RESFEST, a digital video festival, starts tonight at the Royal Cinema (on College Street in Little Italy) and goes until Sunday. Put on by res magazine, there should be a good mix of stuff.
It's been a while since I've heard some live music so I made it down to the Mira Records Mini-Tour at B-Sides. I Am Robot and Proud was humming, QuasiMojo was lovely, and Aidan Baker was tearing up my ears (in a good way though). I give them all my seal of approval so check them out if you're wanting some fresh sounds.
While I was there, I found out that Venetian Snares is playing in Toronto on Nov. 8th! Exciting, I suppose, only if you like messed up IDM music. Though I would actually say that his stuff sounds extremely structured to my ears -- Squarepusher sounds all over the map in comparision.
Irregardless, the flyer is a keeper even if it's not your cup of tea: "Venetian snares is like a movie about giant fighting robots that are operated by the world's greatest kung-fu artists who are specially bred for 'the fight'."
My notes from Images and FITC 2003... I don't even need to type these up but I mostly use this weblog simply to jog my own memory when needed. :)
Images Festival (April 10-19)
Highlights from the Boxed Life screenings:
+ 8.7mb by Jeremy Bailey was great! (Click on placeholder to play. You should also check out Bye Bye Bye)
+ Chair/Screen by Takashi Ishida was so beautiful.
+ God Bless America by Tadasu Takamine was outrageous.
Highlights from the NegativLand screening/talk:
+ Don't have much time to comment on this right now so here's a link to NegativLand.
FlashintheCan (April 15-17)
I was pretty scatterbrained for most of this festival since I was stage manager for the smaller stage and, because of that, I ended up worrying constantly about what time it was and freaking out whenever the audio and internet didn't work. All the good code tidbits went in one ear and out the other. It was a good experience and I met lots of people but definetely hard work... next year, I'll just pay for a ticket!
Here's what I can put together in order of appearance:
+ Brendan Dawes' book was the first Flash book that I ever read which really put the designer/programmer ideal in focus for me so it was great to see him in person. Brendan is hella funny and pretty down to earth. Key: Put your audience first and test, test, test.
+ Andries Odendaal makes the most gorgeous interactive systems! Besides his isometric experiments, here's his walking skeleton that I saw a couple months ago. Play some Whizball. There was also this HP photo paper game with a little buggy that drove around an office desk... link anyone?
+ Kymberlee Weil gave a really good talk about getting more business in the Flash industry. One of her projects was Intro (goto mixed grill, then projects) which is somewhat similiar to my alphalpha project except with video. Key: network, network, network.
+ I missed most of Grant Skinner's talk but his gModeler application looks really useful. I still don't know exactly what it does but I was blown away by Grant's website. You should go check it out... it really articulates the relational navigation that I had wanted to make for this site.
+ Can you believe that I almost kicked Robert Penner off the stage because of mistaken identity? I'm so stupid so go buy his book. (Really, I hear good things about it.)
+ Glyn Thomas kind of came out of nowhere and showed off some amazing stuff with 3D in Flash. I didn't even think Flash could do that! And it looks relatively lightweight in delivery too. (As a side effect, it makes me want to put some effort into learning Lightwave but then I remember doing that paper tutorial and I wince.)
+ Colin Moock went through the new Unity 2 release and it definetley looks much easier to implement than Unity 1. More summer fun...
+ So that's about all I was really able to retain about the talks. I'm disappointed that the two other female speakers had to cancel though. All this hubbub about equal rights, yada yada, and I don't even get to see if they live up to expectations. (I'll save my rant about women in technology for another day...)
Okay, finally those Digifest notes!
OnTarget Digital Entrepreneur Workshop
I originally thought Digifest was worthwhile simply for the OnTarget business workshops but the first 10 minutes were putting me to sleep so I left when they started to get into some hairy statistics from Delvinia.
Dutch Media Practice and Resistance: Electronic Interventions
This panel talk was really interesting in that these new media practitioners really moved away from screen-based restrictions. Their work realizes how important 'real life' interventions should be to 'cyber' interactions. So in no particular order:
+ Eric Kluitenberg - Constructing the Digital Commons
By far my favourite speaker at Digifest! Eric organizes these 'technology jams' in various cities where there's an actual physical location and people just drop in on a weekly basis for some tutorials or to just shoot the breeze with others who share an interest in technology. Whoa, a good old analog network!
I believe the events are called an*at*tom*ik and I would refer to you a URL but (here's a shocker...) there is none! Eric hasn't gotten around to making one yet but he actually says that this doesn't impact attendance at all since it forces people to come by to see what's happening.
