Want to be part of NXNE Interactive? Have an issue you want to talk about or a unique perspective on a topic? NXNEi wants to hear from you!

Submission deadline is Nov. 11th!

It’s the afternoon of June 4, a few hours before Sol Del Rio’s performance. She’s been booked for Designer_Mix, MUTEK’s evening dedicated to the first three cities to join UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network under its “design” banner: Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Montreal. Del Rio, who is from Buenos Aires, and her labelmate, Chancha Vía Circuito, will be bookending the night with their electrified interpretations of traditional and popular South American music.

She’s running late due to some technical issues encountered during soundcheck, but as with many MUTEK artists, it’s understandable. Technology can be a fickle collaborator, and while most MUTEK artists push the state of their art, Del Rio’s evening is still particularly ambitious: first, she’ll be delivering a solo audiovisual performance from Ableton Live and VDMX, then she’ll be back at the end of the event to handle visuals for Chancha Vía Circuito.

Despite the shy persona suggested by the promo photos that show her only hooded or in silhouette, Del Rio isn’t too shy to lay vocals down in her music. A microphone stands at the ready next to her laptop. Alongside “musician,” “VJ,” and “designer,” It looks like “vocalist” could also be added to Del Rio’s calling card.

It is fitting that Del Rio is included in Designer_Mix. Trained as a graphic designer, she entered her current musical incarnation via the visual work she had created for Buenos Aires’ “Digital Cumbía” label, ZZK.

The ZZK family

Though most recognized as a record label, ZZK also functions as a meeting point for artists of various disciplines and styles. “[Graphic design] was a first introduction, but our relationship has become one of friends, of artists, of distinct points of music, audiovisuals, painting… it’s like a family of artists.”

ZZK traces its beginnings to a party started by DJ Nim, Villa Diamante, and El G. They named the night Zizek Club in homage to leftist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and opened the doors to collaboration with artists looking to fuse electronic music with a range of Latin American music styles. Cumbía, as one of the most popular Latin American musical styles today, is of great importance to ZZK, but other styles find a home here as well, including reggaeton, dancehall, folklore, and dubstep.

Del Rio works mainly with ZZK-affiliated artists, but she works with other artists as well. “If I’m aligned with them, if I like the music, and it makes me interested in working with them, yes, definitely. The set I’m doing for Chancha Vía Circuito is a set I’ve made especially for him.”

With Chancha, she finds a unique sound that speaks to their shared origins. “He has a very unique sound that’s a fusion, a mix of electronic music and sounds that are very folkloric, and cumbía. It references something that’s ours, more of the place that we’re from.”

MonsterShine, Sol Del Rio’s audiovisual show, as premiered at MUTEK.

Mixed media

“I started creating my first visuals for Zizek Club – site-specific installations, designing for the club night, the artists, for album art. I designed masks and various pieces. After that I began jumping into all the audiovisual material.”

Album cover for Tremor.

It seems insufficient to describe Del Rio as a multitalent. In addition to music and visuals, she has exhibited visual work in traditional media, such as sculpture and painting in both watercolour and acrylic. “I really enjoy mixing different expressive media. Right now, what I’m exploring and working in is the audiovisual.”

Electronic music is a new medium for her. “I’ve been composing [electronic music] for two or three years. I’ve always made music, but in different styles, more analog styles, with instruments, with guitars, or in bands. Then I left analog music and came around to making digital music. I think what happened was I started making visuals as a VJ, and I wanted to see it more and more as an instrument, but for images.”

“It’s curious, when you’re live, working with images and modifying them with the beat, it’s like an instrument. So, I think that’s what happened, it was the step of VJing, and then I began to make my own music and combine them.”

Performing MonsterShine at MUTEK.

When it comes to her work, including MonsterShine (the show she’s premiering at MUTEK), the audio and visual come to her together. “It’s of the same hand. For MonsterShine, I composed music at the same time that I was filming. It all went mixing in my head and at the time that I made the edits, it came as if it was happening as one. It was like it was the same thought but in two distinct media – one auditory and the other visual – but it’s the same thing that I’m seeking, that I’m saying.”

“I like the moment where you see the result of the mixing of a track where, for example, you have to see it with some rocks, or volcanoes, or something like that, and what’s happening with the music at that moment – how they live together. Maybe they don’t say the same thing, or you see the result of exactly the two things, the sum of them.”

