Picky Sticky Pollen is a game I created with Marie Evelyn as part of the Come Out and Play 2009 Festival. We had over 100 people come out and play our game in the pouring rain. The game was also picked by NYTimeOut as one of the top 5 games of the festival.

Description:
Picky Sticky Pollen is an adaptation of Phoenix Perry’s Honey, an interactive video game exploring issues of survival and the environment. Honey demonstrates even the smallest creatures’ vital importance to their ecosystem as they struggle to survive in a unique fantasy-world.

Download the rules and card pack here and play! >

Here are the details from the Come Out and Play site for game sign up. They give you the who, what, when, where and why.

Be part of a hive! Competing hives direct crazed worker bees as they scurry to pick up pollen in this colorful lawn game.

Start Time: Saturday June 13 at 5 PM
Location: Heckscher Fields in Central Park near the entrance at 63rd Street & Central Park West
# of players: 20 per round
Duration: This game is fast-moving and will allow for several rounds of play.
URL: http://PickyStickyPollen.com
Designers: Phoenix Perry and Marie Evelyn for Analogous Projects

Picky Sticky Pollen is an adaptation of Phoenix Perry’s Honey, an interactive video game exploring issues of survival and the environment. Honey demonstrates even the smallest creatures’ vital importance to their ecosystem as they struggle to survive in a unique fantasy-world.

Game Overview

This reality-based adaptation of Phoenix Perry’s interactive video game consists of costumed worker bees (Amy Benson, Ben Margolis, Douglas Repetto, Jenny Torino, and Melissa Gawlowski) within a colorful, pollen-filled lawn. Teams take turns shouting commands in an attempt to manipulate the bees’ final PollenCount. Part spectator-sport, part New York Stock Exchange at closing time, this fast-paced theatrical game introduces a new set of bee-personalities at every round. Which characters will you get?

The Rules

Summary:
* Players divide into teams of four. Each team chooses one player to serve as the Queen Bee.
* The lawn contains an assortment of pollen: RedPollen, YellowPollen, WhitePollen, and PurplePollen.
* A group of worker bees scurry around the pollen-filled lawn according to one of three types of rules: “Pick up all”; “Scatter all”; or “Trade (thiscolor) for (thatcolor)”.
* Each team collectively decides a set of commands for the worker bees to follow.
* The rules are shouted by the Queen Bee, and are carried out by the worker bees for twenty-second intervals.
* Each team has a total of five turns.
* The team whose PollenGoal most closely matches the worker bees’ final PollenCount (i.e., the amount of gathered RedPollen, YellowPollen, WhitePollen, and PurplePollen) wins!

Rounds:
This game is fast-moving and will allow for several rounds of play.

Prizes:
At the end of each round, the winning team will be awarded a prize or prizes. However, ALL players are encouraged to bring screen-printable items — such as t-shirts, pillowcases, bags, and et cetera — to screen-print for free while they wait to play. Hooray!

Bio: Analogous Projects

Complexity theory is not new to art or to our culture. It migrated from computer science and biology to economics and art and, with the advent of the world wide web, it invaded our collective subconscious. Analogous seeks to support complexity-driven art and artists playing under this conceptual umbrella of “Interaction Art”. Progress occurs by metaphor and analogy: Their hope is (by bringing together people and projects irrespective of media and genre) to enable philosophical crosstalk.

Analogous events and performances have been reviewed in The Wire, Make Magazine, Time Out New York, and The Village Voice. They received a Village Voice Best-of-NYC Award in October 2008 for “Best Arts Organization Centered Around Recycling”. For more information about Analogous and current Analogous projects, visit AnalogousProjects.org.

Bio: Phoenix Perry

Artist Phoenix Perry has a decade of experience in art and technology. From working in San Francisco as a digital arts curator and educator to creating the award winning ongoing DVD project Reline, she has extensive experience in new media, technology, and user interfaces.

Perry’s work has screened worldwide, at venues such as Lincoln Center, SFMoma, The Guggenheim, Transmediale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, LAMCA, European Media Arts Festive, GenArt, Seoul Film Festival, and many others. Her work explores gaming, environment, complexity, and technology.

Honey was originally produced as part of a HarvestWorks 2006 Residency.

