PETRAS Community Development: The Internet of Guitars by Prof. Steve Benford

The Internet of Guitars with Prof Steve Benford

PETRAS Community Development Event

Date: Monday 14th March 2022

Time: 14.00-15.00

The PETRAS Community Development events have been created to offer the wider PETRAS community the opportunity to meet up, network and discover new things.

We offer our community the opportunity to present their own work, discuss topics of interest or to listen to and join relevant discussions from those both inside and out the PETRAS Network. Events can focus on themes, topics or industries drawn from PETRAS’s overall goals and lenses.

This event will host Steve Benford and will be chaired by Alan Chamberlain (University of Nottingham) & Dave De Roure (University of Oxford), the PI and CO-I of the EXIoT Project (PETRAS).

The Carolan guitar is an acoustic guitar that has been digitally augmented to capture and tell its life story. For the past eight years this unique instrument has been telling tales from its life on its personal blog (carolanguitar.com). This is then connected to the instrument through interactive Artcodes that are inlaid into its wooden body as decorative Celtic knotwork. Scanning these with a digital device conjures up stories of its making and repair, guitarists it has stayed with, and songs it knows, which vary according to the context in which it finds itself. Carolan’s life so far has revealed insights into the Internet of Things, including how mappings between physical objects and their digital footprints can be configured, adapted and shared, and has shed light on to how digital services can enable such things to acquire distinctive digital identities that enhance their province, utility and personal meaning, ultimately leading us to the notion of socially interconnected brands.

Steve Benford is the Dunford Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham where he co-founded the Mixed Reality Laboratory. He is Director of the EPSRC-funded Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training and the Director of the University’s Smart Products beacon of research excellence. He currently leads the Creative Programme for the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub. He was previously an EPSRC Dream Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the BBC. His collaborations with artists have been recognised by the Award of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art, multiple BAFTA nominations, four Best Papers at the ACM’s Computer-Human Interaction Conference and were documented in his book Performing Mixed Reality (MIT Press). Steve is also a keen guitarist.

This event brings together PETRAS, TAS Hub and nTAIL (AHRC) communities and is promoted as part of N-STAR, Nottingham Science, Technology, Art Research – in the Faculty of Science UoN, directed by Alan.

If you would like to discuss this event or you would like to develop a session of your own, please contact Claire Coulton (c.coulton@ucl.ac.uk).