Last weekend Amsterdam attracted many sound artists and scholars from all over the world who wanted to attend the Sonic Acts Festival. This year’s theme was “The Cinematic Experience”. Although I was in fact only able to attend very little of the Sonic Acts conference, I will try to sum up what was most interesting for me…
The session I attended was entitled ‘Interactivity and Immersion’ with presentations by Jeffrey Shaw and Marnix de Nijs. weiter…
This is going to be big! Interactive 360° digital video technology!
The camera system has been developed by Immersive Media , it’s eleven CCD 1/3″ sensors in a modular dodecahedral array.
…and once again, all the great photos in this entry are made by the very talented Anne Helmond!
And on yet another rainy morning in Amsterdam (not surprising, you get used to it after a while!), full of curiosity and hopes for the day, I went to the second day of the Video Vortex - Responses to YouTube conference. I was hoping that today would be more fruitful than yesterday, and indeed, what a pleasant surprise! Well, call me selfish, but instead of giving a general overview I will focus on the session that was the most interesting for me personally: Curating Online Video.
On a rainy morning in Amsterdam (that demanded lots of coffee!), the Video Vortex - Responses to YouTube Conference was kicked off at Club 11. I will be blogging on the conference for movingweb, but I was also there because I have been involved with the project through my work at the Netherlands Media Art Institute where we made an exhibition with the same title and related topics. Well, the program of the conference is quite extensive, and I was very disappointed by some of the presentations today (that seemed unprepared, unfocused, had nothing new to say…a total contrast with the first Video Vortex conference in Brussels!). So I will focus on the gems of today’s presentations!
Minivegas has done some channel idents for S4C. They have devoloped a setup which reacts to the voice of the anouncer, so that every ident is a little different. In the piece “Lights” for example the lights get triggered on and off by voice parameters.
Watch the Making Of to really understand the concept!
MySpaceTV is hosting a new web show of dating guru Neil Strauss called Rules of the Game.
The first episode shows two guys and their efforts to get some telephone numbers. After every episode there’s a mission for the viewers, which they are supposed to tape and upload it as a video answer.
The 2007 Xmas-Special is a first-person-livevideo-game that game me goosebums playing it! This websites by well-known german agency “Scholz & Volkmer” is one of the best video based sites I came across this year.
“iChannel is a collaborative web series about a young man who has his life magically taken over by an audience… YOU. Our goal is a compelling original series where the audience can interact with the creators and the show’s characters in unique, unprecedented ways.”
What I really like about this interactive web-series is it’s ironic and humorous tone. In the first episodes the protagonist is really scared by the audience influencing his life but later on he even asked them for advice.
Visit a big exhibition during the day, watch some crazy art performances, and then go to a big concert - how does that sound to you? Last Saturday, me and some friends and colleagues visited the STRP festival in Eindhoven. The organisation of the festival describe it the following way: “STRP is unique because it presents visual arts and music ranking alongside film, games, and robots”. So a promising concept! And yes, despite the messy built-up of the exhibition, the dominance of rather older installation works (actually, some of them were developed in the Netherlands and so have been shown plenty of times before), there were some gems! Overall there was a great atmosphere, and since I guess a big part of the public came for the concerts of Roisin Murphy, Trentemoeller, Goose, 2many djs, and so on and so forth, the exhibition did give a lot of people who are normally not involved with media art a chance to experience it! So in that way it seems successful - they had over 18.000 visitors in 3 days!
During the New Cultural Networks Conference in Amsterdam (Friday 2nd of November, organized by Stifo@Sandberg), PIPS:lab presented diespace , the first internet community for people who have passed away!
PIPS:lab are a group of artists from Amsterdam based Sandberg Institute, and what they do is a mixture of new media art projects, theater, performance, (live!) music,…well, it’s really an experience and it really stirred up the audience of the conference!