It might sound like something torn from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, but the quote above comes from Tea Uglow, the Google creative director and tech celebrity, who is sitting on the sofa at Semi Permanent’s offices in Sydney on a sunny autumn afternoon.
Read MorePODCAST: Curiosity Lecture Series: On Doubt... [2016]
Podcast of Tea speaking at the Sydney Writer's Festival in 2016.
Also contains the act of 'coming out' as trans in public for the first time :)
BOOK: A Curiosity of Doubts [2016]
A Curiosity of Doubts is a Penguin Special Edition published for the Sydney Writer's Festival.
I feel I have somewhat accidentally published a book. Penguin have very kindly included a sort of expanded version of a short lecture I was asked to give (as part of the Sydney Writers Festival). It is a huge honour and I feel a a bit embarrassed to be dressed in the livery of an authentic Penguin Classic, but, at the same time hugely proud. A Curiosity of Doubts is available in shops that sell books. And online. A podcast of the talk is being made and we can link to that.
PROJECT: Ghosts, Toast, and The Things Unsaid [2016]
This is one of my favourite projects of my career - I will always be immensely grateful to all who made it happen - the developers at Grumpy Sailor, the cast, but most of all Dan Koerner & Sam Haren at Sandpit.
I wrote a lot about it here: “We’re doing a play. Again…”
"an immersive performance with 360˚ sound using Google’s invisible, embedded technology."
The Australian, Feb 2016 || Guardian, Mar 2016
In collaboration with Google’s Creative Lab, Sandpit’s intimate performance features two ghosts (the audience) revisiting the kitchen(s) where they grew up, fell in love and refurbished, over 50 years. Audiences of two will (digitally) tune in to the inner thoughts of a couple at three stages of their life.
ABOUT: "Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid".
Ghosts was performed at the Adelaide Fringe in 2016 where we teamed up with Sandpit to deliver theatre with digital at the core. This article looks at the motivations and excitement and, well, goals, of the project
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PROJECT: Editions at Play [2015-2018]
Editions At Play was an edition of experimental books that cannot be printed by incredible authors including Reif Larsen, Joe Dunthorne, Sam Riviere, Alan Trotter, Misha Glenny, Laurie Penny, Maggie Koerth-Baker & Tea Uglow. Made by Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney with partners Penguin Random House and Google Books.
Click through to each title:
".. Google is also interested in this problem of engagement, and cites the declining use of e-readers as evidence that the frontier for digital books has moved. "Phones offer countless new ways to construct narrative and read deeply," says T.L. Uglow of Google's Sydney-based Creative Labs, which created the initiative along with London-based publisher Visual Editions. "These are books that can compete for attention on your phone via incredible, dynamic literature."
The Verge, Feb 2016
PROJECT: Bar.Foo [2013-2015
"Google Has a Secret Interview Process… And It Landed Me a Job
"If Google sees that you're searching for specific programming terms, they'll ask you to apply for a job. It's wild. Here's how it works."
The Hustle, Aug 2015
PROJECT: TEDdyX [2015]
In 2015, in collaboration with Grumpy Sailor, TEDxSydney and the Sydney Opera House, we developed a teddy bear that could talk. In fact, we developed 40 of them. Not only could they talk, these bears could react to their environment, meaning they could tell different stories depending on where they were within the Opera House. Walking around with a TEDdy X Bear is kind of like having a witty, often cute, occasionally rude, teddy bear companion. We created a series of riddles - Our teddies had lost their owners and we asked users to pick one up, walk around and figure out who the previous owner of the bear was. The teddy bears revealed secrets - and little hints - about their formative years. Guess the owner correctly, and a reward was on offer.
PROFILE: Collective Magazine [2015]
AS THE creative director for Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, Tom Uglow has a job many of us dream of, but what really goes on behind the colourful doors of one of the most innovative companies in the world?
Here, he shares what he has learned with The Collective magazine.
I THOUGHT THE INTERNET WAS AWFUL.
PROFILE: Desktop Magazine [2015]
This article appeared in 'Desktop Magazine' in 2015
What we see today as being huge and difficult and complex simply won’t be huge and complex for the next generation. Take phones for example. They seem so ubiquitous, yet smartphones are good at distribution of information because of convenience, not design. In itself a phone does improve on what other ’things’ used to do. Before the phone came the personal computer, and before the PC, surfing the net meant mainframes. Before that we had books, cameras, maps, newspaper - the phone has aggregated all of these in digital forms mainly because it is the easiest 'device' to connect to the internet. Perhaps we should have seen that coming?
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PROFILE: Write Track [2015]
Head of Google’s Creative Labs in Asia, Tea Uglow, is about as far at the cutting edge of emerging technology, art and design as it’s possible to be. This year literature and books in all their forms are the focus of his attention. We asked Tom to tell us why and what he sees the future of reading and writing to be.