As an artist, my interest in these films comes from my fascination with natural patterns and generative systems. I’m very much into looking at where the man made divide between modern humanity an nature begins to crumble and collapse in on itself. Horror films are a place in the psyche of western culture this gap appears.

The patterns in these art works are created from a generator “seed” image inspired by the film. Inspired from this form, a whole ecosystem evolves into a completed new piece. Each shape seems to posses a secret pattern that repetition and tessellation expose. These works are celebrations of the power of form to create complexity and emergent patterns.

In generative art, works are created at least in part by some process that is not under the artist’s direct control. Generative processes have been applied to music, dance, and all forms of visual art over thousands of years. With the advent of computers, complex digital generative art has become one of the defining art forms of the twenty-first century. The works in this collection amalgamate the organic and the methodical, seducing with pattern, texture and beauty.

The villains in these films can be read as archetypal encounters of the feminine archetype of Tiamat in mythology. She is a dragon representing the feminine force of chaos. When she is slain, order in nature emerges. “The female dragon Tiamat is regarded as the mystery of Chaos, primal and uncontrollable, passionate in her unchecked creative energy. She is the frightening Unknown of “formless primordial matter” sacrificially recreated as the very beauty of Earth itself. In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the creatrix of the celestial and earthly realms as a result of her violent demise. She is the primordial mother of all and the personification of the saltwater ocean – chaos embodied in the form of the ancient Divine feminine.”

The Horror generative drawing series draws from vintage horror films with an augmented reality component. By using shapes found in cinematic images as a generator, these drawings draw parallels between human cultural forms and biological algorithms. Using augmented reality, this series also plays with AR as location for a new form of horror.

Photos from Gallery Project presents Warp a multimedia exhibit in which 30 local, regional and national artists engage in close observation of the interconnectivity of social, political, technological or natural systems and the intricacies these networks create. December 1 and runs through Sunday, January 9, 2011

In generative art, works are created at least in part by some process that is not under the artist’s direct control. Generative processes have been applied to music, dance, and all forms of visual art over thousands of years. With the advent of computers, complex digital generative art has become one of the defining art forms of the twenty-first century. While this art may harnesses the power of computation to create work enacted via machine, the human originator is ever present, even if acting by proxy. The works in this series amalgamate the organic and the cinematic, seducing with pattern, texture and beauty.

Work Titles: Step into the Light, Lucky Star, Bad Luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but broken minds.

Press for The Horror:

Art Slant

The showstoppers were Phoenix Perry’s giclee prints on vinyl, with high contrast and multilayered patterns executed by hand with impressive sharpness and precision. Her use of color in “Step into the Light” is dramatically minimalist and eye-catching from up close and from a considerable distance. read more >
AnnArbor.com

“Perry’s “Step into the Light” is a computer-generated marvel whose abstracted purple and black bristly growth blends energetically in and out of its background.” read more >

Nightmare Kitty is a kinect game currently under development using Beckon Gesture Technology. I’m currently co-authoring a book called Meet the Kinect with Sean Kean and Jonathan Hall. This game is based the technology I cover in my chapter in this book.

As you walk by, your head transforms into a ballon and you need to keep from being popped by the evil cats falling from the sky. Duck, shield, dodge and find power ups and it rains laser beam claw evil from above. Can you stay alive long enough to battle the most evil kitty to ever live? Can you beat Nightmare Kitty and free the balloons from this reign of tyranny or will your nightmares consume you?

Play alone or with up to 4 other friends.

Game by Phoenix Perry and Nick Fox-Gieg

In the last two weeks, I did three shows. I curated an exhibit for TEDxBrooklyn as part of their Labs program, played the opening party for the Independent Games Festival andwas in the AR piece, Unicorn Park at BETA Spaces in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

At the exhibit for TEDxBrooklyn, I showed the working visuals for 000000swan controlled hands free via computer vision. This game play will really inform my choices for the future of our visuals. I learned how my system changed based on number of player and time between plays. It was interesting to see how tailored they are to me and my knowledge of them. I think I want to make it so the crowd can control or help control our visuals via game play. I’m starting to see this develop into a console like experience for games… The 000000swan game that we can have with us when we play or just leave open for people to play – I don’t know if a band has ever created a reactive visuals game for their shows before, but this is the next project. After creating a box, creating a game, and playing it with a crowd, I am beginning to see how the two can connect into something really amazing. I am going to see what I can rough out in the next few weeks. How hard could this be? All I need is something to put a laptop on and a shield for the keyboard to convey the idea that, “You can’t touch this.” I just need to create a few basic sketches to prove the point.

