Flash, arts and happiness

Eyedentity is a project of a few fellow students, in cooperation with the TV Show Holland Doc. Unfortunately for non-Dutch-speaking people, it’s all in Dutch… But here’s what this is all about.

Eyedentity is an experiment about survival in the virtual world. After several rounds of casting, a participant has been chosen to be locked up in a room with only a computer hooked up to the internet to communicate with the outside world - even phonecalls are out of the question. Jennifer, that’s her, must even order her own food from the ‘net. Parcels will be deliverd to the researchers, who will then hand them over to Jennifer, as to limit physical contact with the outside world as much as possible. Also, she can be followed with a webcam 24/7 from the project webpage. How will she survive this modernist trail?

I’m really curious as to how much damage this abstinence from the outside world (even during ‘Sinterklaas’ and Christmas!) will do to her (not to worry, there’s a shrink on stand-by). Even though I am more of a ‘net person than most, after a few days of no (physical) contact I get rather bored, irritated and generally craving for human contact. And then I’m not even speaking of having a webcam following me all day…

Update: As you might have gathered (I am a little late in reporting), the whole thing was a fake. The creators wanted to create an experience about online privacy, about what it means. According to them, it comes down to:

You are what you pretend to be

I don’t really know about outsiders, but being in on this project (I helped out with a bit of the programming) was quite an experience as well. There were quite a few dubious happenings (for example: there were obviously repeating clips, or a large (plastic) gull flying through the room), and still people kept believing. For example, she (or, at any rate, the person behind the chat) was asked if she noticed the gull flying trough the room. She could deny it, and people believed her instead of their own eyes.

Wonderful.

Jesper Juul has just posted a new (experimental) game, along with a questionaire. He is researching for some new games. So, if you’d like to help him, head over here to his weblog, play a game and answer a few questions.

You can also head straight to the test page.

Hello and thank you for waiting.

I have been rather busy lately (and been on vacation for a few weeks) so updating my weblog didn’t go as planned. Sorry for that…

As I have told, I have been working on the website for ‘The Selfish Gene‘. It has worked out very well and I am very pleased with the result - as is Lola, who commisioned the project. All the lamps you can see on the website are dynamically generated, based on the genes Lola enters in the database. We did have a few headaches concerning the mathematics though.

Unfortunately, I still cannot tell you much about the project I was enrolled in last time. However, we’ve had a few very promising meetings and it is most likely that two of our three concepts will be implemented in the real world outside our school. I’ll keep you posted.