Issues

GRIG stands for the GUILD FOR REALITY INTEGRATORS AND GENERATORS.

Mixed reality

Mixed reality is a term much in vogue. The GRIG project uses it to refer to environments and movements in them that involve the blends, variations and flows of digital media and informations systems and the ways we enagage with them through our embodied selves. We prefer mixed reality to other well known terms such as virtual reality and hybrid reality. In investigating mixed reality arts GRIG looks at processes of integration and generation.

We have adopted the term guild to refer to the collaborative integration and generation of experience and knowledge about mixed relaity arts. Our guild is built around a group of corer partners. These partners work on key projects of their own but we also connect these as part of shared activities and the exchange of ideas and practices. The guild also refers to a wider wolrd of previous experiments on mixed reality (many of them preceding our 'digital age'). Currently, we also link up with other similar endeavours, persons, groups, projects and institutions. In time we hope that GRIG will function as a network of cultural and research partners who use a variety of methods, meetings and media (mixed relaity) to build and importantly exchange knowledge.

On the guild

Generating inspiring and playful situations in this reality requires skills from a variety of artistic, technological and scientific disciplines. For several years the gRig partners have worked together, exchanging information and resources; in European projects, informal networks and symposia, working towards a sustainable and extendible conceptual, organisational and technological support structure for artistic expression in hybrid realities. With gRig we will to formalise our collaboration over a longer time-span, strengthening the bonds between the partners through a joint research, production and presentation programme.

Aims

GRIG has two main aims:

• to develop fruther practice-based research into mixed reality arts as a domain of digital design and artistic expression
• online research 'rhetorics' and mediation of mixed reality arts in an interdisciplinary European level project via wiki-based technologies and media rich representations.

Main activities

GRIG will produce three mixed reality art works, a process-driven website, mixed modes of academic publishing and formal articles and chapters. The intention is to also collaborate on publications and build knowledge across sub-projects and varying practices and conceptual frames.

Funding of project: November 2006-November 2009 (EU Culture)

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