BETA Spaces: Unicorn Park

In my continued quest for the, “look Ma no keyboard” approach to life, I put a few pieces in my teacher, Mark Skwarek, Unicorn Park. I put in masks for characters out of my imagined game world. It was a fun experience but one that was ultimately more of a learning exercise. I am not one for usually just slapping art up without the context of the rest of my work. I’m a firm believer in context, even though that is something that is continually removed from images in a digital domain. It’s all about the context with what I create, about the story – I strive to make sure that all of my work connects back to my vision and to my main body of work. I struggle when I see it out of context and thrown into group experiences. Putting something in an augment that I myself have no control over isn’t easy – I kept having ideas for games larger than the task at hand and for linking to online content. It is inspiring me to create my own augments in the future where I can have more control over the experience.

The IGF opening was an utter delight. I love game designers. They are my people. I’m excited to continue working in this vein. I loved seeing all the games in this opening. Games are the most inspired interaction design in the world right now. I can’t help but to get a little rush every time I see a new indie game. This is where the future of computing is right now – this is the new gold rush of creativity. This is where I have been focused now for 4 years and where I am going to stay. Hands free gaming / musical experiences here we go.

This week I am going to draw a few more canvases for my horror project and continue to augment them. I have a show this week in Detroit and I’m flying out on Friday to show a new body of work that I’ve been creating called, “The Horror” based on 70′s horror films with “final girls” who survive and thrive in the face of some sort of out of control natural female force. More on this soon….

I’m doing so much right now I can hardly process it all – I am creating as fast as I physically can – I am talking again this week and I am not even sure where – I think SVA again…

There is so much to be done. Here’s a studio tour for fun. Today I’m hacking the kinect.

From programming HONEY (a long standing game project) in Java to augmenting wallpaper, to creating handsfree consoles…. I am constantly building projects if I am awake and not working for the man, at yoga or watching sci-fi. Watch here for more fun stuff in the coming weeks.

This month has been the month of lectures for me. I’ve taken 2 different approaches to talking about my work and I now am pretty convinced that the first route is the route that’s the more successful of the two.

The first lecture I did this month was for Trilby Schreibe’s MFA computer arts class at SVA. At this lecture, I framed my work in terms of my personal and internal motivations for creation in the context of exploring into unknown territory. I briefly took people through my past projects and spoke about my current work in that context. I didn’t get into the technical nature behind any of my projects, but instead focused on the conceptual thread moving throughout my ideas. In other words, I spoke about searching for dragons.

The second lecture was much more technical. It was also a significantly shorted talk rooted in the technology behind the 000000swan project, HEXCODE. I talked about my work with Rebecca Fiebrink’s Wekinator project and my use of gestural computing in our live visuals. This talk involved walking people through Kbow, a cello bow packed full of sensors, and then introducing them to Rebecca’s learning system, Wekinator.

Monday, Nov. 8, 2010, Leaders in Art and Software occurred at my gallery, Devotion. There too I took a more technical approach to my work. It was moderately successful, but I wish I would of covered more projects and spoken more about the work. However, where as I used the Kbow at Dorkbot, I controlled all of the visuals using computer vision completely hands and controller free.

I wish I’d of talked more about my motivations. The most important thing about 000000swan is that we only write love songs. That’s what people connect to – while the tech is fascinating, it’s what we do with it and how we push and expand what is even possible with computers that’s more important. We make computers serve the ineffable. We push them into the terrain of mystery and encourage and sense of wonder.

After my talk two people compared what we are doing directly with either magic or witchcraft. This is exactly what I want – We are using technology with art to reintroduce wonder into the mundane.

Art. Science. Alchemy.

The Rose Garden is a project created for Mark Skwarek’s Unicorn Park shown by NURTURE ART and part of BETA Spaces 2010.

