Speakers’ Profiles INTRE:FACE: Mika Lumi Tuomola

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Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola is professor in Design at Politecnico di Milano, Italia, and founder of Crucible Studio, the New Media Storytellingresearch group at Media Lab Helsinki, Department of Media, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.

He researches and teaches generative/interactive storytelling and participatory drama.

As an internationally awarded writer, dramaturge and director, his artistic productions include the web drama “Daisy’s Amazing Discoveries” (Coronet Interactive 1996),  avatar and game world designs for “WorldsAway” (ICL-Fujitsu 2000), moving image installations “Myths for One” (Media Lab Helsinki 2002) and “Alan01” (Jaakko Pesonen & Crucible Studio 2008),  the dark musical comedy series “Accidental Lovers” for television and mobile devices (Yle 2006-7) and tactile poetry app “Antikythera” (Saila Susiluoto & Taiste 2015).

Antikythera

is tactile, game-like poetry application for iPad and other tablet devices. It is based on the Antikythera mechanism, the ancient analog computer from c. 100 BC Greece, found in the Aegean Sea in 1900.

Download to iPad from App Store: http://antikythera.taiste.fi/. (Available only in Finnish.)

More INFO in ENGLISH HERE

Kun pimeä havahtuu, on myöhäistä, joku lamppu on syttynyt jo.
    (When the dark wakes up, it is too late, a lamp is lit already.)

Antikythera_screen-10-05-2015

The application is experimental and voluminous; it contains over 200 poems written for the mechanism. The artwork links together poetry, new technology, visual and sound art, and researches and explores new forms and possibilities of digital poetry: broken chronology, randomness and determined paths of reading, locked poems which open procedurally, games, visual and animated poems, temporality, disappearing and appearing poems, poems where verses change their places from one poem to another, words and lines which change their meanings and react to the reader’s physical actions, her/his touch and movement of the tablet.

The Antikythera collection of poems has six parts – or storyworlds, presented as the gears of the mechanism – each part containing 32 poems written for 32 different themes (e.g. love, transition, death etc.). Zeppelin Letters from The Hindenburg (Ilmalaivakirjeet Hindenburgilta) is about young Adele and Hindenburg’s last journey in 1937. Labrys, the feminist and feminine version of the story of Ariadne, is set on the Treblinka extermination camp. The Witch (Noita) tells about the 17th century witch-hunt in Finnmark, Vardo Island, Norway. In The Empress (Keisarinna), Elisabeth of Austria monologues about restlessness, rage and lack of freedom. Images of Artists (Taiteilijakuvia) is situated in pre-war Vienna and discusses poverty, art, love, sex and artist’s muses via two voices: Oskar Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler and Egon Schiele’s lover Valerie Neutzil. Town Stories (Kaupunkitarinoita) imagines a medieval European town with a whole new set of little ghost and horror stories between poetry and prose – it’s about poverty, evil and horror.

There is also an Oracle in Antikythera, divining mechanism based on the “free verses” of all the poems in the thematically organised database. The database also provides the reader with date, season and moon phase sensitive daily verses via the moon interface traveling in astronomical real-time unless interrupted: the cosmos goes on unless a reader pauses it.

Based on awarded poet Saila Susiluoto‘s overall idea and concept, Antikythera presents her latest collection, co-dramatised for new media by director Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola, visual art and interface design by Shakti Dash, sound art & design by Antti Nykyri, and system architecture by Rasmus Vuori. The work has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK, Milla Moilanen & Elena Näsänen) and Kone Foundation, and has been technically finalised for the Finnish Apple App Store during Spring-Summer 2015 by the Taiste production company.

 

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