Women at MUTEK

Several MUTEK attendees I spoke to noted and lamented the absence of women from both the crowds and stages of MUTEK. “It’s strange,” she says, “I’d like there to be more women in the scene. I suppose it might have something to do with technology, or you have to be more masculine, there’s a lot of programming. But I don’t know why it is, really.”

It’s Del Rio’s first visit to Montreal, so she evades making any comparison between Canada and Argentina. She offers, though, a glimpse into the status of women in the scene she knows. “In Argentina there are several women who are VJs. More in clubs, not like visual artists who perform, like in a museum or gallery – that’s almost non-existent. But real-time work, like VJing, with music, yes. There are lots of women who make real-time visuals in clubs.”

Regardless of how well technology and the electronic music scene accommodate women, Del Rio has clearly eked out her place in their midst. Standing in front of the pulsating LED cube displaying her visuals, she takes the microphone towards the end of her set and begins to sing. There are lyrics, but the syllables are long, digitally cut and delayed to evade recognition.

They fade, as do the lights. The beat slows to a halt. Del Rio dedicates her set to the late Federico Rodríguez, a member of the ZZK family who passed away last year. Surrounded by the pulse of technology, Sol Del Rio reminds us there remains a real, beating heart at the centre of it all.

More of Sol Del Rio’s work can be seen on her site, laboratoryo.com.

Aylwin Lo is a Technical Coordinator at CFC Media Lab, providing technical and design support to many of the Media Lab’s activities. He is a graduate of Seneca College and the University of Waterloo.

The author would like to thank Margaret E. Edwards for assistance with the Spanish-language transcription of this interview.

Don’t miss this boundary pushing conference featuring presentations by leading international innovators and forward-thinking producers. Uncover new business, creative, and technical strategies and inject a fresh perspective into your cross-platform documentaries.

Two full days of inspiration, information, networking, and debate! Promises to be the most exciting docSHIFT program yet.

Some Guest Speakers:

Matt Locke from Storythings
The former head of multi-platform commissioning at Channel 4, and former Head of Innovation at BBC’s New Media takes us to the new frontiers of immersive storytelling. More about Storythings.

Welcome to The Goggles!
Meet Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge, AKA The Goggles: the Vancouver-based creative team behind Adbusters, and the internationally acclaimed interactive documentary Welcome to Pine Point.

What is the practice of game design?

Out of all the disciplines needed to make a game, game design is the most critical but least understood. PRACTICE is an unprecedented gathering of professional game designers that takes a rigorous look at the ideas and methods of game design.

Bringing together veteran designers across computer and videogames, paper games and sports, PRACTICE takes a close look at the nuts and bolts of game design. Through lectures and panels, workshops and discussion, we will explore the practice of game design, with a head focus on the concrete, day-to-day activity of designing games. And there will be plenty of time of gameplay and socializing too.

PRACTICE is not a conference about business, technology, or how to break into the industry. If balancing the variables in a virtual economy or theorizing about the effect of rule changes on a player’s emotional experience sounds like fun to you, this is the conference you’ve been waiting for.

This two day conference will be held at the Game Center on October 28th-30th, see a full schedule of events listed on the PRACTICE website <http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/practice/index.html> .

Space is limited, so those interested in participating must purchase tickets.

Continuing our MUTEK interview series, we talk to AntiVJ artist Joanie Lemercier and producer Nicolas Boritch about their approach to mind-bending projected music visuals, their evolution from nightclub VJing to producing large-scale artistic collaborations, and their approach to working as a “visual label.”

Since 2005, AntiVJ has had a resounding influence on visuals in dance clubs, live music performance, and installations. Though they pioneered and perfected the usage of projection mapping – wherein carefully-aligned digital projections create illusions on unconventional surfaces – AntiVJ pledges allegiance to no technique, only a focus “on the use of projected light and its influence on our perception.”

AntiVJ’s 2008 collaboration at Nuit Blanche Brussels introduced the potential of projection mapping to a broad audience.

They’ve also maintained a low public profile, so while their colleague Simon Geilfus prepared for his performance with Mexican ambient electronic musician Murcof at MUTEK 2011, we were fortunate to meet with Lemercier and Boritch to talk about AntiVJ’s motivations, structure, and opinions. Both had just arrived from France, having survived three consecutive sleepless nights’ preparing their next major installation.

Lemercier, a graphic designer, started VJing in Bristol, England in 2005 using personal photography. Thanks to Bristol’s vibrant club scene, he was soon VJing at danceclubs weekly. With Boritch, he organized a monthly event, Cuisine, inviting artists from around Europe. Before long, the two found likeminded talents with ambitions to provide visuals that had a deeper impact than static projections on rectangular screens.

3Destruct, an immersive installation AntiVJ produced for Biennale d’Art contemporain in Louvain, Belgium in 2007.

By 2007, the yet-to-be-formed AntiVJ crew had developed a digital graffiti wall working with new members Romain Tardy (VJ Aalto), Yannick Jacquet (Lego_man), and Olivier Ratsi (emovie).  Jacquet experimented with projecting on transparent materials while Lemercier explored projection mapping. Meanwhile, Lemercier focused his Cuisine recruitment on artists with a strong, identifiable aesthetic such as Pikilipita, a French video artist who hacks gaming devices and cellphones to create visuals, and Sanch, a groundbreaking generative artist with a background in sculpture.

That same year, AntiVJ artists collaborated on a large installation at Nördik Impakt, an annual music festival in Caen, France. AntiVJ soon became an organization facilitating its artists’ collaboration, promotion, funding, and production.

Today, AntiVJ works as a visual analogue to a music label. “We’re really inspired by music labels,” says Lemercier, “it’s a structure to produce and promote some projects or some artists which all have some things in common, but each artist has his own style.”

Boritch, a former music industry professional, agrees. “I grew up with Warp, and Skam, and all those labels, with a really really strong… identity, aesthetics, attitude as well and a vision, a direction.”

The idea of a collective, in contrast, doesn’t fit AntiVJ well. “We would really not like to be a collective… having to be a set number of people always working together and having a really closed sort of structure. I think the visual label makes more sense on different levels.”

Despite the loose approach, It didn’t come automatically. “I think it took us
a while to find our way to work,” says Lemercier, ”we all do solo projects,
sometimes collaboration with one person or two persons.”

AntiVJ’s set developed for Nuits Sonores, a festival hosted in Lyon, France, in 2009.

AntiVJ’s name may seem intentionally ironic, reactionary, or even provocative. “We all come from this VJing world,” says Lemercier, “We’ve all done 8-hour VJ sets to a drum ‘n bass – or techno, or breaks, or whatever – we’d just turn up with our laptop, live, we’d have to improvise and you have to bring your own cables, your ladder, and it’s quite demanding, but we definitely come from this, we all have this background.

“I’m quite proud that I’ve done a couple of hundred gigs just playing live alongside the DJ, and you have to improvise, be good at syncing stuff, try to get good at technical mixing as well. I find it really nice, but at some point we just started doing something different. What I wanted to do was get away from the rectangular screen, so by projecting onto objects, buildings, and that kind of thing.

“People were asking, ‘What’s your job? What are you doing?’ and if we’d answer VJ, or VJing, people would think about something completely different. They would think about multicolour layers and whatever I said before, this kind of old-school video effects that are in pretty much every VJing software. It was more a bit of a joke, this AntiVJ thing.”

“It’s a bit of both,” says Boritch. “It’s a statement because it does mean something that we think and at the same time it’s just a clin d’oeil [an inside joke]… it’s a reference to the fact that all four artists from the beginning are VJs.”

AntiVJ’s focus now is to be seen as an umbrella for its artists, rather than a single entity. “The first couple of years we used this name AntiVJ without putting the artist in front,” admits Lemercier. However, that has changed in the last year. “We’re trying to be like a real label and push the artists as individuals and promote them when one project is an artist project or if one artist is the creative director for one project, we’ll push his name.”

With projection mapping hitting the mainstream – just this week, Wrigleys 5 Gum picked up an FWA award for its crowd-sourced projection mapping advertising campaign – a challenge AntiVJ faces is how to continue making an impact on audiences when their techniques have been appropriated at ever-increasing rates.

“It seems that the advertising industry is taking over video mapping,” says Lemercier, ”I’m trying to imagine what it will be like in a couple of years’ time if companies start putting video projectors in the streets to have, like, permanent 3D advertising using architecture just to sell stuff.”

Commercial work, by the way, has little appeal to AntiVJ. “We get a million emails asking us to do stage design for a beer company or to do some projection for a big brand,” continues Lemercier, ”that’s really not what we’re really interested in from the very beginning… we’re more interested in live performance and installation and things.”