The Rose Garden is a mythical Augmented Reality Garden emerging from Oolmuni, a world that’s been evolving in my body of work since 2006. This body of work started in 2004 when I began drawing by hand again. Moving from an all digital practice to a pen reinforced in me the astounding complexity and beauty of nature. After creating hundreds of sketches, I integrated both practices together to create these pieces. The flexibility of digital creation let me add additional levels of complexity to the original pieces. At its core, this newer work experiments with building up complexity through repetition, algorithms and pattern. Fusing interests in myth, nature, complexity, and emergence together, these drawings weave together an abstract experimental ecologies.

The pieces in this garden include: The Rose, The Mask of the Guard, The Skull Queen and Totem Bird. Viewers are invited to have their friends to become creatures.

Phoenix Perry, Head 1 from mark skwarek on Vimeo.

I’m developing an augmented layer for 000000swan’s release HEXCODE. All of our merchandise will have an augmented layer, including our teeshirts and jewelry. The record will be released only for download with as a fabricated object. Each object will have a unique id allowing the buyer to access the record. Comps and drawings forthcoming.

You can’t really tell yet, but this is an early AR test to work with. My little critter here is simply a low res gif for now to save on time/speed up the coding process but he’s on his way to being computationally generated art. Right now he tracks to a particular shade of lipstick I own. I am nothing if not predicable. I’ll eventually map him to a tracker that will be a laser cut object. The java class here will be a the core of my processing.

HEXCODE

PHEREPAPHE: THE THIRD OF THE FOURFOLD ROOTS OF EVERYTHING IS FIRE.

First Studio Rush of the Falconer by phoenixperry

HEX6 is an experimentation in process and interaction. I’m going to be working with Margaret Schedel (Stonybrook Professor of Music and cellist in 000000Swan) and Rebecca Fiebrink (machine learning expert, Princeton). Together we form a team of programer, artist, and musician to create a new form of musical interaction involving gesture, visual design and machine learning. Rebecca built the Wekinator and we are hooking it up to this little device called a Kbow Meg’s been beta testing for a bit now. It’s now available publicly, which is great. People might not dumb stare us quite so much as the have over the last few years. We are then taking a whole group of sample of different gestures, letting Wekinator learn them and then we are interpolating number sets between different groups of gestures. We then map those gestures to processing and values such as object size, scale and opacity.

I’m not going to lie. I have no idea how this is going to turn out. Today the KBow was stubborn. It was really hard to get the OSC values to come in to processing as much of a change. We got some circle to go from pink to green. It might not sound like much, but it was the first step.

So – here it is – some info on what is the project I’ve worked on for the last 4 years called 000000swan in near secrecy. Our record, Hexcode, comes out on Halloween. We’ve been playing in NYC for 2 years now, mostly unannounced or unpromoted  to rooms where people stare enchanted or clear the room or both. There’s nothing like having dancers in swan costumes while you sing songs about death and transcendence surrounded by candles to make people think you’ve gone completely off your rocker. Well, it’s either that or covering my bandmate in blood…

We are threading a profound awareness. HEXCODE is a journey mutating through love to rage transmuted with fire into compassion ending broken in submission and release. It’s the story of Wands. It’s a record of love songs. It’s a record of love lost songs. It’s a record of liberation. It’s a record reaching through a void into stillness.

The optic experience evokes mystic awareness and entrains the viewer into an altered consciousness. We create and then destroy a palatable place within the music 000000Swan. It’s the architecture of the unbuilt…

000000Swan Live at THE SHIFT from Devotion Gallery on Vimeo.

I’m developing an interactive music box for Margaret Schedel of 000000Swan. The name of this music box is “The Song of Despair.” The full piece name is “20 Love Songs and the Song of Despair.” The final piece is comprised of 21 music boxes that are all reactive. When each music box opens it triggers and ipod touch to play audio and video. When The Song of Despair is opened, it triggers all boxes simultaneously.

This box is designed and cut in black acrylic plastic. It’s then bonded together with acrylic solvent.

This box is based on sea maps of dragons into unknown waters (see here be dragons below). The occult reference to the crow speaks to the transition of the spirit into the afterlife after death.

The Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973 / Parral / Chile)

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles in its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining in my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank.

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman that I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How horrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitter mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank.

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor on the prow of the vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
in which the night fastens to all timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!