Enigmeta

ChampdAction LAbO

At the end of august 2020 I was a coach at ChampdAction LAbO, an interdisciplinary summer school bringing dancers, musicians, composers and visual artists together to create art. Traditionally organised in deSingel in Antwerp, this year's edition took fully place online, using Mozilla Hubs as our virtual space.

Watch the performance:

The show on Sunday, 30th of August 2020 was recorded and live-streamed on Vimeo. You can re-watch it here:


I was one of 8 coaches providing artistic and technical support to 32 students, making a total of 11 projects. I've highlighted a number of projects I was involved in:


Ghost in the Hub

By Louisa Teichmann, Ezra Babski, Odis Babski, Anton Lambert, Alyssa Aska

Ghost in the Hub Ghost in the Hub Ghost in the Hub Ghost in the Hub

Structured as an escape room, "Ghost in the Hub" is an atmospheric game that explores and in some ways transcends the possibilities of Mozilla Hubs as a game platform. For the project I reverse engineered Hubs' communication protocol, and designed a bot that could run in the background and receive and send chat commands.

LAbO participant Louisa Teichmann then took this code and made it her own, creating multiple bots present in the different rooms of the game that could give instructions, taunt you, and play riddles.

The end result is a haunting experience that plays with the expectations of how virtual environments can respond to your actions.

Silence

By Melina Scialom, Marijke Van Mol, Emma Versluys, Tricia Enns, Peter Stiegler

Is this Silence? Is this Silence? Is this Silence? Is this Silence?

This project was special in that it was the only website, going outside of the framework of Hubs to present a completely white page. Users could hover over the page and "hunt" for sounds, images or movies that were present. Clicking on them would show or play the element.

I helped in the initial coding of the website. Marijke Van Mol's simple but intelligent approach to use Figma to prototype page positions made it relatively easy to code the absolute positions of the (initially invisible) page elements.

Mozilla Womb

By Sara Greet Gilis, Alyssa Aska, Katarzyna Trzewik

Mozilla Womb Mozilla Womb Mozilla Womb Mozilla Womb

An "online safe space of tranquility and reflection", the Womb Room is a home of rest in strange and enclosing times. Sara modelled a number heart, lungs and ears in SculptGL which we then took and processed in Blender. We used a decimation modifier to reduce the geometry, tweaked materials and exported the objects to .glb to be imported in Mozilla Spoke.

Night Dreams of Water

By Alisa Kobzar, Katarzyna Trzewik, Vlad Boyko, Anzor Ghudushauri, Lucy Fandel, Linus Miller, Olivia Mc Gilchrist

Night Dreams of Water Night Dreams of Water Night Dreams of Water Night Dreams of Water

This project was a collaboration between a number of media artists and dancers working with bodies in virtual space. The motion capture and video data were imported into a set of rooms, turning the project into an Escher like experience, with video in video, and strange creatures walking around in a sea of blue and purple.

Together with Martina Menegon I provided support in cleaning up the models.

Credits

LAbO is a production of ChampdAction. Coaches for the 2020 edition were: