Brighton Fringe Basement Gallery, Brighton
SpeedDatingWebChallenge

On Friday 28 November Lighthouse and Blip organized a SpeedDatingWebChallenge in the Big Blip exhibition space at the Brighton Fringe Basement.

The event combined networking for regional digital artists with a selection process for a £1000 Lighthouse commission for a Digital Miniature to be hosted on their dedicated microsite: Blind Date meets Enter the Dragon's Lair.

Regional artists were invited to take part and 38 agreed to participate in the event. When each participant arrived they were given a name badge and which colour coded whether they were a visual, sound or technology based artist. Many of the artists were strong in more than one of these categories, but our aim was to ensure that each group had at least one technical expert. Once we'd taken a mugshot, each participant was given a sheet to fill in which asked them to go around the exhibition and to rate each of the works, giving reasons for their choices.

Ben Sheehan	Yuneikys Villalonga	Pavel Acosta Proenza	Andre Viljoen (left)

Each participant then had 15 three minute speed dates. Half the participants were seated and the others moved around them in order. Given time constraints it wasn't possible for everybody to date each other, but each artist was able to meet about half of the people participating. In order to find out whether they were artistically compatible, the participants were encouraged to find out whether they liked the same work in the exhibition.

Andrew Mailing	Lucy Childs	Martin Janicek	Rona Innes

All of the artists were put into groups of three on the basis of their skills (sound, visual, technical) and the order in which they arrived at the event. Every artist then had the opportunity to change the group they were in. This involved specifying a person in another group who they wanted to change places with. The other person had to make the swap, whether they wanted to change groups or not. Participants' names were read out and that person had 20 seconds to make a swap. If a person did not make a swap when it was their turn, they could not make a swap at a later time. Swaps will be made in order starting with the person who arrived at the event last and finishing with the person who arrived first. This rewarded punctuality, as the last person to make a swap can decide which group they want to be in and nobody else can swap them out of that group.

Each group had to have at least one techy and at least 3 participants. Therefore techies could only swap with other techies, but visual artists could swap with both sound artists and visual artists and sound artists could swap with both visual artists and sound artists.

Tord Paulsen	Luciana Haill	Ivan Pope	JJ Maurage

Once all the swaps had taken place the 12 groups (two of which consisted of four people) were given the brief for the Digital Miniature, a web-based artwork:

They had 45 minutes to prepare a three-minute pitch for their concept for a web-based artwork based on the theme of scale. The piece could be no more than 2 MB and was restricted to using HTML, DHTML, Shockwave, Flash, Quicktime and/or Javascipt. Each group had to answer the following three questions in their pitch:

what is your concept?
how does this project reflect the strengths of your group?
how long will it take you to complete the project?

The groups were then asked to leave the Brighton Fringe Basement to prepare their pitch. They were asked to return to the basement by 9.29 and were told that any late comers would be disqualified. Any groups that did not have at least one techy and 2 other artists making the pitch would also be disqualified (to encourage groups not to lose members while they were out and about).

Jonathan Gilhooly	Stephen Wolff	Sarah Angliss	Rachel Cohen

The groups pitched the following concepts for a digital miniature:

Group 1 (Lorna Gay Copp, Lucy Childs, Bonnie Mitchell) - Taking a Bite
The cursor will act as a mouth and the user will be able to eat various visual representations of objects.

Group 2 (John Murdoch, Jo Shaw, Chris Stevens) - Emotional Scale
Z-axis transformations of images using a technique developed by Chris.

Group 3 (Emilia Therese, Pavel Acosta Proenza, Yuneikys Villalonga, Ben Sheehan) - Recycling Lives
Each member of the group will keep a diary, excerpts of which will be recombined using an emotional scale.

Group 4 (Anna Dumitriu, Mark Pawlak, David Steinberg) - DNA/Microbiology
A journey through different scales from the micro- to the macroscopic with the user being able to control the zoom.

Greg Daville	James Johnson	Lorna Gay Copp	Rosie Woodridge

Group 5 (Jon Gilhooly, Andrew Mailing, Andre Viljoen) - One-to-One toybox
Intelligent 'lego' for adults and children - virtual construction kit.

Group 6 (Greg Daville, Rosie Woodridge, Stephen Wolff) - Titanic
Comparing objects to the Titanic?

Group 7 (Rachel Cohen, Pete Bennett, Martin Janicek) - Chinese Whispers
A graphical Chinese whispers game involving copying images that will be played world-wide.

Group 8 (Manuela Brandao, Chris Johnson, Rona Innes) - Exagerated Points of View
An exploration of how camera viewpoint affects the way we interact with objects.

Jamie Wyld	Chris Stevens	Emilia Telese	Tamsin Williams
Manuela Brandao	Sol Sneltvedt	Anna Dumitriu	John Murdoch

Group 9 (Ivan Pope, Sarah Angliss, Luiciana Haill) - A New Measurement Unit - the Routemaster Bus
Measuring famous landmarks, such as Mount Everest and the Eifel Tower in terms of the length or volume of a Routemaster bus. People will be able to send in their measurements of landmarks.

Group 10 (Seb Cohen, Zoe Tissandier, Tord Paulson) - Titanic
Comparing objects to the Titanic?

Group 11 (JJ Maurage, Glen Lashley, Sol Sneltvedt) - Popularity Scales
A site where people can enter two celebrities names and see who is the most popular, based on the number of hits each name generates.

Group 12 (Kate Forrest, Tamsin Williams, James Johnson) - A Family of Bottoms
Based on a small survey at a local Brighton pub, the thing that people want to see on a website is pictures of their family member's bottoms. Maybe the small sample skewed the data?

Chris Johnson	Jo Shaw	Glen Lashley	David Steinberg

After all the groups had pitched their concept, Tessa Lewin gave a short summary of each proposal and then the groups voted for their favourite projects. Each group had 5 votes that it could use to vote for other projects in any way that they wished as long as they did not vote for their own idea. The voting was done blind to ensure fair play.

The winning pitch was the Routemaster bus developed by Ivan Pope, Sarah Angliss and Luiciana Haill. Their pitch was engaging, focused, answered the questions that had been set and was extremely funny. The project is practical within the financial and technological constraints as well as supporting a venerable British institution while keeping their tongues firmly in their cheeks. The Routemaster Digital Miniature will be online early in 2006 on the Lighthouse website. Ding, ding - hold tight.

Kate Forrest	Bonnie Mitchell	Sebastian Pedley	Zoe Tissandier
	Peter Bennett	Mark Pawlak