| Go
See Now! |
Shareable
Media Group @ MIT Visual Interfaces
for Shareable Media
Thinking about how your user population might be able to interact
with each other around your media? The Shareable Media Group
has some provocative solutions. Digital video/rich media folks
should take a close look at I-
and M-View and Individeo
(tools for collective storyboarding and editing.)
MECAD
Media Center for Art and Design
Looking for new art/design/technology talent? Keep an eye
on this brand 2-years young new media center inside a graduate
school for the arts just outside of Barcelona.
Virtools
Behaviour-Based Interactivity for 3-D
Adding behaviours
to 3-D environments is not new; creating a tractable authorting
environment and optimizing for the web, however, is still fairly
fresh. SGI's Cosmo
division tried to make it happen with VRML
and failed. Will Virtools succeed? For all of those looking
for ways to draw eyeballs to your site, you might want to check
them out. I'm getting a beta version of their authoring environment
into the lab soon and I'll let you know what it's like. |
|
Summary |
Two steps
into the room for my talk on the ActiveText project and my
shoes were soaked. Seems that the room had leaked the night
before, forming a huge puddle underneath where the speaker
and all of the electronica equipment sat. The VCR I had requested
was nowhere to be seen, and the rooms alternatte identity
as a lightwell made it impossible to see the projection created
by the itsy bitsy portable projector they had. We had already
begun to suspect, but now it was confirmed - this conference
sucked. No way to get around it. Proof that bad organization
is worse than no organization. Rooms which were the site of
talks about the Web didn't have Internet access. The program
was organized by room, so finding who you wanted to hear speak
when they were speaking became a group operation involving
diagrams on napkins. Parts of the conference - it seemed like
most of the good parts - were scattered all around the city.
And the main location was in the middle of a shopping mall!
I thought we were in Paris, not Edmonton!
I have
nothing to say about the conference itself, other than what's
above in the Go See Now! section. The catalogue looked very
promising, but I don't know, maybe it was the luck of my draw,
but very little of the other presentations were interesting.
ISEA is known as a gathering place for a wide range of folks
working along the art + technology frontier, and it was worthwhile
to renew contacts with some of this tribe (Sher Doruff from
Keystroke, Frank Boyd, formerly of Artec and the MultiMedia
Labs, Lizbeth Goodman from the Performance Research Unit at
the University of Surrey, etc.)
The only
other bright spot was Paris itself. We caught an exhibition,
Au du la Spectacle, at the Pompidou which was a joyous ride
through several decades of pop-art. And an entire afternoon
spent at the Picasso Museum gave me a new appreciation for
the number of different phases he went through. Next time,
I'll just go for the museums and forget the conference.
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