The City Beneath

As promised something on Dave Walker's Nottingham Cave Survey that so impressed me at Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording in Dublin last Friday.  Dave and his team have been working on producing a comprehensive digital record of Nottingham's unique and relatively little known systems of man-made rock cut caves, the earliest survivors of which date to the Middle Ages, but for which there are far earlier accounts.

Using a variety of terrestrial laser scanning kit the team have worked on the "cave a day" principle to produce a stunning primary record.  While there is little in time and resources to make too much of these data what Dave has done is produce some lovely, quite ethereal flythroughs using Pointools View Pro.  Nottingham is my home city, and I've wandered through a few of the caves over the years; these visualizations perfectly capture the sense of strangeness that descent from sunlit city street to subterranean space creates - I'm always reminded of something faintly Lovecraftian "the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries" but that's just me...

Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording

Here, for the record, my presentation given at Technological Advances in Landscape and Heritage Management Recording in Dublin on Friday.  An excellent, useful and enjoyable day with some very interesting presentations, particularly focused on high resolution airborne and terrestrial lidar.  I was really taken by the work of Dr Dave Walker on the Nottingham caves (good enough to deserve its own post, so more later) and the Scottish Ten, mysterious name, but great work, again deserving its own post. Since I managed to give the wrong version of my presentation, anyone interested in what I had to say will get a fuller picture from the below...  

Recounting the Landscape: Laxton Castle CryENGINE 2

Part of the aim of "Lasers, Landscapes and Muddy Boots" is to demonstrate the way in which game engines can place us as archaeologists physically within the landscape of our surveyed monuments, albeit virtually.  As a demonstration I've produced this short walkthrough of our survey of Laxton castle, based on field collected GPS data.

Produced using CryTek's CryENGINE 2, it lacks the ludic elements of earlier CryENGINE 1 models of the same site, but has a greater degree of visual fidelity - it looks more like the real thing.  Just the thing to get across the point that standing inside our survey data and rewalking the same fields, getting digital mud on our boots, may bring new insight. In the words of Tilley "To understand a landscape truly it must be felt, but to convey some of this feeling to others it has to be talked about, recounted, or written and depicted."

Narrative and Choice: The Stanley Parable

Really enjoying the Half-life 2 mod The Stanley Parable.  A great example of what is achievable using FP game engines when creativity breaks free of the predisposition to run and shoot things, this strange fractured narrative with its dominant narrator and meta narrator brings to mind Aldiss' Report on Probability A or the fracturing of narrative form and convention of some of John Fowles's novels (the ending of The Magus for example, when the a narrator suddenly appears to discuss choices and outcomes).

This is clever, intriguing stuff, done with flair but minimal fuss and with starkly simple visuals that point the player back to the experience of the unfolding narrative and the dominant voices of the narrators, confusing, commenting and instigating choice, while all the time undermining and questioning our freedom to really choose.  Great stuff!