Bombaze

Abstract

Commissioned for the ‘NEoN’ Digital Art Festival, in Dundee, Nov 2012, and delivered via the festival website and iTunes app store as an interactive virtual art game. ‘Bombaze’, is a term first attributed to the writings of the great Scots Poet Allan Ramsay in the 17th Century and is the Scottish equivalent for the word ‘bamboozle’ as in ‘to perplex’, ‘to mystify’ and ‘to confuse’.

Through gameplay ‘Bombaze’ becomes a creative tool for investigation into the virtues of ‘virtual’ art, engaging its audience with novel, quirky, 3D augmented interaction and offering users a platform from which to speak out on the ways public / augmented artwork can enrich an environment, and provide alternative models for engaging, social interaction.
Gameplay entails following a route around some of Dundee’s more secret locations, on the look out for personalised image recognition game tags, once located the player enables the app through the use of their smart phone to view and interact with the 3D augmentation and engage with an updating database of geo-tagging preferences.

Research for this output involved the implementation and experimentation of 3D augmentation programming and geo-tagged, locative technology. The testing and development of this was addressed through a period of collaboration and discussion with directors from Scottish Digital Games Design agencies ‘Once were farmers’ and ‘Small and the giants’. In this instance the two companies took over the development of the 3D implementation and programming as directed by Jaygo Bloom.

Funded by a grant of £6.5K by the ‘Fleet Collective’ in association with Creative Scotland, ‘Bombaze’ coincided with the launch of ‘NEoN’ 2012, Its premise, to bring artwork out of the gallery and place it in public space, accessible to all and to act as an platform for discussion, engaging the local community and festival goers in discussions about the relevance of digitally mediated artworks within public space

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