On May 7, 2012, Santa Cruz Film Festival President, Elizabeth Gummere came onto Artist on Art to talk this great annual event that brings scads of filmmakers, directors, actors to Santa Cruz for rollicking fun ten days.
This is our eleventh festival and runs May 10-19, 2012. Here’s a PDF with the list of movies and showtimes.
If you missed any part of our Artist on Art broadcast, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Founding Organizer of TechRaising, Strategist, Critical Thinker, and Change Agent, Andrew Mueller came on to Gamers on Gamer on April 30, 2012 to talk about the recent second annual event TechRaising Santa Cruz Spring 2012.
This year’s TechRaising began Friday, April 20, at 6:00 PM with a gathering to pitch ideas and ended Sunday, April 22, at 6:00 PM with the demonstration of prototypes built over the course of the weekend. It is a weekend startup blitz designed to take ideas for new web-based businesses and bringing them to reality. Most teams include a designer, developer and a business developer. Volunteer mentors help by roaming the event and injecting knowledge and sage advice wherever needed.
During the show, Andrew explained that he and co-founders Mathew Swinnerton and Margaret Rosas, began TechRaising in an effort to help create a friendly environment for tech startups in Santa Cruz. Their mission it to “provide the space and support for individuals to gather, collaborate, build, promote, and gain momentum for their ideas.” The collaborations created at this annual event have lead to several successful new application creations.
If you missed any part of our Gamers on Game broadcast, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Here is the video from our interview:
On April 16, 2012, graduating Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, Ken Hullett came into KZSC and onto Gamers on Game to talk about his research in game design.
Ken spoke in length about his dissertation, The Science of Level Design: Design Patterns and Player Behavior in FPS Levels. Ken’s research is in the Center for Games and Playable Media Department and in the Augmented Design Lab with Jim Whitehead as his advisor.
We started the conversation with defining what level design which is level designers create gameplay through geometry, AI scripting, and item placement. Designers draw from their experience, design lore, and rules of thumb rather than a formal understanding of how the construction of a level creates gameplay for a player. To improve this understanding, Ken and his research group have taken a first by identifying design patterns in game levels, primarily in single player first-person shooters (FPS) and studying the cause-effect relationships between these level design elements and gameplay. To test these relationships, they are gathering data from a series of user tests. Analysis of this data will improve our understanding and provide level designers with scientifically verified tools for creating gameplay.
We explored Ken’s other research interests concerning Design in Games: Level Design, Design Patterns in Games, Game Data Analysis, Player Modeling, and Procedural Content Generation.
Ken is a part of the first cohort to graduate from the Department of Computer Science (CS) with Ph.D. degrees. This program is considered one of the top ten graduate schools in video game design.
If you missed any part of our Gamers on Game broadcast, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Here’s the video of our interview:
On February 20, 2012, multi-media artist and graduating DANM MFA student, Sabrina Habel spoke with Nada Miljkovic about her art work and upcoming installation entitled, Seeing Spectacle, as a part of the DANM MFA 2012,I’ve Got Something On Your Mind.
Sabrina was the first DANM interview that I had in this year’s series of 2012 DANMite graduates. It was really fun to talk with her about her various forms of art. It has also been exciting to watch her work show around Santa Cruz over the past two years, such as partaking in the First Friday Santa Cruz Art Tour with an installation entitled, Cyphergraph, at Motiv, and her Hypnagonian work. You’ll have to listen the interview to hear what that means.
During our show, Sabrina explained the concept behind Seeing Spectacle, that “advertisement is everywhere- in magazines, on TV, the Internet, plastered over shopping malls and urban areas. Together all these advertisements form a mass media spectacle of desire, fantasy, and above all, consumption.” Sabrina’s multi-media series Seeing Spectacle uses off-beat humor to confront the essence of advertising. Commercial products and celebrities are replaced by simple and even mundane natural elements, usually taken for granted in consumer culture. By choosing non-gallery spaces for billboards, window displays, tabloids and TV commercials, ordinary sights are warped into a satirical commentary on the ever-intrusive advertising industry.
You can see Sabrina’s Seeing Spectacle at this year’s UCSC DANM MFA exhibition, I’ve Got Something On Your Mind all over the stairways in the DARC building.
