Media Evoution is funded by the Region Skane, Malmo City Council, and the EU Structural Funds, Region Blekinge, City of Helsingborg and Malmo University. That funding provides for the support of a number of projects including;

- Cross Media Talent – a project aimed at developing individuals who can move freely between areas of media industry, practice and modes of production.
-A project aimed at encouraging dialogue and cooperation between the film and computer game industries in the hope of inspiring new products, new stories, new processes and business models.
-The Nordic Game Conference and related activities
-The Living Lab Kvarteret run by MEDEA, Malmo University- a new media innovation lab/incubator aimed at establishing networks platforms and infrastructure.
- A research and development project at Malmo University looking at the way local media actors access and make use of available research and development.
- Minc Incubator: a business incubator and development network.
- A number of infrastructure projects supporting new media innovation.

About TEKS – TEKS, Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre is a non-profit organization founded in Trondheim in 2002.  TEKS is a resource and competence centre that has as a goal to realize productions of techno related art projects within all art disciplines.
TEKS initiates and organizes artistic productions and projects, works with promotion and education through courses and workshops, and acts as organizer or co organizer of various cultural initiatives.
TEKS organizes “Trondheim Matchmaking,” an annual international festival for arts and technology. The festival is an arena for presentations of innovative ideas and artistic projects – a place where competence and resources are maintained and developed.
TEKS is in 2009 funded by the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs and the City of Trondheim.
TEKS is a member of PNEK, Production Network for Electronic Arts.

Innovation and its relationship with experimentation and artists are particular interests.

Their website states

Artists are innovators, if a new piece of technology or a new medium, becomes available; artists want to try it, to experiment with it, to push the boundaries. Some artists take on the role of a scientist in almost a performative way and some scientists equally take on the role of artist. Attitudes to science, medicine and art have changed over the last five hundred years, in that whilst Science has become more formalized, Art has become increasingly less so. By stepping outside the testable hypothesis artists are free to go off at tangents, to get bogged down in aesthetics and be mavericks.

Courchesne earned a BA in Communication Design from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974) and a MA of Science in Visual Studies from MIT (1984). In the early 1980s he helped pioneer the field of interactive video when he co-authored Elastic Movies (1984) with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman et al. Throughout recent decades he has continued to produce several interactive installations that combine light, photography, design, sound, film and video.

Courshesne’s installations characteristically encourage participants to enter into an immersion of images and sounds that is triggered and guided by use of their own voice and physical movement; the works attempt to remove all spatial reference to plunge the viewer into an interactive, virtual world within which they are able to transverse landscapes and communicate with real or fictional people. Courchesne’s ongoing interest in socialisation has grown more pronounced from each work to the next as his installations have themselves become more increasingly complex and advanced in their development and presentation mode. In Where Are You? (2005) visitors are invited to operate a joystick to control their flight through a world of several dimensions that are defined by an X,Y and Z scale – the higher the visitor travels to the ‘+’ end of each axis, the more detailed the world they experience is. Here existence is paramount, for the work is dependent upon the visitor’s whims and choices to define itself and reach its full potential.

Courchesne is based in Montreal where he is professor of information design at Université de Montréal. Courchesne is also a founding member of the Society for Arts and Technology.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.

Edmonds is currently Professor of Computation and Creative Media in the Faculty of IT at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS). The origins of CCS derived from his unique research, which spawned a conference series under the similar title of Creativity and Cognitions. A regular headliner from 1993 onwards on the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCHI calendar, concepts explored in these meetings developed into an artist-in-residency program (COSTART) at Loughborough University (UK) from 1996 before CCS was established in its present location at UTS in 2003.

The Centre for Pervasive Computing is committed to bolstering this rapidly unfolding reality by contributing to the development of new concepts, technologies, products and services based on a broad spectrum of available media and resources. Beyond harnessing and understanding these technologies, the centre facilitates innovative interaction between universities and companies to assist with the implementation of new business models based on pervasive computing, as well as providing a strong future basis for educating IT specialists.

The size and scope of the centre positions it as a world leader in the development of next generation computing environments. Housed within the centre are a number of departments that cut across research areas and involve several traditional research traditions, attesting to the widespread implications pervasive computing bares for several aspects and levels of society.

Research pursuits range from exploring the effects of sound in its functional and emotional roles in day-to-day life, to addressing the impact of 3D visualization and interaction technologies in areas of life and industry as diverse as architecture, city planning, industrial design, medicine and the arts. Current joint research projects involving both companies and universities aim to examine and develop new information technologies for workplaces and the manufacturing sector; others seek to provide new ways to deliver services and dynamic content to mobile computing users.

Since the start in 1998, their work has been characterized by not only conducting traditional academic research but also exploring the borders between art, design and technology, industry and academy, etc. The institute has about 60 employees organized in a number of research studios/groups located in Kista/Stockholm, Piteå, Eskilstuna, Norrköping, Växjö and Göteborg. Each research group has its own focus area that relates to the overall focus of combining technology with art and design.

The Interactive Institute has a number of research groups within it such as Digital Cultural Heritage Centre which looks at issues such as cultural knowledge transfer in new media and technologies, The Design Research Centre which seems concerned with developing big-picture research strategies, Sound Studio and SoundSpace groups working in interactive sound design, NVISION working with visualisation techniques and Mobility Studio which looks at, well, developments in the use of mobile technologies.

