SPECIAL EVENTS

Aurora Picture Show presents the 8th Annual Media Archeology Festival Thursday, September 15 through Saturday, September 17, 2011 in Houston. Taking place at venues across the city, including The Orange Show and the Museum District, the festival is presented in collaboration with the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. This multi-media festival showcases artists who use, manipulate, recycle and reinvent electronic media to create live multidisciplinary performances.

This year, the festival explores the ideas of games and play from the past and present. Games are social tools for interaction, community building, and entertainment that have traditionally permeated media in various ways—all the way from chess, charades and hula-hoops, to role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and now to the World of Warcraft, one of the most successful multi-player role playing video games of recent times. This year’s festival Rewind – Play – Fast Forward examines new forms and contexts of performance-based art informed by games through visuals, interactivity and strategy.

For the opening night of Media Archeology, Aurora invites everyone to Sniff With Karolina Sobecka, to downtown Houston for a unique shop window display sure to entertain. Sniff is an interactive projection where an animated CG dog follows the viewer, responds to gestures and forms a relationship based on the history of their interaction. Sniff was created with Unity3d Game Engine, which renders the dog in real time and allows it to dynamically change his behavior based on the video tracking data. The dog’s personality is shaped by the relationships he has had in the past and is expressed in the modulation of behavior whenever the new viewer approaches him. Sniff is an attempt to trigger an intense, playful and insightful level of engagement with media art inspired by the Kinect sensor that is commonly used in new gaming systems of today, such as Xbox 360, which allows the user to interact with the game.

Karolina Sobecka is a Polish-born artist whose work spans various disciplines and media, focusing on how we create, interact with and impact the world we inhabit. Her projects often use emerging technology and take form of public participatory interventions, interactive installations and conceptual design. Sobecka's work has been shown at festivals and galleries around the world, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, MOMA, Beall Center for Art + Technology, ISEA and Medialab Prado. She has received awards from, among others, Creative Capital, Princess Grace Foundation, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards, and the Japan Media Arts Festival.

This festival is presented in collaboration with the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, with additional support provided by IKEA Houston and The Downtown District. Media sponsors include 29-95.com, KUHF 88.7 FM, Glasstire and Saint Arnold Brewery. Gift bag sponsors include: Katz Coffee, GHCVB, Whole Foods Market and others.