The eclectic backgrounds and experiences of the Soda team typically bridge artistic and technical divides. Their personal art practice and research reflects this breadth of interests and enriches the culture of creativity that Soda supports.
Recent entries by team members more
Passing by 26 November 07
Soda friend and collaborator James Tindall brings us Passingby, a never ending video journey assembled from brief travel glimpses from around the world. Add your own clips via youTube or just sit back and enjoy.
Make way for play 8 October 07
On Friday 19th October I’ll be taking part in the 2007 Cinekid Festival, which is an annual Film, Television and New Media Festival for Children that is held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In the morning I’m promised to be providing brain-food for media/ICT creatives and in the afternoon I’ll make way for play.
b.TWEEN Users as developers 17 May 07
Fiddian is leading a panel entitled ‘Users as developers’ at the UK’s biggest interactive media industry gathering b.TWEEN07 on June 15th. The panel will look at what strategies can be employed to meaningfully involve users in content and application development. Sodaplay, Newtoon and Animoodle will be Soda’s key exemplars. Come along, say hello and contribute to the debate. b.TWEEN07 is… Innovation, Information and Inspiration for Digital Entrepreneurs… Turning Creativity into Cash
Secret Moovl fan? 17 May 07
One of my countless automated internet spys recently noticed a brand new moovl blog on the interwebs. Soda is clueless as to who is running it, but whoever it is - they are doing a good job promoting our much loved Moovl.
Bets are on our publisher being the culprit - but nobody really knows. A mystery!
Digitally Ours 30 March 07
Soda is appearing in Digitally Yours, an international digital art exhibition collaborated by Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova museum and The Regional Art Council of Southwest Finland. As well as featuring Sodaplay the exhibition has been an opportunity to work with Zach Lieberman on an all new version of Ed v Zach.
An architectual association 7 February 07
On the afternoon of Wednesday 14th February I’ve been invited to give a lecture at the Architectural Association. This open event has been organised by the AA’s New Media and Info Systems Research Cluster led by Joel Newman, Theo Spyropoulos and Vasilis Stroumpakos.
Is subscription the next search? 19 January 07
Richard Sedley, director of cScape‘s Customer Engagement Unit, asked Soda to contribute a few thoughts for a small end of year brochure reflecting on the space we are working in (or rather one of the spaces soda is):
Search is key to the internet - it has been for a while and it will be for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately the very nature of searching always requires the user to have quite detailed knowledge of what he/she is actually looking for. Subscription is an powerful alternative way to access the vast amount of information on offer. Rather then searching for specific information you subscribe to a trusted source of information. Just like search, subscription is well established and supported already. There are few online publishers left who do not yet offer their content for subscription via RSS, atom, or email.
The challenge lies in helping users to identify the trustworthy and valuable sources and more importantly, to manage and maintain a vast collection of these sources. The real danger we need to mitigate against is that of loosing control, not because there is too much noise but because there is a such colossal quantity of potentially valuable signal.
Soda Excites Minds 27 November 06
We were delighted to be invited to exhibit at Creative Partnerships’ Conference and Arena this week. In inflatable pods the Arena showcased some of the most innovative creative work currently going on in partnership with young people. Soda was honoured to be exhibiting alongside such company as The British Council, The Guardian, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Arts Council England, Futurelab, FACT, etc. etc. Groovy artist architects Muf were recreating a dramatic and colourful school installation they have been working on and grand verbaliser Mickey was heroically captaining Talkaoke The event was produced to inform creative teachers from around the country about the work of Creative Partnerships and engage them in debate about future best practice.
paying attention to attention 30 August 06
Tried out a recent version of Touchstone briefly and although it’s got lots of interesting ideas (and quite a bit of implementation as well), it won’t yet work for me until it has a few key features - technically, the ability to work with https-delivered and authenticated feeds are mandatory for the way I subscribe to feeds now, and from a interaction point of view the ability to manually segment (or mark up) feeds (on subscription) into different types with different attention-management heuristics - news, events and alerts…
Fiddian at BNMI’s Interactive Screen 06 21 August 06
Last week I was very privileged to again attend the Banff New Media Institute’s annual Interactive Screen Workshop. Incredibly situated in the Banff National park high in the Canadian Rocky Mountains Interactive Screen brings creative digital media practitioners and theorists from all over the world to share work and related discourse, some pics are at iascreen06.
It was great to have an opportunity to play Blast Theory’s ‘Can you see me now’. I really felt for Matt and Ju being ‘runners’ in the game for an hour at 5,000 feet.