people at the graduate school of creative arts and media

 

john buckley: ncad, faculty of design, research scholar

 

 

 

biographical details

 

John Buckley is an artist and educator living in Dublin. Upon graduating from Fine Art Printmaking and History of Art at NCAD in 1995 John worked as a tutor at Arthouse Multimedia Centre for the Arts, 3D/motion graphics artist at The Yard Postproduction, and as a freelance web designer abroad. He returned to NCAD in 2001 to take part in the MA in Virtual Realities. His research has been focused on the increasing historical and politcal specificity in computer games.

 

 

Since 2003 he has been collaborating with artist Shane Cullen, initially on the work Courage to Refuse which was an attempt to breakdown the percieved monolithic nature of the Arab/Israeli conflict as it is generally mediated. As members of the Culture and Conflict Group they exhibited the work in both Europe and the US. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the conflict and to to evolve the work they undertook a research trip in April 2007 to Israel/Palestine and Lebanon. They will return in July 2008 to partake in the home rebuilding projects of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) in East Jerusalem.

 

 

In the past John has been a formative member of the Darklight Film and the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA) which has recently been relaunched. John is currently an assisatant lecturer in 3D modelling and visual effects in IADT Modelmaking.

 

research interests

 

My research interests focus on the design of immersive computer game spaces and on the repurposing of game technology, particularly massively multiplayer on-line (MMO) to function as participatory systems for social and political engagement.

 

 

An important source for this research is the CyberSyn project (1971-'73), an attempt to deploy an electronic participatory system of government developed by cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer with the Popular Unity government of Chile, before the coup d'etat of September 11 1973. Although never fully operational, the project was an inspiring collaboration between designers, engineers, artist, musicians, scientists and political leadership.

 

 

My enquiry relates to the design of software, a game engine, that would enable many simultaneous users to act collaboratively in a 3-dimensional, computer generated space. A major technical and design challenge, it involves gaining an understanding of computer programming, scripting, and network architecture as well as methods of translation and visual modeling of spatial data. From a design perspective the task is to develop an understanding of the relationship between the representation, model or simulation of the built environment and our 'lived' experience of it and to then translate that understanding into a set of tools that would enable non specialist users to interact with, modify and run such simulations themselves.

 

 

I am currently working on a digital media commission for Kerry County Council. The Kingdom will be an online multiuser space that explores unrealised or failed utopian projects in a landscape inspired by the aesthetics of the massively multiplayer worlds such as World of Warcraft.

 

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For additional information on the collaborating institutions consult www.dit.ie, www.ncad.ie, www.iadt.ie and www.ulster.ac.uk.