Stella Im Hultberg is a New York based, Korean born artist who creates amazing feminine artworks of raven haired skeletal women. Created using mixed media, particullarly oil and ink, often on tea stained paper. Emotive and striking, the images explore the fluidity of the media used and with subtle use of colour create a flowing and evocative and feminine images. In particular I love how she paints hair, exploring and accentuating the organic forms that the media offers, to create striking contrast and movement within her images.

Nuri. Oil and ink on tea-stained paper

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I’ve been attending GameCity since its creation, and before that the Broadway’s Screenplay games festival that which ran from 2000. Each year it gets bigger and raises the bar. This year was no exception, with some amazing and large scale events.

This year saw the event take place mostly in the Council House and a large tent pitched outside in Market Square, so the event had its highest public presence to date, which can only be good for the festivals future.

Highlights

The best part of a games festival for me is in exploring new games and new ways of playing, which is evident in my selection of festival highlights.

Sandpit

This was my first experience of pervasive gaming, and I’m totally hooked. I only managed to register for two games due to demand, but this wasn’t really an issue because there were lots of other people waiting too so we were able to start an impromptu game of Werewolf (http://www.eblong.com/zarf/werewolf.html) which needs 7+ players. One of the things I loved was that the people had an open attitude towards play.

I played two games, Hipsync and Moveyhouse, which were great fun and interesting experiences. There is something elevating about reclaiming a space with play and people not taking themselves too seriously. http://sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk/events/

Gambling Lambs

Gambling Lambs is a monthly gaming event in Nottingham, which held a special event as part of the festival. There was a great atmosphere and in the same way as Sandpit having a group of friendly strangers willing to play games together is a great experience. It takes place the first Thu of the month and I highly recommend it. http://www.gamblinglambs.com/

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Project Natal was announced by Microsoft at E3 as new interface peripheral for the Xbox 360, which removes the need for a joypad, instead body movement, facial recognition and voice are used for interaction. 

We have seen similar innovations with the EyeToy for the PS2 and the notion detection in the Wii, but both have severe limitations. The EyeToy is a single lens camera, so it is easily affected by lighting and background, while the motion detection in the Wii is built into the joypad and has limited capabilities by default.

The demo shown at E3 is jaw dropping, showing seemingly natural interaction with a character called Milo, but anyone with any experience of Microsoft demos treats them with appropriate levels of scepticism. Since they haven’t beaten the Turing test there is certainly some smoke and mirrors going on, in the words of Milo’s creator Peter Molyneux “If we had, then applying it to a computer game would be the last of the solutions we'd use it for.”

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The Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939) is commonly recognised as the instigator of the Art Nouveau movement, characterized by organic, especially floral and other plant-inspired motifs, as well as highly-stylized, flowing curvilinear forms. His work typically has women as his subject matter and his fame grew when he created posters for the Parisian star of the time Sarah Bernhardt.

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Ok I have had some real fun with getting my XBox to see my XP desktop. It was easy enough to get it to see my Vista laptop after I set up Windows Media Centre (WMC), and although WMC sees everything on my network it has no supports for DivX, so doesn’t really meet my needs.

Diagram of XBox on wireless network, but media sharing can be on wired or wireless network. 

However playing video through the XBox dashboard does have DivX support, but this way it only finds files that are local to my laptop and I wanted it to see my whole network. It wasn’t as straight forward as it should have been so here is my quick guide on how I managed to get it working. It’s not the only way, there are 3rd party tools out there.

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I loved the Google Wave demo, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I loved the fact that it was an honest demo, ok so that means it breaks, but I prefer to forgive a few bumps in the demo than see canned demos that are so slick I'm left wondering if it was all faked up.

Google Wave made a lot of noise when the demo video was released, and understandably, anyone with an ounce of geek in them keeps an eye on what the big guys are up to. I love how Chrome has changed the way I browse the web and I'm interested to see how Wave might change behaviours too.

For the most part Google Wave, while technically a huge accomplishment, is really the next generation of the web (whatever we might call it), it is a natural evolution from where we are now.

I like the concept of simultaneous conversations; I’ll often have at least two concurrent conversations with an individual via instant messaging, and being able to thread that could be really useful. However I can imagine not wanting to share everything I type straight away. I find the thinking time typing allows me to be really useful. Interestingly I might not turn off the functionality – and give the game away – but rather think more before I type. Typing becomes more transparent like talking, but still lacks the other sensory cues we use in communication.

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At last the ball is rolling...

I'm really excited that at last I have managed to get the ball rolling and Girl Geek Dinners are back up and running in Nottingham. I have to say a massive and huge thank you to everyone who has been really supportive. I've never run an event like this before, but what I lack in experience I make up for in enthusiasm and a willingness to ask questions.

If you want to be kept up to date about these events then either email me or follow @NottsGirlGeeks on Twitter.

Long overdue is a post on another of my favourite artists, Blaine Fontana. His work is beautiful and mixes two of my favourite styles of art; Japaese prints and graffiti. I discovered his work at the same time as Samuel Flores in San Francisco's Upper Playground gallery: Fifty 24SF.

The Last Koi Chapter #1 • 48" x 48" acrylic on canvas

 The print is also available as a Gelaskin for the geeks out there who like to customise and protect their laptops and iPhones.

If you are reading this then you are probably already aware of Ada Lovelace Day, but just in case; it is a day dedicated to blogging about women we admire in technology:

I'm choosing to write about Molly E. Holzschlag, and why I admire her. (Disclaimer: fangirl moments are therefore to be expected).

I've been working with the web for all of my professional career and it became very clear, very quickly that web standards were fundamental in making writing code easier, while more importantly being necessary to create an open and accessible web that was capable of what we hoped and imagined it could do. Although she doesn't know it Molly has been with me every step of my journey, writing about best practice and web standards, shaping the way I and many others work. I started way back with a HTML and CSS textbook and A List Apart and WaSP.

Molly was leader of WaSP (Web Standards Project) from early 2004 through to the end of 2006 and in that time drove real change by recognising that it is not enough to be evangelical about your subject, you need to make connections with and influence those that create the tools and the code inorder to affect the change you want. She helped build relations with Macromedia to influence the tool that web designers were using, and connections with Microsoft to help improve the browser that most people were using. Coming from a history of hacking Dreamweaver to try and force it to write valid XHTML while struggling with browser inconsistencies, it was good to know someone was talking to these corporate giants and refusing to be ignored.

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Microsoft have released a demo of Photosynth that allows you to create your own experiences. It still only works in Internet Explorer and requires a plugin to view. But I've been waiting for ages to have a play with this technology. It is amazingly simple to use, you just add a selection of photos of your subject and you are away, there is no labourious stitching of photographs required, it works out where they all fit in the scene.

I decided for my subject I'd take the popular Flickr topic of photographing your workspace. I've always felt my desk is a bit of an adventure (mess) and one simple photograph could never allow you explore its landscape in the same way I do. So I've made a photosynth of my desk here:

Photos are so much easier to take and store, they are on almost all mobile phones and services such as TwitterPic and Flickr show how taking photographs has become a normal way to document any event. When there is such a rich source of information, new ways of using and exploring this data is really interesting. If we think about how Google have recently had cars driving around the UK to map the streets for Google Maps, this effort and expense could be made redundant through the power of crowd-sourcing the photographs/data and applying a technology such as Photosynth. While Google just captures that street at that single point in time, this technology could also allow you to manipulate the time you are viewing that moment at. For instance if we take a popular tourist spot like St Paul's Cathedral, this has been photographed millions of times, so you could choose to not only experience it from a contemporary set of photographs but also using historic data, to experience the view in the 1920's for example.