Review by Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede
On December 1, the first edition of BrightLive, techlifestyle playground and expo on technology, design, and style, took place in the Amsterdam Westergasfabriek. Esther Weltevrede and Sabine Niederer wrote a review for cut-up magazine. What is that thing that Bright calls techlifestyle? Techlifestyle is all about technology, style, and design in music, office, travel, sport, fashion, science, and culture. It seems to be a way of life in which you focus on new tools that make life easier and more aesthetic. Furthermore, techlifestyle has to do with new, hip, innovative, and progressive thinking and living. Magazine and weblog Bright invited progressive brands and thinkers to share their wide range of product releases, ideas, and concepts with the audience. So did BrightLive succeed in covering this so-called contemporary techlifestyle?
During the day, brands and designers with individual projects had the opportunity to show their gadgets and ideas to the visitors. Older and brand new gadgets, installations and tools were presented by companies, artists and designers, and accompanied by screenings. The beautiful building as well as the art installations created a more artistic/underground context for the many commercial brands like Canon, Motorola, Audi, Dyson and Apple Centre Machouse. On the other hand, the commercial context provided the artists and designers with a network of potential partners and investors. The art installations included the Cell Phone Disco by Ursula Lavrencic and Auke Touwslager, a grid of LEDs which light up by the radiation of cell phones, an overview of beautiful projects of this year’s Design Academy graduate students, and the Laser by Beyond Expression interactive laser mixer by the artist Raymond Deirkauf. Every laser beam has its own beat or sound so you can mix the music with your body. It seems the perfect installation for clubs.
For the gadget-minded visitor this created an environment where voracity could prevail, with wannahaves like the Dyson vacuum cleaner (men love it), Mac and Tivoli products in MacHouse (we love it), the new transportation device Segway (we don’t think it’s cool), and the Motorola KRZR mobile phone (we think it looks a lot like the RZR). One the other hand there are more social applications for the visitor like the Cell Phone Disco, the Nabaztag rabbit and Fleck.com. Fleck is a website which creates a layer over the Internet where users can tag websites with comments and share this with others. Fleck had the most efficient marketing stunt at the event. At the venue, they stamped their url on yellow post-it notes and pasted their comments all over the event. The stickies were a great illustration of how their tool works, and a simple and playful act. Besides being a techlifestyle playground and expo, BrightLive was mainly a place for networking. The network-minded visitor can have a relaxed business talk on the waterresistant buoy-shaped KPN airchairs by Jorrit Kreek with special BrightLive-wine, beer, or a Latte art-coffee. (Yes, that’s right: the art of latte).
But what about social issues and topics like surveillance and security? Apart from the screening of the short film The Catalogue by Chris Oakley there was no reference at all to surveillance and RFID. This seems odd, as apart from the fact that the Netherlands have just introduced the biometric passport, RFID and surveillance are widely applied all over the world. The only reference to data-collection and visualization was the DNA art by Rafael Redczus en Rudolf Wessels, which commercializes personal data by visualizing DNA and putting it up for sale as a work of art. But this had no critical component, it’s merely presented as a personalized aesthetic object. Or as the website states: “Experience the beauty you are hiding; experience the beauty of your DNA”.
The evening started with a performance by Boom Chicago, based on their show Me, MySpace and iPod. After that, the stage was cleared for a Pecha Kucha Night, named after the Japanese presentation format Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for the sound of conversation). On Pecha Kucha Night designers get the opportunity to present their ideas in 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. This format worked really well, especially in a space like this with difficult acoustics and quite a lot of distraction from the digital playground. In a nice pace creative projects were presented, ranging from ‘urban profiling’ by Afaina to Blossum, an airline specialized in flower rains.
How well did BrightLive succeed in covering contemporary techlifestyle? We had the feeling there was something missing. We missed the more critical viewpoint, since in our point of view, a ‘techlifestyle’ is as much about cool gadgets as it is about consumerism, enticement, datamining, loyalty cards, profiling, and tagging. Apart form this critical perspective we missed some technologies and applications. What is a trendy technology: Laser (not really), LED (apparently), but also RFID. Social software applications, a huge trend, were also missing with the exception of Fleck. That said, from the techlifestyle playground and expo perspective BrighLive was successful. Especially the interaction between art/design and commercial brands in this context worked well. Simple and good ideas like the Cell Phone Disco, Laser Beyond Expression, and Fleck’s stickies guerilla marketing stood out. In contemporary techlifestyle commercial gadgets and art/design projects go hand in hand. The BrightLive event blissfully ignored all social issues surrounding new media, but definitely showed us that tech is the new hip.