Just came back from OFFF – International Festival for the Post Digital Creation Culture. I have been to a few work related conferences over the past 7 years, but Offf is different from the programming centered once I am used to: new features, how to apply new language constructs, Flex, AS3, best practice OOP… and so on. Offf is strictly design oriented. The theme of the event: REFRESH. Something about the fun having been taken out of digital media in recent years, and being bored, and about sticking the fun back in to digital media work. I dunno… I’ve been having loads of fun all along. Maybe cause I am a developer and see this as software evolution. Is the design community moaning because of all the Flex and AS3 hype? Much is certainly said about large scale applications, robustness and best practice. Downr design perspective. As the tools get more advanced, designers can no longer master them entirely unless they are prepared to spend months exercising the left side of their brain instead of their preferred right side. New media is like an old hippie collective; it accommodates everybody, but from time to time everybody feels alienated. I feel lucky. I am always in the middle of extremes. And so I feel relatively comfortable in both end of any spectrum presented to me. But I do get bored with the living reference guides, who often dominate at conferences. I did find it refreshing to hear only the artists speak. Well, mostly the once who knew how to tap in to the essence of their own work, and didn’t just list what they’d done and how much they got paid for it.
A few presenters stood out: John Maeda – brilliant speaker with some deep things to say about simplicity. Hillman Curtis – I was moved to tears by his film, “Soldiers”, the boys from the Graffiti Research Lab – maybe the one truly fresh movement on the scene right now. However, I did find that they seem to be trapped in a loop: “we battle advertisers, therefor we are”. I would like them to discuss their utopia – life without advertisers. Otherwise I fear their cause (to beautify our public spaces) will drown in the light of simply provoking police scenes. And this is one thing that will not bring about Change. Where or what would we be without advertisers [capitalist society] ? How could things be different? What exactly are we fighting for? We are all part of this crazy consumer loop, aren’t we? Nordic Kingdom made a process oriented presentation which I felt was very familiar yet interesting for me as a producer.
In the exhibition area i spent quite an amount of time trying to capture myself in a perfect handstand somewhere in the past&present-space continuum Craig Swann had provided. Activating censors in the floor, you would start a recording of yourself, which was then placed on top of previous recordings of other people (or you) and played back.
Joshua Davis show-cased some pretty impressive looking computer generated art. He was there on site rendering and printing his work for people to take home.