One big day downtown Toronto. First, visiting the Royal Ontario Museum* where Senior Director of New Media Resources, Brian Porter, showed us his work, and after that, breaking into the lab of who they call “The Cyborg”, inventor Steve Mann himself.
Digital Media Developer and journalist Brian Porter talked about his experience trough the challenging task of introducing the ROM to the digital world (with a weak low budget) using audio, video, touch and video basic interaction to enhance the experience of the visitors.
“Have as much different experiences as you can into the different fields of media” were the words of this experienced developer that also recommended to “Mix powerful media with good contents in order to reach the goals of your projects”.
Talking to Brian Porter was a good learning passage on how to adapt yourself to the resources you get and experiment with different kinds of media in order to improve the experience of the public.
Standing in front of Mister Steve Mann, Inventor and University of Toronto Professor, is enough to call that day a “big day”. “We live in the cyborg era. Everyone is tied to the social network” Mann says. “My new wave is to return to the primary media, take a break and go to the fundamentals” he stops.
With a deep way to comprehend technology, the inventor explained his creative processes initiating in dreams and ending into new objects, applications, and ideas that provide a new manner to face the world. One case of that approaching is the “Hydraulophone”, Steve Mann’s waterflute oriented to provide entertainment to different groups of people among with an educational frame for kids and music production.
After visiting the ROM and Steve Mann’s laboratory I can say I faced the two sides of the Multimedia Development: the rough “real” work field where budgets and timelines rule the construction of a digital face for the ROM, and the visionary but certainly fragile world of creation where Steve Mann can write his name in golden letters in a lucky day or walk by as a computer freak in a messy lab when trying to solve the mystery of the human-machine interaction.
RELATED LINKS
Digital Media at the ROM
“New Media is the Message” ArticleMcLuhan Lectures 2005 July 13 Tony Hushion and Brian Porter
Steve Mann Homesite
Wereable Computer
The Cyborg logs by Steve Mann
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