It's amazing how body language makes the hugest impact on how we communicate and that's sort of getting lost today. And you can really see how effective face-to-face speaking is when Eric immediately built a relaxed rapport with the audience by simply detaching himself from the speakers podium... plus, he had the cutest little accent.
Eric is somehow related to Next 5 Minutes 4.
+ Nat Muller - User Research in Responsive Environments
Nat founded foAM which does a lot projects with everyday people to see how they react and interact with environments hooked up with sensors. From the documentation she showed us it was hard to figure out what the actual interations where (besides people swinging around in a circus arena, serious) but she does a lot of direct interviewing with the participants after they leave the environment in order to gather information. A very tactile way of getting feedback for tactile environments... sounds like a good idea to me.
Some more info on foAM can be found in their Librynth.
+ Guy van Belle - Old School Tactics vs. New School Abstractions
An urban update to that Russian guy who makes those political Zenith projections onto buildings. (Sorry, can't even fathom how to spell his name at this time.) Guy was trying to make these culture jamming statements but this I didn't really get though... how does projecting typography and Flash animations onto buildings (when it doesn't seem like anyone is around) change the world?
He did however offer this piece of advice: To get freedom of speech on the internet, you need to fight for freedom of speech in the real world too... they aren't completely separate entities.
Here are some resources for digital copyright info: info-commons.org and creativecommons.org.
+ Floor van Spaendonck - Tools for Social Change
Seniors should be allowed to use computers too right? Technology is making the generation gap even bigger so the Waag Society for Old and New Media would bring different types of technology to seniors homes to allow them to record their stories in non-intimidating ways.
Free as in Speech: Open Systems for Creative Expression
I was starving so I missed the first 3 speakers but made it back for James Fung who is one of Steve Mann's graduate students. They hooked up the big screen to James' eyetap glasses so it was very weird to see him navigate through a Linux OS and a hacked internet browser in order to present to us.
It was also surprising to see how normal the cyborg James is in comparison to Steve Mann who seems quite nervous and introverted when he speaks. (I suppose I assumed incorrectly that only those who seem like they want to leave society would want to become a cyborg.) Though, I'm still not entirely sold on the idea that the eyetap's ability to block out ads is unobtrusive.
Also to note: this group was hardcore into the open source movement. To keep up to date, they recommended checking out freshmeat.org. When I finally hook myself up with a laptop, I think that I'm going to hunt up an open source GUI OS... Lindows makes me laugh though.
Okay, enough typing from me. I'll finish off by saying that Amon Tobin was great and I'll add some of the hints that gmunk dropped tomorrow or later on.
Because everyone loves links (yes, I'm being partially sarcastic here since most of us recieve floods of information en masse on a daily basis), here's a compilation of URLs that have been passing through my mailbox the past couple of weeks. Content varies though I guarentee that they are interesting in one way or another.
+ Toronto's Images Festival new media component - 'Source'
+ Stelarc's website (he's one of those cyborg guys)
+ Lisa Klapstock's 'Threshold' photography
+ Promise (artsy warehouse party this Friday in Toronto)
+ Fluxen.com has a new series finished!!
+ Short promo show for Pixel Gallery in Toronto
+ Art Directors Anonymous (Canadian designer collective of sorts)
+ 4 days left to win Digifest tickets!
+ Mr.Wong's apartments (I know you'll click on this simply because of the name)
+ Semantic room building (crazy!)
+ Yahoo directory of web work
And it ain't a cool link list without... Stinkoman and Teen Girl Squad 2!
I went with my roommate to check out I Am Robot and Proud aka Shaw-Han Liem tonight. It was definetely a night to remember.
This event turned out to be a UofT art show fundraiser with a pretty interesting crowd. For example, we ran into this girl (in the bathroom, of all places) and we talked for about 10 minutes about various things and even the topic of nanotechnology came up.
Unfortunately, when we arrived we only heard/saw the last couple of tracks. It was a wicked setup though... Liem was sitting cross-legged on the stage floor, his synthesizer on the ground in front of him, doing this live PA of funky ambient tunes.
He's performing again at Oasis (294 College) Sunday evening (Dec 8) along with hellothisisalex for the Pinhead Christmas fundrasing benefit party so I think that I'll have to check that out.
Anyways, there was an intermission and this electro/punk/something band called Russian Futurists comes on and it was totally scary/awesome/bad/funny/something.
The female vocalist was jumping into the crowd, getting into people's faces, rufflling peoples hair, crazy stuff -- kind of reminds me of Bif Naked. They played this number called "Tidy Up After Yourself" which went a little something like:
guy: "After you use the rice cooker..."
girl: "TIDY UP AFTER YOURSELF!"
guy: "After you have your dinner..."
girl: "TIDY UP AFTER YOURSELF!"
It is now mine and my roommate's "song". :)