Though his stance is a little more open, Boritch agrees. “We’re not against the idea of making some money, doing one-offs. But at some point you have to make a choice,” he says. “It depends on whether you want to keep your time to carry on developing, carry on experimenting, and not having any – too much pressure, or only the pressure that you decide to take. But not any pressure from big projects and big brands.”

Lemercier keeps a watchful eye on trends and technologies. “I spend about two hours a day watching stuff and reading blogs. I spend loads of time doing research about Kinect, about MIDI controllers, about tracking.”

“You can watch about 10 YouTube pieces every day and I think maybe once a month there’s something quite nice or a visual that hasn’t been done before. But yeah, it’s rare and I wish there would be more new things more often. But we’ll see what’s gonna happen. I’m not sure.”

In the meantime, Boritch is hopeful. “As the equipment and the technique is getting more around and cheaper, hopefully there will be more opportunities for artists to experiment with it and they will bring more new stuff that you didn’t see coming.

“But for the mapping technique itself – and not just for buildings, but the mapping technique – it can be applied to any object and that’s really the core of the AntiVJ label from the beginning. When Joanie was experimenting with mapping around 2006, it was just the idea to turn any object into a display. I think there’s huge potential for decades, hopefully to create new stuff.”

A promotional video of AntiVJ’s collaboration with Murcof. A review of their show at MUTEK 2011 by CFC Media Lab IAEP Guest faculty, Greg J. Smith, can be found at Creative Applications.

Aylwin Lo is a Technical Coordinator at CFC Media Lab, providing technical and design support to many of the Media Lab’s activities. He is a graduate of Seneca College and the University of Waterloo.

Note: The day after posting this interview, Boritch emailed us to clarify a
few points. We revised this post on Wednesday, July 13 to more accurately reflect
AntiVJ’s relationships with its own artists as well as artists they have
collaborated with, and their views on organizational structure.

Greetings! I’m Aylwin Lo, CFC Media Lab’s newest staff addition. As a Tech Coordinator, I provide technical and design support to many of the Media Lab’s exciting activities. Last week I took a trip out of the lab to attend the 12th edition of MUTEK, Montreal’s prestigious and groundbreaking festival for electronic music and digital art.

As in previous years, this year’s MUTEK promised an array of acts ranging from seasoned acts premiering their latest audio-visual work to up-and-comers making a break for it. One of our own current residents, Laurel McDonald, has performed at MUTEK and was recently featured on their website for her performance project combining vocals and visuals, Videovoce.

It was my privilege to be able to interview four of the acts performing at this year’s festival. We’ll be posting roughly an interview a week until they’re all up. Be sure to visit Stabletalk once a week if you aren’t already subscribed to our RSS feed or email updates.

Among the highlights at this year’s MUTEK was the world premiere of Amon Tobin’s ISAM audio-visual installation. Billed as a larger-than-life, “next-level HD” experience, the installation features a 25′ × 14′ × 8′ projection-mapped installation surrounding Tobin as he performs ISAM live.

One of the higher-profile artists carried on the well-respected Ninja Tune label, Tobin’s work has also been featured in video games (Infamous, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) as well as film (Italian Job, 21). We sat down with Tobin a few hours before a media-only preview of ISAM’s premiere.

So, how’s the installation going for tonight? Is it complete now?

You know, thankfully it all arrived in one piece – well, not one piece. But you know, without being broken or anything. We sighed a collective sigh of relief when it got through customs as well. None of us are used to doing anything of this scale. It’s usually just me and a pair of decks or something and suddenly we’ve got crates of stuff so it was just great: “Okay, everything made it!” and everything’s working and putting it together – it’s good. It’s a nice start.

Where were you bringing it from?

From LA.

So that’s where the space that you have been developing this is.

Well, I say me, but the credit should really be going to the guys at V Squared who have been building it, literally there for hours every day, putting that shit together.

Presumably, the plan is to go on a tour with all of this?

Right, yeah, we’re gonna fly with it for the first time this week, we’re gonna take it to Berlin, which will be another “Ooh shit, how’s it gonna fly,” y’know? Hopefully they won’t lose any pieces of it.

Can you tell me a little about the team and the building process of the installation?

Of course, yeah! There’s a few different people involved: Alex Lazarus, who kind of set up – he’s overseeing the actual physical build of the thing. And Heather [Shaw], who designed the set, and then you’ve got people who are doing the actual visual content, and there’s a whole range there, being overseen by Vello [Virkhaus], who’s the creative director of the project. And he came to my studio and we spent some days going through different ideas and kind of started from the idea of using projection mapping to somehow integrate me into a visual.

I wanted to not be the visual focus of the show. I wanted it to emanate from what I’m doing, but I don’t find my presence on stage particularly visually engaging as an electronic musician. So I wanted to be part of a bigger thing and projection mapping just seemed really interesting. I could see the idea of working with dimensions, illusions, perspective, and so we storyboarded a bunch of ideas and came up with the kind of a loose narrative – and it is a loose narrative – of going into space and having those kinds of experiences and then he took that idea, that rough storyboard, and mapped it out with visual concepts, and got different groups of people to do rough renders of those concepts for each track, and then we would go back and forth and slowly developed it over 5 months.

So, that was all developed at V Squared?

That’s the collective that has been doing all this: Alex, Vello, and all these people are all affiliated.

I’ll have to find out more about them.

Well, I didn’t know much about them when we started.

I’m interested in some of your videogame and soundtrack work. As a part of the Canadian Film Centre we’re interested in narrative and also about things like transmedia, which is a buzzword, but…

I’ll have to use that one.

… well, if you’re working with Ubisoft more you may hear them talking about it! But the work that you’ve done with movies and videogames – both are storytelling, but one is more linear, one is less predictable. How do you factor storytelling and narrative into music? You were talking about a loose narrative for ISAM.

I haven’t had a huge range of experience, to be honest. I’ve only done a few small projects, a few larger ones, but really my experience has been trying to musically articulate a scene – what’s happening at a particular moment. I would probably approach it that way. Looking at the sound aesthetic of the whole project but then taking each scene as its own thing so hopefully you can link it all together through style, but often the actual cut of how things get put together will get changed even after I’ve done my part. So it’s probably not my role to tell an entire story, it’s more to feel it out with the director of the project to say, “We really need this to be emphasized here, and how can we do that with music?” It would be more like that.

And what about the stories in your own work?

I don’t really think in terms of stories or visuals, either, to be honest. When I make my own music – it’s very much that sort of vague, emotional thing really. Even though it’s electronic music I think there’s still something that’s – that’s just what it is. It’s an emotional thing. Technically, I have ideas which I’d like to try and realize and I’ll try and achieve those by trial and error. But when it comes down to the music part it’s about you’re partially there, you’re just feeling your way through it.

One of the things I was also curious about was that in the last couple of albums you’ve moved away from samples and towards having your own foley sounds and then manipulating those. Is there a point where – how do you decide when you’ve manipulated something enough or you want to leave it as it was?

I see it all as sampling in some way just because it’s all about – well, sampling to me from the beginning wasn’t really about, “I can’t get a guitar, so how can I get a guitar in my song? I’ll sample one.” It was more about trying to change the context of something. That’s what I was interested in. If I took Latin drums and put them in an electronic track, I wasn’t really interested in Latin drums. I was interested in what would happen if I took that out of its natural habitat and put it in this new musical environment and the contrast and how this creates this weird dynamic of things are pulling apart, or trying to hold together. I just find that fascinating, so to me that’s what sampling is about personally. About manipulating things.

So it’s the same thing that I’m doing. The source material is different, it’s maybe not from old dusty vinyl so much anymore or at all on this record. But it’s still about changing the roles of sounds and manipulating them into something that I’ve imagined, I guess, or as close as you can.

Back to ISAM – how much room is there in the installation for improv? How do you get that in there when you have a very complicated setup?

It’s not really – well, that’s not true, there’s some – I guess I’m going to wait to see how brave I get with that because it’s – we’ve tightly choreographed so much of what’s going on but it’s a performance and it’s not like a party, really. It’s not entertainment which maybe sounds a bit weird. It’s more of a personal presentation of what I’m doing and I hope people are entertained by it. But it’s not like I’m like, “How can I make this as fun as possible for everyone” and interacting with the audience. It’s more about, “This is really what I care about. This what I’ve been doing, I really want to share it with you. Hope you guys are really into this.” It’s more like that. So improvisation for me is about feeling what the crowd – doing where they’re going and adapting to that, riding that wave, which is interesting to do as well, but I’m much more dictatorial when I (laughs) – It’s more like this is what I really believe in.

I think that’s valid too.

I think it’s different, that’s all.

Aylwin Lo is a Technical Coordinator at CFC Media Lab, providing technical and design support to many of the Media Lab’s activities. He is a graduate of Seneca College and the University of Waterloo.

