Tagnic is the new reputation game of the Twitterverse. Trade +tags in tweets, receive feedback from your followers, and earn badges to display proudly on your profile.

To start playing, login using your Twitter account at http://playtagnic.com and the Badge Badger (@tagnic) will follow you. Tweet +word @anyone or @anything and that word will show up on their Tagnic profile! For example: @tagnic wow, this game is +amazing!

Tagnic is made by Socialbomb in NYC and is in public beta. We’d love to hear what you think! Send to feedback@socialbomb.com or tweet @tagnic.

Paparazzi is a game about fame, photography, and catching your friends in the act.

Celebrities and Paparazzi. Earn points by taking photographs of your friends and by having your photo taken. The more photos you are involved in—as a subject or photographer—the more valuable you become.

Location, Location, Location. Earn even more points by taking photos in “hot spots”—places where other players have already taken a lot of pictures.

Whether you want to be Lady Gaga or Patrick McMullan, be the right person in the right place at the right time and watch your score escalate you to stardom!

Paparazzi launched for iPhone and Facebook at SxSW Interactive 2009 — now available in the iTunes store! Check out the site for more info.

The festival is, in their words:

SCRAPCYCLE is a noise show and one-night exhibition.

……it’s an experiment in giving a scrap-material an exchange-value, an attempt to foster the local scrap-material exchange community, and a forum for art and music created from scrap-materials.

I’ll be doing a modified Concrete Crickets installation, as many of the originals were lost at Bent Festival of last year (when you make things that look like garbage, occasionally they get thrown out), and I’ll be in the company of some of my favorite artists and performers, including Loud Objects, Torino:Margolis, Lovid, and a pile of amazing others. If you’re out in Brooklyn on Friday night, 11/21, come by!

Throw down your blanket! Will you end the day surrounded by friends and eating a delicious meal, or will you be invaded by ants and left stranded and hungry on the edge of the party?

Competitive picnicking is a large multiplayer game of trading items and claiming territories, set on a big lawn on a sunny summer day and using food as game pieces. Players come to the picnic with the basic ingredients for lunch and play a culinary variant of go fish to assemble the highest-scoring snacks and sandwiches.

Competitive Picnicking debuted at Come Out and Play 2008, and was run again at the Adelaide Film Festival 2009.

Installations go up on April 24th and come down after the 26th, so come on by and check them out any time between then — and come see a show or catch a workshop. As they say on their site, “If you have the least bit of curiosity about electronics or electronic music, or if you’ve ever just wanted to rip your toys apart, this festival is for you.” It should be a pile of fun — hope to see you there!

Photo by Joo Youn Paek.

From the flyer:

Sculpting Voice is a night of performances exploring how voice can be shaped, destroyed, orchestrated and processed to build space.

A voice is as unique as a fingerprint and speaks in both presence and absence. In an evening of performances ranging from the sublime to the
insane, performers will use human voice to shape audio, video, theater, dance and origami. Performers will include R. Luke DuBois,
Lesley Flanigan, Andrew Schneider, Joo Youn Paek, Adam Parrish, Nick Hasty, Nancy Garcia, Eric Beug, Christopher McDonald, Mike Dory, and Dafna Naphtali

Lesley and I chose to make our performance a conversation between two distinct voices: her Speaker Synth project and my bass guitar. She warmed the synth up, exhibited a range of tones, and then set up a repeating loop. I did the same, first exploring the range of the bass and then settling into a groove. The performance mutated a bit as we went back and forth, finally closing with us both fading the loops out. It came out even better than I’d have hoped, and I’m looking forward to doing so again.

Photo by Pollie Barden.

It was a beautiful evening of sounds quiet and loud, calm and energetic, usual and decidedly un. Lesley has said she’ll be doing other shows like this, which I look forward to! In the meantime, Lesley and I have agreed to do the same type of set at BENT festival, so watch for us there as well.

Pusher/Puller is a architecturally-inspired physical device for pushing and pulling sound — an interactive architecture prototype. The device is meant to both stand on its own, reacting to what it hears, and provide control over the audio environment for the users.

By pushing and pulling the points along the shape’s exterior, users will be able to change the parameters of filters, delays, buffers, etc., allowing them to “play” the sounds around them as music.

I’ve long been interested in how the sound we hear is defined by the space we’re in — so I wanted to find a way to control the space myself, and therefore change where I hear.

The Pusher/Puller made its performance debut at Exit Art for the ITP NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) Show in on December 13, 2007. Other shows are being lined up, but look for it to come out again at Monkey Town in late January.

What I’m hoping to do with this project is re-inject human contact into the stressed user’s day, triggering a phone call when too many unhappy words are typed. This phone call will feature one of several pre-recorded cheer-up messages, encouraging the user that everything is okay in the world. Additionally, by pulling the user away from the stressful situation (the computer), he or she will ideally take a moment to collect his or herself and return to work more focused and generally happier.

This project stemmed from my obsession with humanizing factors in technology, calm tech in ubiquitous computing, and frustration with typing. I ran a text logger for several weeks with the intent of making a program that would randomize my sentences, but when I saw how often I typed sad/angry/depressed/stressed words, I saw a new focus emerge. I’m hoping to be able to provide a little shot of happy for people who could really use it — myself likely included.

Social Bomb is a game about social circles and quantified reputation scores. The current version is designed to accommodate 15-20 players. Each player is awarded points for being near players with higher reputations, and penalized for being near players with lower reputations. Bonuses and penalties are applied according to overall social promiscuity and status. The player with the worst reputation score is the ‘Social Bomb.’ Their score will have the most negative impact on a social circle.

Social Bomb is designed to be played in real-world social environments. Players are given small devices that house a microcontroller, a radio transceiver, and a numeric display. When two players come within conversation distance, their scores are slowly averaged. This is reflected on the numeric displays, which serve as a constant reminder of who outranks who and what effect players will have on each others’ score. The algorithms that determine the score are not simple, however – interactions involving multiple players are reflective of the group average. Longer conversations are worth bonus points, and superior social networking skills can reap exponential rewards down the line by increasing a player’s social momentum. Conversely, if a player is anti-social and aloof, they will soon begin losing points. If they’re not careful, they can become the ‘Social Bomb,’ and will have great difficulty finding receptive companionship in the game.

In addition to the score displayed on the players’ device – recent scores, bonuses, and penalties are visible on a public leader board. This hub provides a public record of interaction data. Players can check their overall game standing and strategize to improve their social rank by seeking out the most popular players in the game.

Social Bomb was created by Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP).

More details available on the site.