http://www.e-culturefair.nl/
24 October 2003, Amsterdam, Melkweg
Lynda

(Mettina Veenstra, Geert de Haan and Michel Huiberts were there too, not to 
mention Anne Nigten)

Apart from the terrible registration process (where everyone was
waiting outside in the cold) the day was extremely interesting and
valuable.  Maybe what inspired me most was the high percentage of interesting 
and knowledgeable speakers.  The moderator, John Thackara of Doors of 
Perception, did a great job too.

Sara Diamond gave an excellent keynote talk, the slides for which
are available:
http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/docs/artisticR&Dslides.ppt
http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/docs/artisticR&D.pdf
http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/docs/artisticR&D.doc
(currently) available from:
http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/uk/nieuws/nieuwsecf2.html

Speakers from a number of prominent institutes came along and gave
some very good visions about how to set up, fund and work on the edges
of art and technology.  (Beware confusion of terms art, technology, science, 
research, design etc.)

Klaas Hernamdt gave a talk about the verhalentafel.  Sort of nice
project, but didn't seem much more than a nicely designed application
for people wanting to share stories together.
http://www.waag.org/verhalentafel/
But this is probably my scientific "what's new and generally applicable" 
instead of the artistic judgement of "wow - cool".

Dipak Patel gave a more interesting talk about how to have information
in your own environment (wherever that may be) about people you care
about.  He is working at three places - Media Lab Europe, BT and UCL.
http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/lcs/papers2003/91.pdf
Not my cup of tea (you gotta see the pictures :-) but I admire his fundamental 
approach to the work.  (He was showing us cross-sections of brains, 
identifying 3 parts, inclusing the emotional and intellectual parts.  He said 
that this is why mammals have emotional resonance, which I confess I hadn't 
thought about before.)

Sara Price described the Ambient Wood project, which I think is the
same project described in the HT03 paper:
http://www.ht03.org/papers/pdfs/3.pdf
although Southampton were not mentioned in her talk.  (There are a
large number of partners involved.)

The session was designed to reflect on "The added value of creativity
and co-operation: researching human connections"

I got a bit annoyed about the continuing reference that "artists are
creative" and technical people aren't.  (Scientific researchers have
to be creative too - that's the point - but it doesn't flash and
sparkle and glitter all the time... Flame off...)


Four speakers from different art-techie environments made some very
good remarks.

Stefan Agamanolis, Media Lab Europe, Ireland
(He gave very much the impression that he has been shipped over from
MIT Media Lab and, like all the Media Lab people, still has his
blinkers on for interesting work outside the Media Labs...)
They hire extremely creative people - "T" shaped, i.e. deep and broad.  They 
are lunatic fringe risk takers, passion driven with a sense of art.  (Sound 
familiar  :-)

Marleen Stikker, Waag Society, NL
Now an established institute for technical innovation on art side.

Sally Jane Norman, Ecole Superieure de L'Image, France
A very articulate lady.  (English...)  She sees "New Media R&D" being of 
fundamental value.  The need to train a small number of articulate people.

Tapoi Makela, ISEA 2004 (this is a conference, not an institute...), Finland
He has been around and seen a lot and had a bunch of nice stories, but I'm not 
sure that I know what his messsage was.  He is a "big name" in the crowd of 
big names present.


Co-operation with Industry and Science

Peter Werkhoven, TNO and UvA, NL
Said good things about V2_ and the Waag in the context of MultimediaN
Few keywords from his talk:
Mediated communication, synaesthetic media (I think he means 
switching/combining media to communicate), prosthetic memory.  Information to 
experience.)  Basically, the more the computer can 
understand the more it can help.

Jo Reid, Hewlett Packard Labs
http://www.mobilebristol.com/
Bristol online with very high bandwidth.  So broad as to not say anything.
The most interesting thing was hearing her remarks about dealing with all the 
(hundreds?) of partners involved.

Monica Fleischman, MARS (Media Arts Research Studies) at Fraunhofer, Germany
http://imk.gmd.de/mars
She holds competitions to find artists she wants to work with.
She has something to do with I3 - Intelligent Information Interfaces.
http://www.i3net.org/
They (MARS) do "weird" stuff compared with other GMD/Fraunhofer groups but she 
hears good reports that the institute is "proud" of them.  Much of their 
funding is from culture.

Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, NL
He is a linguist who is creating virtual humans.  Coined term "multimodal 
media".
July 2004 Social Intelligence Design, Art Media and Technology


Session 3 Creative Industries, New Legal and Economic Models (== misc  :-)

There was an interesting diversion with the creative commons guy Glenn Otis 
Brown.
http://creativecommons.org/
He showed a great animation explaining their ideology and also their 
technical/legal solution.
http://creativecommons.org/learn/

Bronac Ferran mentioned "The Creative Economy" John Howkins, RSA
http://www.creative-economy.com/

Paul Rutten
(I was listening intently to all the presentations, except unfortunately this 
one - his tone somehow matched my theta/delta brainwaves...)

Minna Tarkka, M-Cult center for new media culture, Finland
http://m-cult.net
They are organising ISEA 2004 (the "IW3C2 WWW conference" for electronic arts).

Manifesto (authored by ANne et al.)
http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/docs/e-culturemanifesto.doc

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