Rather than reporting on a specific keynote, I would like to focus on something that has been experienced behind mobile screens and not on in front of the festival stages. Such phenomenon can be approached both as an emerging genre of network literature, as well as a very contemporary and technologically mediated feeling of social awareness and connectivity.
Inside the E-art dome were some interesting lectures too and ways of art meeting new technologies. Too bad we could not see all in there but outside were also activities we joined in after the lecture on nature versus culture and ‘real nature is not green’. With other people we collaborated in games instead of lectures.
Collaboration…If there’s one word I would suggest to compress PICNIC’08 into, this would be it. To be perfectly honest, the whole concept has gotten a bit hollow after three days of this greenly, grassy, commy conference. A small impression of my corporate PICNIC experience…
Short presentations, few both clickable art visualizations and physical artistic prototypes from presenters, and conglomerated art projects without neither explicitly separating lines nor accessible explications for the few curious ones is the best way to describe the first impressions of Picnic’s 2008 e-Art virtual platform. At least from the very first hours.
Adam Greenfield talked at Picnic about how new technologies changes our perception and experience of cities. According to Greenfield the networked city is no science fiction anymore, it is becoming reality. We live in ubiquitous cities where information systems are linked. Information data of the city will be captured, stored and visualized.
Greenfield explains how our experience and decisions…
On friday afternoon at Picnic 08 Aaron Koblin talked about the visualisation of collected data in his art projects. The main project was the drawing of 10.000 sheep all done by collaborating volunteers. Koblin is not the only one working on data visualization and other examples are given here, all about anonymous people working together to create something or make a difference.
This is the first post in a series where the Masters will blog some lectures given at the Picnic 08 conference which is held the next three days at the Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam.