of the 'cretatious' stratum ( the period between the last large dinosaurs and the beginning of flowering plants)
• the local broadminded scientist being religious, but also a supporter of the beginning theories of evolution
• as a polititian reformed the school system and included girls education up to 12 years
• as a doctor, he founded preventive medicine in the region (vaccination against pox)
• as a scholar set up a massive library in the castle
• died as an old savant (92 yrs old) in brussels studying local geological strata (can his age be attributed to drinking excellent local beer?)
• after he died and his daughter married, her children fought over the division of the property and over 2 centuries brought the castle to a near ruin. some of these descendents were named 'socialist barons' for their policies in the 1920ies when the regions was politically progressive left.

• the appearance of the train-line caused a massive move of the local people from Halloy to Braibant

• in the 2nd WW, Margareta from Ieper (born of a secret love between a Flemish woman and a Brittish officer during the 1st WW), working for the Belgian secret service (resistance) was parachuted and dropped over a grass field close to the chateau to seek a noble man who turned out to be prince Charles of Belgium, with whom she spent several weeks having romantic walks in the forest

• local gastronomy:
• carbonades flamandes (???)
• patate (from hungary!!?)

Leon's presentation was interesting to discover a certain (true/false) history that has changed the group's perception of the site

• Cypher
• Resurrection of the little match girl
• (Flip's martial arts parody)
• St John's Wort

• looking for absurd stuff
• contrast nature/human built structures (based on control)
• light and darkness
• schrijvertjes (surfing community of bugs on water) - interesting patterns of movement
• bridge over the water
• spiky plant
• ferns growing out of a wall
• tar smeared over plants to stop them growing through the road
• iron wire through the branches
• mushrooms as a dwarf village
• contrast between dead and alive, idillic landscape with cows + barbed wire
• a shadow play of branches on a canoe
• experiences of near death (a dying fish in the pond)

• human built objects embedded in nature
• riven-line environment
• electrical lines
• moist wall inside tunnels
• plants growing from a cracked wall
• a sole branch as a separate entity floating in space
• strange plant movements
• “scanning” the environment in a limited way, looking at them as close-up surfaces, without figurative reference points
• mediaeval feel of neglected garden furniture
• overgrown paths
• trees joined up with iron cables, with ivy drying up in contact with them
• pointless bridges over dried up creek
• strange formations of stones around the place
• spider-webs with properties of a glass surface
• waiting in vain for the dwarves around mushrooms
• natural corridors made out of trees
• organic shapes with rigid geometric structures (leaves)
• branches growing on/in the water

• long paths, corridors and tunnels through the forest
• geometric patterns in fallen branches, forming beams with an abstract and complex structure
• strange sized holes in the ground
• vampire nails in beam structure of the barbecue place

• flies everywhere (on cows, horses, people, plants and dead things (mouse, mushrooms)
• waiting for the inhabitants living in human scale dwarf houses
• can beer cans be contemporary mobile homes for dwarves?
• dallas everywhere!
• undulating lines through a wheat field, with mushrooms as landing platforms for dwarves or aliens
• exercises in being a tripod
• death everywhere (dead field mouse with green flies grazing on it)
• miniature gothic church brown by trees
• cows behind fences
• ancient and massive chestnut trees
• discovery of the dwarves wearing stars
• forest ends in fences
• private property warnings
• a seductive dance of leaf-shadows and a neighbouring tree-trunk
• a tree that dreams of being a fence
• DD (designer dwarf) mushroom houses

• fences
• bridge leading to a fence
• abstract signs in a forgotten language
• plants growing through cracks of human built environments
• 'prince charles frog'

Pablo, Eric, Sara, Tom, Flip and Marta have talked about their expectations and wishes for the workshop, have shown previous work and described their working processes

• borders and fences
• frontiers and limits
• human control of nature (and vice versa)
• flies, insects, mushrooms and death
• green is the colour of death?
• green flies and surfing mosquitoes
• are things dead or alive depends on the scale
• structure of spider webs resembling nests/miniature houses
• mushrooms can be seen as drawf dwellings or holes for insects
• geometric patterns as abstractions of the environment:
• grassy fields
• a branch hanging in the air
• structures of trees, branches and leaves:
• casting shadows on the world around them
• encapsulating a path to form an infinite, intricate tunnel
• a straight, noisy, infinite train-line
• insects (ticks, flies, water-walkers)
• different viewpoints on the world: snails, insect swarms, growing plant

• entanglement of:
• natural and artificial
• grown and built
• human and non-human structures
• straight and curved lines (based on their perception and intention)

Julian: http://www.selectparks.net/ ; http://www.escapefromwoomera.org/ ; http://fijuu.com/ Maja, Nik, Lina: http://fo.am ; http://fo.am/tgarden/ ; http://fo.am/txoom ; http://fo.am/groworld ; http://fo.am/p~lot ; http://fo.am/illumine

see: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Tutorials.243.0.html for in depth tutorials

see: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ see: http://mmmaybe.gimp.org/tutorials/ for in depth tutorials see: Nebula Notes for quick overview of the relevant part of nebula for the MR media worlds workshop

• what is the emotional temperature of the world?
• what is the scale of the world? - can you see its limits?
• no photorealistic modelling
• using movement, behaviour of objects and light from the physical world to animate transparent shapes and surfaces
• morphing between realistic/non realistic

• garden as a minefield of truths
• coming with an expectation, gathering information bits based on that expectation
• a gallery of images that one can choose from
• limiting the experience of the physical space
• finding out what is interesting to experience in the virtual world
• a world with constantly changing positions (as leon showed us, history is a relative phenomenon
• travelling through the space as travelling through the archives of historical information. the path becomes the re-interpretation of different elements that are constantly rearranging themselves
• an alive archive in which everyone passing through the chateau (both physical and virtual should place a new media element in the world, generating a large amount of paths through the 'truths'
• movement as a journey through different strata (metaphor for history); the movement needs the space to be manipulated (requires a large amount of energy)
• an archive (database) of memories in different media come to life in animated bitmaps
• every stratum is one person's experience, a three dimensional cube surrounded by other strata (needs an immersive projection system with at least 2 faces

• a dense space, filled with particles, moving from empty to full
• simplicity: a claustrofobic world made up from a swarm of particles
• when you stand still, the world shrinks and sticks to your skin (like a swarm of fireflies)
• when you move and increase the energy in the system, the world becomes sparser, lighter and more comfortable

• discovering things, being drawn to details, in an otherwise not too exciting surrounding. elements of wonder inside normalised reality
• the discovered objects are passages, new realities that you can discover through interaction
• light inside a tunnel can suck you into another space
• feeling of surprise and enchantment, seduced by the richness of the world underneath, behind…
• creating a fantastic world within the everyday reality, in a constant morph between reality and fiction

• a tunnel: environment in which i'm limited, i can only see inaccessible realities that are not immediately evident, a tunnel is constructed from the density of the forest that i can't go through
• feeling the navigation of insects under the floor - recognising the action only through its effects on the environment
• inviting, inaccessible realities
• the tunnel is created by different creatures passing through it. if the movement stops, the tunnel closes. the forest is continuously trying to take back its posession of the tunnel
• tunnel: an eco-system of invisible beings
• emotion: frustration, imagination
• finding your own scale in different dimensions, a cozy situation in an otherwise threatening environment
• coherence of infinite tunnels through a diversity of media

• no physical boundaries (walls)
• limits are changing atmosphere: border, connection
• walls as particle systems, movables, changing direction, becoming ceilings, floors, walls again
• changes remain until the next intervention

• the world is a representation of the site and history of the chateau seen through personal experiences of the group; translated into a virtual topology; reorganised reality, a dynamic trace

• a dense, infinite tunnel built out of tiny elements (particles). every particle of the tunnel is alive
• when the player scales the particles s/he can discover:
• bits of historical sediment
• flying insects
• visual and sonic seeds
• fully grown flora

• when the train passes in the physical world (should be detected by its sound), the world is temporarily washed away:
• the player looses control over the interaction with the world, the colours and objects disappear
• the space vibrates and its physical properties temporarily change
• the player can be teleported to another region of the tunnel

• increasing the energy in the system allows the player tokeep the environment from taking posession of the tunnel, as well as to move through different spaces and emotional temperatures

• the world responds differently depending on the amount of time spent in it. It moves from being unfriendly to friendly, or from interested to ignoring. the world is a forgetful place, so that after some time, it will treat a familiar player as a novice again

introduction to accelerometers, cerfs, OSC and OZ (foam's sensor data transmission and analysis system (in max)) real and pseudo sensors possible to use in the design:

• raw data (x,y or xyz)
• smoothed data/bias
• average over time
• leaky accumulator
• peak detection
• zero crossing
• delta/threshold
• energy levels (x,y,z)
• correlation

• mixing between forms
• manipulating textures
• changing the size of a form
• non-linear scaling
• rotating forms
• growing forms
• appearing and disappearing
• minimalising light position and light colour
• moving forms
• concluded with an introduction to tlc scripting in nebula

• in fijuuu: a cave (one thick part of the tunnel) with:
• 1 interactive object in it (swarm of fireflies)
• 3 animated objects (historic sediment, visual seed, branch)
• rich texture visualising the idea of the tunnel being constructed out of media particles
• interaction consists of: (1) looking around the cave by rotating around 2 different axis of the accelerometer and (2) shattering the swarm of fireflies by using the 'leaky accumulator' (accumulating data across 3 axis with a small 'leakage')

• in blender: a richer visualisation of the tunnel, with lots more textured objects, moving lights and camera + an intro sequence of a dynamic map of the region of halloy
• in max: a passing train detector, to be treated as a sensor in fijuuu
• in after effects: compositing of the blender tunnel with a swarm of butterflies
• in the physical world: a semi-transparent screen placed in front of a tunnel, creating an illusion of depth, projection on different surfaces to create an additional texture (walls, stairs, grass, trees, corners, people…)

• production of assets in blender and gimp and runtime scripts in nebula

• programming the interaction
• alternative visualisation in blender, max and after effects
• feasibility check and evaluation of the process

• finishing touches
• physical displays
• public experiment
• blow-ball tournament

• closing brunch and departures

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some workshop notes from an xmedk workshop