The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University has a research focus that spans from social and entertainment and work aspects of mobile technologies, affective engagement and ubiquitous computing. Set up as a 10 year funding project by VINNOVA – (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), which is a State authority that aims to ‘promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden’ through funding ‘innovations linked to research and development’. The Centre names the Interactive Insitute and the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science as collaborative partners, and also list a number of industry partners including Sony Ericsson, Microsoft Research and Stockholm Innovation and Growth. The centre lists around 20 PhD students and Professorial staff on its list of researchers and lsome of the more interesting research projects include:

Mobile Eco-System

The future mobile eco-system – who pays for what? And what does it feel like? A future mobile service eco-system where we explore alternative universes for infrastructure, business models and the industry’s new role.

Embodied Affective Interaction

Interact emotionally with your whole body. New mobile and ubiquitous services in areas such as pervasive games, social, emotional and bodily communication and new mobile media.

There is also an interesting list of seminars on topics such as the following:
Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

Affective Loops : research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Whilst this begins to appear quite the complex web of tangled connections, it seems that one common link and hence potentially a good interview subject might be Professor Kristina Hook . She is Professor at Mobile Life, as well as Lab Manager at Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at the Dept of Computer and Systems Science (a joint venture between Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kristina Hook lists research projects in embodied interaction and ‘affective computing’ among her interests. Particularly notable is the research project which has involved Microsoft Research called Affective Diary, which investigates techniques data-mapping diary of galvanic skin response via mobile technologies, and seems to have spawned collaborative projects such as a sound design project which looks at sonification techniques using the data sets generated by Affective Diary.

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook

With a background in interaction design, focused on algorithm controlled animation, sensor driven interactive installations, web applications, broadcast applications and digital design, shiftcontrol applies a united process of design and development to its clients and users.
In 2008 Simon Løvind joined as associate partner, bringing experience from media-art, academia and game developement.

shiftcontrol has already taken on projects for Carlsberg, ZDF, Al Aan, BBC, Danish TV2, PRADA, OMA, AMO, Kontrapunkt and VW.

shiftcontrol works tightly with the team behind Unity – our preferred platform for exploring next generation interactive media, and Markus Schaefer/Hosoya Schaefer Architects – our preferred partner for exploring next generation concepts.

Screenshot from ‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’ VJ and networked remix project. Performed at International Symposium for Electronic Arts and ZeroOne, San Jose, USA, August 12 2006.

Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 is an international, ARC funded project that provides information for Australians to more extensively implement dynamic media within a social context. Based at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, the project is a collaboration between Anna Munster (CoFA/CCAP), Andrew Murphie (Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW), Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) and Adrian MacKenzie (Lancaster University).The project focuses on the international strategies for social use of dynamic media, and will form the basis of an online database that will profile and be accessible to Australian artists, arts organisations, new media researchers and social innovators. This study highlights the innovation of Australian artists and researchers in the development of dynamic media and positions these internationally.

Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics, College of Fine Arts, UNSW

From the Innovation Lab site;

Through a wide and varied range of activities and media, Lab Agents work to translate the latest technological developments into hands-on experiences and meaningful scenarios. Innovation Lab interprets the meaning of technology—and makes technology meaningful for all of us.

A very interesting commercial model, the Innovation Labs has terrific slogans like; ‘Insight is Influence’ and ‘Ideas are born of movement’.

The Katrinbjerg Centre has strong ties to the University of Arhus that appear to be negotiated via the Alexadra Institute which appears central to the mangement of the information networks described above, is based at Katrinebjerg and whose members include various research bodies, university schools, corporations housed at Katrinebjerg, and large organizations external to the Arhus municipality.

The most prominent of the schools/research programs aligned with the Katrinebjerg centre are;

Department of Computer Science – There is a really interesting HCI reserach focus/centre housed here with a number of interesting projects under the banner of Hypermedia, Participatory Design, Augmented Reality, and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (beyond Groupware !*&6!). They do other Math type stuff as well….

The Information Institute – Its all in Danish – feel free to comment on what they do…

Multimedia @ Arhus Uni – Its all in Danish – feel free to comment on what they do…

Centre for Digital Aesthetics - Its all in Danish but I note Matthew Fuller’s name here.

and the most prominent for Katrinbjerg is the

Centre for Pervasive Computing – This research centre deserves a blog entry to itself and I suspect it is the principal research body engaged with the Katrinebjerg centre/city. The amount of research the centre is involved in prevents me from a providing a detailed account. But I might comment individually on some of the projects that are of particular relevance. These can be found via the links below copied from the site. Of particular interest are Centre for Andvanced Visualization and Interaction. Note that there are a number of projects that cross over between partners so that the pervasive computing is a research focus for the Department of Computer Science on Computer Supported Collaborative Work that is listed here as well – so the CFPC appears to manage an area of research interest that runs (and provides a funded node for) projects under that title which each have a different group of partner institutions attached. Super Distributed and very Dynamic the projects become kind’a virtual in the process… (fishing for comment – more ideas to explore here regarding research/development structures – I wonder how this plays out in terms of funding and commercialization/IP)

• Ambient Intelligence with Tangible Objects
• Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction – CAVI
• Center for Pervasive Healthcare
• Computer Supported Cooperative Work
• Database Technology
• Design Anthropology
• Embedded Systems – Embodied Agents
• Interactive Workspace
• Mobile Systems and Wireless Communication
• Modelling and Validation of Distributed Systems
• New Ways of Working
• Object Technology
• Sound as Media
• Tangible User Interaction