Exhibition dates are April 28-29 and May 3-6 with the reception, Friday, May 4, 5:30 – 8:30PM. The Gallery is open from 10AM – 4PM and located at The Digital Arts Research Center (DARC), off Meyer Drive near the Music Recital Hall and Theater Arts on West Campus.
If you missed any part of our Artist on Art broadcast, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Here’s a video of our interview:
Here is a video we took during the show:
On January 23, 2012, the first shows for Artist on Art and Gamers on Game at their new time slot, 3-4pm Mondays, featured artistic director of the Santa Cruz Performing Arts: Ben Jammin Hulck.
SCPA is a nonprofit with the whose mission is to provide classes, programs, and events where individuals can develop skills in music, dance, and theater, thereby fostering self-esteem and an appreciation of the arts. SCPA offers a wide range of programs from dance classes with Cathy Faihy, Be in your own Rock & Roll band, to the Young Actors Studio. For more information, please visit their website, Santa Cruz Performing Arts.org and/or call Ben at 831-334-2121.
On the Artist on Art show, Ben brought two of his singers, Thor Layne, of Aptos Junior High School, and Chaska Farber, New Brighton, for an on-air live performance of “16 Going on 17″ from the Sound of Music.
If you missed any part of the show, do not fret. You can hear our broadcast in its entirety by clicking the gray ‘play’ button below:
On January 2, 2012, PhD student at UCSC’s Games and Playable Media Center, Mike Treanor, came into KZSC to talk on Gamers on Game for the first show of 2012.
Mike is a game developer and theorist researching in the Expressive Intelligence Studio which is dedicated to exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, art and design. Their goal is to create compelling new forms of interactive art and entertainment that provide deeply autonomous, generative and dynamic responses to interaction. A major thrust of this work is advanced AI for videogames
We started off the interview talking about his graduating project as a Digital Arts and New Media, Reflect. In 2008 and right after graduating wtih his MFA, Mike began studying in the Computer Science department. We talked extensively on his curent work with:
- Videogame interpretation (the “proceduralist” perspective).
To hear our broadcast in its entirety, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Here’s a little video we took right after the show:
Local dancer, singer, electronica musician, videographer, producer and editor Jazz-Elle came into UCSC’s KZSC radio station December 12, 2011 to talk about her upcoming event Deckin the Holidaze Party. Jazz-Elle is also a UCSC alum having graduated from the Community Studies program with her Master in Arts in 2008.
This show will be at the Coasters Lounge, Santa Cruz Boardwalk Bowl, December 16th beginning at 9pm with three acts. Come out to this happening dancing and live music event created as a means to de-stress with partying from all the holiday pressure. It’s a free event.
Jazz-elle Lasiuk is an educator, editor and producer at Community Television of Santa Cruz. She has a show on the station called, Planet of Dreamz. You can find all ten episodes at Jazz-elle’s Youtube Channel, JazzElleMusic.
Her website, is full of her musical and video work at Jazz-Elle.com. Her Electro Wave music can be heard here at listn.to/jazz-elle. playing “in the heat” in Sacramento. She has a full length cd album, Test Your Taste Buds. By cross pollinating the sounds of Bjork’s “Big Time Sensuality”, with Joan Baez’s “Blowing in the Wind”, while dancing in a “Love Shack” with the B-52′s, and then “Stepping Out” to DJ Kaskade, you get a better understanding of the influences that helped to produce the Jazz-elle vibe.
To hear our broadcast in its entirety, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
This video is from alive performance of Jazz-elle’s song “Don’t Doubt It” at the Cypress Lounge 2010. Used here to promote the Deckin the Holidaze Party Dec 16th, 2011. 9 pm at the Coasters Lounge, Santa Cruz Boardwalk Bowl.
This is my daughter’s new song obsession:
Local artist, photographer, curator and the Director of the Mary Porter Sesnon, Shelby Graham came into KZSC to talk about her work and current installation Xiaoze Xie: Resistant Archeology.
This solo artist show features, Xiaoze Xie, who was born in China in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution and is currently the Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor in Art at Stanford University.
The exhibition has stunning new larger-than-life paintings, prints and provocative video installations, showcasing Xiaoze Xie’s use of books and newspapers to symbolize the fragile nature of compressed history and memory. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, several distinguished private collections and are currently featured in a traveling exhibition from Bucknell University “Xiaoze Xie: Amplified Moments (1993–2008).”
Shelby and I talked about how one goes about curating and in this case choosing the works while visiting the artist in his studio. Coincidentally, his studio happens to be the same size as the Sesnon. This made it a little easier for Shelby to visualize the pieces, some of them are vey big, in the relatively small space of the gallery. We also talked about Professor Xie’s videos and his requisite for the building of the wall of books on which one of the video would be projected. The wall they built took over 1000 books donated by Logos and Goodwill Industries. Later in January, the Sesnon will have an event for the public to make and repurpose new things out of the old books. In December, the video will be shown in a storefront in downtown Santa Cruz after the show is over.
The opening reception and art talk was captured and published on the Sesnon Flicker.
If you are in the Monterey Bay area, don’t miss this show that ends November 23, 2011.
Gallery hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 12–5pm
Wednesday 12-8pm
For more information, call 831-459-3606.
Joyce Brodsky, Professor Emeritas-Arts Division, is writing a book on Transnational Artists including Prof. Xie. It was a natural to come together for Shelby and Joyce to co-create this show. On Saturday, November 12, Joyce & Shelby spoke about co-curating the show, and the work and artist, Xaoze Xie.
To hear our broadcast in its entirety, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Here are pictures of the paintings:
For the October 24, 2011, Artist on Art show, I had the great pleasure to speak with long-time local author, musician, and Nickelodeon Theater Founder, Bill Raney about his art and newly released paperback edition of his memoir, Letters to Zerky: A Father’s Legacy to a Lost Son.. . and a Road Trip Around the World.
Letters to Zerky is a touching story that is as captivating as it is heart-felt. During our interview, we talked about how Bill was moved to write the story both as an homage to his son as well as the rediscovered letters written during a journey around the world nearly 50 years ago.
The book begins with Bill’s beatnik years in San Francisco, describes coming to Santa Cruz to start the Nickelodeon in 1968, and an amazing trip hrough Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Hong Kong, and a few countries that no longer exist with his first wife and son.
Zerky & Friends at Kaziranga, Assam
The book appeals to a wide audience, including those interested in travel, Middle Eastern history and simply a well-written story of adventure. It is a lovely tribute to a little boy who crossed cultural divides to bring people together. ‘Zerky was the common denominator that brought us together with the peoples and cultures of the world during this thirteen-month-long adventure between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans,’ Bill writes. The beautiful young boy was their passport to the world.
Photo taken by Dan Coryo for the SC Sentinel
Santa Cruz is a better place because of Bill Raney for many reasons. Recently, he created a memorial, Zerky’s Park at the entrance of Santa Cruz High School’s Memorial Field where a newly planted coastal redwood stands sentry next to two park benches. It has been over 40 years since the tragic accident that took the young Erik Xerxes Raney. When asked why Bill chose the place of accident to memorialize Zerky’s life, he replied, ”when there’s an accident, there’s a natural human tendency to want to memorialize the last place on Earth where the person was. I don’t want his memory to die. A memorial is the closest you can get to immortality in the minds of living people.”
At the end of the interview, you can hear Bill singing along to the Zerky’s Waltz. You can also hear Bill’s guitar music.
To hear our broadcast in its entirety, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
Leading Game Theorist and Author of the website and book, Half-Real, Jesper Juul was on Gamers on Game September 26, 2011 to talk about what are games, the impact of failure and do-overs in games, time in association with games and the future of game theory. He called in from New York City. Jesper is a researcher at the Danish Design School and an affiliate at New York University Game Center.
The website and book, published by MIT Press in 2005, Half-Real, work in tandem with each-other. In the website, Jesper has a a dictionary of video game theory. With the dictionary, he hopes to provide a resource for students, researchers, teachers, and game players looking for terminological clarifications and pointers to further reading.
Along with being an author, Jesper has a blog, the Ludologist, is a teacher, lecturer, and gives talks about:
I came to know Jesper in 2007 when I was first researching video games and game theory. His dictionary was a boom to my studies and has the best definition of “games” that I found. The sentence should be seen as an evolution of game theory and is shown at the end after 7 other definitions such as Huzinga’s from 1950 .
Here is Jesper’s definition from chapter 2 of Half-Real:
“A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.”
During the show we discussed each clause of this long and important sentence.
To hear our broadcast in its entirety, please click the gray ‘play’ button below:
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