Paidia Laboratory: Feedback at Platine 2011

Paidia Insti­tute will be part of the Pla­tine 2011 (Cologne, August 15th-19th) with the Paidia Lab­o­ra­tory: Feed­back.

„I was walk­ing down Granville Street […] and I was look­ing into one of the video arcades. I could see in the phys­i­cal inten­sity of their pos­tures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed sys­tems out of a Pyn­chon novel: a feed­back loop with pho­tons com­ing off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neu­rons mov­ing through their bod­ies, and elec­trons mov­ing through the video game.“
William Gib­son, author of “Neu­ro­mancer” und inven­tor of the term Cyberspace

Feed­back is a mech­a­nism, process or sig­nal that is looped back to con­trol a sys­tem within itself. In sys­tems con­tain­ing an input and out­put, feed­ing back part of the out­put so as to increase the input is pos­i­tive feed­back (regen­er­a­tion); feed­ing back part of the out­put in such a way as to par­tially oppose the input is neg­a­tive feed­back (degeneration).

Paidia Lab­o­ra­tory exam­ines com­puter games as closed feed­back sys­tems. In series of artis­tic exper­i­ments the feed­back behav­iour of games will be stud­ied and put in new cor­re­la­tions through mod­i­fi­ca­tions of hard­ware and soft­ware. The focus lays not on the usabil­ity of games, but rather to deter­mine their lim­its and bound­aries to under­stand the media spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics of games.

The results of the lab­o­ra­tory will be pre­sented at Pla­tine 2011: http://www.platine-cologne.de/11/

Update: The doc­u­men­ta­tion of the exhi­bi­tion can be found here: http://paidia-institute.org/feedback