Last Wednesday team Led It Up attended the BeamLab #22 conference. There were some inspiring presentations about media art and the use new innovative interactive devices.
Justus Tomlow was the kick off presenter he showed us idea’s for KiKa (Child Cancer Foundation) in how they can get more money from donators. His students learned a new way to make concepts, this is the main part of his course. The idea is, to find out all the different kinds of interactions that happen when a person is handling an object, by relating it to the stories of fairy tales. Some off the ideas the students made are now for review by KiKa. There was an idea about a tree in the hospital where you could pick an apple (when you donate a certain amount). When a person picked an apple there would go a light to a child which was ill. The idea was quite simple but i wonder if it’s an idea what could be useful. There where a lot of questions out of the audience about the quality and time spend about the ideas. So probably the ideas should be improved before the can be used. All by all it’s was an insight in the work of Justin Tomlow and how he stimulates his students.
Rogier van der Zwaag presented the stop motion video clip he made for the audiovisual formation “Nobody Beats the Drum”. The video lets you experience the Music through colored blocks moving by means of stop motion. Also we were promised the premiere of his newest creation. Again a stop motion clip not with blocks this time but with actual trees. But it was not quite the premiere we were hoping for. Mainly because the clip is not finished. So he showed us some previews and even though these were only previews, it was pretty ff’ing awesome. We can’t wait to see the finished result.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Marije Meerman from VPRO BackLight presented the worlds first TouchDoc. A documentary that can be viewed on an Ipad with all kinds of interactive layers on it. The new idea of this product is watching the documentary non-linear and with extra information and visualization of the presented content. This means that the whole experience of watching a documentary is changed. At first they showed a short introduction of the documentary ‘Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box’ about how companies are conquering Wallstreet with the use of algorithms. The presentation was interesting because they showed the Ipad application and its possibilities. The public was very enthusiastic about this new concept. There were a lot of questions about how the VPRO is going to market this new product and if the source code is open for use. They said it will be open but we will know it in the future.
Time for a little break.
Alright so the break was over and Bruno Jordaan, of RANJ, came to tell us about a serious game they created for the lawfirm Houthoff Buruma. This game was to serve as an aide for recruiting young lawyers, it was to test some skills such as teamwork, problem solving and more. The story Bruno told was somewhat vague and it didn’t really become clear how this game was played and what it looked like. This might have something to do with the fact that he couldn’t show everything about the game because it is still in use by the lawfirm.
Next up was Arne Boom, and let me tell you, this guy was really awesome. He presented some very cool and interactive projects he made. I especially liked the project Bandjesland. The idea here was to remix sound clips by means of physical tapes. The sound clips were linked through RFID chips in the tapes. By placing the tapes on different points you could play the different tracks that were linked to the tapes, by doing so you were mixing your own music. Maybe this is a new way for us to look at the Open Images Database in terms of remixing, we’ll have to find out some more about this.
