Love City

Final university presentations

2007-02-02T16:57:00.000Z

over the last two days, we have done presentations to DMU and Derby Uni, to tell more people, particularly students, about the game and also show a bit more about the game is, what it will be etc...

We are getting closer... 13 days to go as the Love City texts keep reminding us along with all the people who have signed up.

Love City is...

2006-12-21T13:23:00.000Z

Love City is a love story between three people. Two men and a woman, lost in the city, trying to find each other, trying to seduce their way out of the various messes and moments of sincere heroism that make up their lives.

Love City is either a utopia, a dream of a better world or something more decadent, a wild fantasy place
Love City is not just a place it is alive. Treat the city as if it was a person.
Love City is a place where you can answer the big what ifs?

Ramona is searching for Billy, Billy is searching for Charlie, Charlie is searching for Ramona and so on until they get so dizzy that they all land in a heap under the big tree in the park, the tree that is engraved with the message “eventually someone will love me back” and encircled with flowers placed by the very same broken hearted people who receive brown paper wrapped gifts every morning, along with their pint of milk.

Love City must be built. TEXT 07785 200 350
Love City must in someway reflect the city you live in.
Even if it is in a hyperreal surroundings.

Love City testing with Students in Leicester

2006-11-27T12:46:00.000Z

Yes it been a while since I updated this blog. But Things have been lumbering along in the technical areas of the project which have been so extensive that I didn't want to go into detail about them here.

But we know have prototype 1 which is to be tested with 8 sutdents in Leicester over 24hrs to see what they can do wtih it and see if they have any suggestions.

We are testing:

1) If they can log their position in love city while wandering throught Leicester.
2) If they can send messages to each other when they share the same space.
3) To see how many messages they can recieve.

Any way we are off in 10mins. I will report what happens later

Love City Is...

2006-08-14T17:18:00.000Z

Love City will soon be launching our Love City Is... campaign.

Influenced by the 70's all loving cartoon, we are building a vision of Love City via text messages. We will text you what we think Love City Is... and in return we would like you to send us your vision of Love City, based on your own city + a bit of love, fantasy and imagination.

To get you started,
Love City Is... either a utopia, a dream of a better world or something more decadent, a wild fantasy place
Love City Is... a utopian dream on the brink of a decadent decline
Love City Is... a city of crossed wires, star crossed lovers, lonely hopes and innocent dreams, sent out as a message to the wrong person.

Add your visions of Love City to this BLOG or join Love City's text messaging service.

People do imagine the future. I was wrong

2006-08-09T11:44:00.000Z

I recently saw a film called "Code 46" by Micheal Winterbottom with Samantha Morton (Nottingham lass) and Tim Robbins. It was a recently made utopia/dystopia film, so my claims in the previous post have been challenged.

The film had obviously been made on a small budget, so all the future imagining had been created by using minimal modern buildings in Shanghai for interior and exterior shots. There was also a clever use of desert locations to create a sense of a barren, devastated world. Although it wasn't a great film and the plot at times was impossible to follow or even find, its got some interesting ideas.

It's a description of a world where all sex is regulated to avoid genetically similar people having relations. Where insurance creates the divide between rich and poor. If you haven't got cover your no-one, everything you do in life is governed by whether you have a valid policy.
The basic plot is a love story between a fraud investigator and his target, a worker in an all powerful insurance company.

Great shots and ideas but overly self important and you lose interest in the characters towards the end. It was a shame because there were important messages about present global issues: environmental disaster, cloning, surveillance and the yawning gap between privileged first world populations and the stark poverty of the developing world. But the films meditative approach meant that some of these messages get lost.

But people are making future films. I stand corrected.

Why does no-one imagine the future anymore?

2006-07-27T14:14:00.000Z

We have started to look at what Love City might be like to people playing. We started to think about what connotations the words Love City might have.

The first thing that came to our minds was a perfect place, a sort of quasi hippy commune a place where every one is cared for where happy people in kaftans, banging tambourines dance around in a state of constant bliss. A place like the film "Logans Run" where everyone is young and carefree with endless free time. Everyone is high on future drugs which come in the form of silver spheres that you rub in orgasmic group frenzies.

The 60's and 70's seemed full of these imagined futures where pleasure and sexual freedom were central to the vision. Other films like "Westworld" and more comically Woody Allen's "The Sleeper" explored similar themes.
The darkside of these Flower Power Love Cities is that all these decadent shenanigans come at a cost - knowledge. The idea being that you can have as much fun as you like as long as you don't ask any questions and accept that the agents of the system are watching your every move.

The second thought that came to our minds was more seedy. Love City also sounds like a modern red light district, like a world of neon light, strip joints and sex shops.
This seems in part to be informed by the Japanese optimistically naming their knocking shops - Love Hotels.

We could also describe Love City in this light, as a decadent dystopia. A sort of last days of Rome environment, a place where morality is elastic and everything is poised on the brink of imminent implosion.

A part of making Love City was to explore why nobody seems to imagine the future any more. We seem to no longer be interested in building grand visions and futures filled with perfect people and terrifying all powerful machines.
We all seem to live in an all consuming eternal present where thinking of next months hot gadget replaces imagining possible futures. So maybe we can use gadgets to re-awaken a love of building tomorrow.

So we will create a parallel utopia superimposed over 3 midlands cities and allow the citizens to imagine their own future through a game on mobile phones.

Promo video

2006-06-23T12:01:00.000Z

As part of our development of our project we have made a short video to hopefully make the idea seem a little more tangible and to promote it closer to the launch date when it will be shown in cinemas across the region.

See what you think - WATCH IT

Original map of nottingham

2006-03-31T16:10:00.000Z

As a comparison to the digital visualisations for Nottingham here is a picture of the planned route I drew on a map.

You can see how closely the lines correspond

Nottingham Survey Results

2006-03-09T20:02:00.000Z

Result!!
Here are the results of the Nottingham survey. It is the view of Nottingham (6km x 6km).
The yellow area shows the observed area of one cell from the Orange network. It was almost worth all the car sickness for something so pretty.

Image courtesy of Leif Oppermann for Nottingham University's Mixed Reality Laboratory

Surveying Nottingham

2006-03-06T16:39:00.000Z

In order to create the world of Love City we first have to go through some extensive mapping of the 3 cities. Yesterday we mapped most of Nottingham by circling the city in ever decreasing circles.

I now know what it must be like to be a taxi driver now . From 12 noon to 8pm we drove around and around bouncing over a million speed bumps like a small boat in a storm, stopping whenever the motion sickness set in.

The equipment we used was 4 mobile phones to track the 4 phone networks in the UK: Orange, Vodaphone, T-Mobile and O2 and a blue tooth GPS unit to establish our position. In 10 hours we managed to map most of the inner city area of Nottingham. On monday I mapped the city centre on bike.

Let's hope the data is good as I don't fancy doing that again!

Welcome to the birth of Love City

2006-03-06T15:38:00.000Z

This unique project by Active Ingredient exploring the potent mix of amour and technology to unite the 3 English cities of Derby, Leicester and Nottingham in a menage a trois of mobile game play.
I will use this blog to update you with the progress in, both, creative process and technological development.

This project started on 14th February 2006 and Love City the game will begin on Valentines 2007.