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ABOUT: Books and bookness.
I wanted to write an essay about books: physical, electronic and the new kinds of digital books. It is a subject that preoccupies me. This is about the other "future of literature", not the industry, but the form: why we love literature, and what literature might become, in a digital world.
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PROJECT: The Next Stage [2014]
In Dec 2014, The Griffin Theatre and Google’s creative lab witnessed a one-day culmination of a conceptual project called 'The Next Stage’. The final output was a play written with digital ideas at it’s core, and as such I suppose was always likely to provoke. In the end we created a project that was so… so, something, that the audience revolted. They literally forced themselves upon the production (not physically) and changed the experience. That’s got to be interesting right?
Well, I wrote about that here.
But it was also a very special and important and educational project for me in many other ways - mostly covered by these beautiful films:
Notes from Watershed's Playable City conference
Beamed from Singapore into Bristol's Watershed - for the Playable City Conference in Sept 2014.
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PROJECT: Moodstone [2013] →
The Sydney Creative Lab worked with the Japanese design and research agency AQ to explore the concept of mood-mapping via a small hand-held device. The intention was no more than to explore the space, and the outcome of the project is an essay and a video talking about the outcomes of this thought experiment.
Read MorePROJECT: Shakespeare's Birthday Hangout [2014]
Google Australia partnered with Bell Shakespeare, a theatre company specialising in the works of William Shakespeare, his contemporaries and other classics, to host six live and interactive events on Google+ to showcase the use of our platforms.
Apart from celebrating the birthday of the world’s greatest playwright, this initiative supports our strategy to inspire traditionally non-technology focused companies to go digital and encourage digital in education.
The weeks activities included a Promotion video, birthday bash Hangout, Elizabethan Hangout in History, in conversation with John Bell and Peter Evans, Hamlet workshop, in conversation with John Bell and Lily Cole, photos and blog post. 40+ print and online articles and national broadcast coverage quoting Google as the technology and innovation partner. With just under 7,500 tuning into our YouTube channel and a whopping 55,372 of you liking and sharing our Facebook updates, including 11,500 sharing Mr William Shakespeare's Insult Generator, 'Thou art a beef-witted box of envy'!
PROJECT: The Binoculars [2013]
ABOUT: The CUBE @ WIRED [2014] →
From Google, a Virtual Cube That Plays Video on All 6 Sides | Design | WIRED
FROM interactive music videos to YouTube symphonies, the artists and designers at Google Creative Lab are known for pushing the capabilities of the web. Their latest project pushes boundaries in a very literal sense. It's a crazy, non-linear video player: Instead of putting clips in a rectangular frame, it stretches a single narrative across all six faces of an interactive cube.
The project debuted last week at the creative festival Semi-Permanent, in Sydney. There, a massive virtual version of the cube was projected on a wall, with scenes from an experimental short film playing out simultaneously on all six sides. By twisting and turning a handheld cork cube, viewers could decide for themselves when and how to move from side to side and scene to scene. In a sense, they become the editors of the three-dimensional story.
The task of creating that story fell on Steve Ayson and Damien Shatford, the directors that Semi-Permanent and Google tapped for the job. In terms of filmmaking, it was a challenge as unique as the canvas itself. "The main challenge is that you're not just telling one story. You're telling six stories," Ayson says. Ultimately, they settled on a loosely connected series of sequences based on the seven main story types--comedy, tragedy, rags-to-riches and so on--with characters moving seamlessly between the different scenes of the cube's faces.
The idea for the project was born last year at the Google Creative Lab in Sydney. From the start, the team saw it as an experiment in both technology and storytelling. "At Google, what's exciting to us about the cube is that it's really exploring different ways of approaching film," says Jonathan Richards, a creative lead at the studio. "We've been quite accustomed to film being a little rectangle on the web which you could play and experience the director's vision. But what would it be like if you handed the editing experience over to the audience and said, 'You're going to create the path through this film. You're going to decide the narrative structure.'"
The ultimate aim is to make the cube available as a sort of sandbox for creators. In coming months, Google plans to release an embeddable version of the player, in addition to a smartphone app which would let viewers prod the cube as scenes played out. Tom Uglow, a creative director at Google's Sydney studio, hopes that the experimental canvas might be of interest not just to artists but perhaps to people like educators and journalists, too.
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/google-cube-player
PROFILE: Financial Times [2014] →
Luckily enough - a charming profile / Sydney lifestyle article by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore.
PROFILE: ABC Arts [2014] →
Alongside the Remix 2014 summit in Sydney, the ABC took the pulse of a few of us producing these short talking head films discussing ideas around ethics, creativity and cities of the future.
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