Jacqueline Nuwame, Sr. Training Programs Manager at the CFC Media Lab, had the honour of speaking at last week’s HTMlles Festival of Media Art and Networked Practices 2010 in Montreal.

Founded in 1997 and produced by Studio XX, the HTMlles Festival of Media Art and Networked Practices explores various facets of digital technology and the web as a medium for the creation and exhibition of women’s digital artworks. The festival occupies the singular position of being one of the only Quebecois and Canadian events entirely dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of independent media art, its particularity also being emphasized by its feminist approach, concerns and engagements.

Also featured at the festival was First Person Digital, produced in partnership with the NFB, which featured some amazing female-only work.

Take a peek at these other great projects:

www.itschinesetome.net
www.otandayanaan.net
www.perfectplum.com

A big shout-out to Studio XX for organizing this great event!

Seminar Series to Assess the Financial Landscape of Digital Media in Canada:
With the recent launch of the Canada Media Fund, the financing landscape for Canadian film and television has changed dramatically. New media extensions are part of the new reality and there are a LOT of questions that are probably on your mind:

• When should I start planning?
• What are the implications for my production?
• Who should I work with?
• How will this help my bottom line?
• Where can I find out more?

To answer these and many other questions, the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, the CMPA and Zeros 2 Heroes Media are continuing the seminar series that has been held in cities across the country. Speakers in Toronto will include:

• Andra Scheffer, Executive Director, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund
• Shawn Bailey, Director, Chocolate Liberation Front
• Jessica Clark-Bojin, Head of Entertainment Business, VFS
• Johnny Kalangis, Creative Director, Marble Media, and CFC Media Lab Alumnus
• Matt Toner, President, Zeros 2 Heroes Media

These speakers will share years of experience working with convergent media and provide the inside track on how best to advance your production. With the next Bell New Media Fund and CMF windows fast approaching, it is time to finally figure out the best way to go digital.

Check out the full coverage of Cross Media Toronto 2010 (CMTO10) now up on YouTube as a 13-part series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_hiHUhFtCY

CFC Media Lab and MaRS co-presented with Jumpwire Media to launch Cross Media Toronto on July 21st, 2010 at the MaRS Centre. Cross Media Toronto (www.crossmediato.com) featured heavyweight media industry executives who discussed perspectives on how transmedia content will be produced, distributed and consumed in a cross media environment, with a specific look at ways to incorporate cross media into business models.

I recommend taking a few minutes out of your Monday to go YouTubing down the web-stream!
Bombs away!

THE WHAT: Cross Media TO 2010

THE WHEN: 6 – 9:30pm, July 21, 2010

THE WHERE: MaRS Centre, 101 College St. Toronto

CMTO 2010 features an all-star line-up of industry executives and technology experts. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the different media sectors in order share information and find new opportunities. We want the gaming people to meet the TV people, the publishing people to meet the web video people, and everyone to meet the advertising people but let’s be honest, in the end, it’s all about the money.

Headline speakers include:

Lisa Charters – SVP Director Digital for Random House of Canada

Sabrina Geremia – Head of Agency Relations for Google Canada

Pete Watson – Senior Business Development Manager for RIM

Steve Pratt – CBC’s Director of Digital Music

Other special guests include:

Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn – Transmedia Consultant and CFC Media Lab Faculty Member

Chris Van Hoy – Akamai’s Chief Strategist

For more, check out www.crossmediato.com

nextMEDIA+Banff2010 will be chock-full of inspiring conversations and exciting keynotes!
Still trying to decide when to be where and where to be when? Check out the CFC Media Lab’s top picks!

To register for Banff2010, visit: https://registration.achillesmedia.com/delegate_registration/list_products?event_id=19

To check out the full schedule, visit: http://www.banff2010.com/schedule.dynamic.php?

On.Fire (onfire2010.ca) is the national media arts conference and festival of the Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA), a non-profit organization representing over 80 artist-run media arts centres serving more than 12,000 artists and cultural workers across Canada.

On.Fire 2010 will run June 15-19, 2010. Highlights include Opening Keynote with Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller on June 15th at 6:30pm, and Closing Keynote with Rafael Lozano Hemmer on June 19th at 6:30pm.

Check out the full schedule here: onfire2010.ca/?page_id=236

To register for On.Fire 2010, visit: onfire2010.ca/?page_id=3

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

CFC Media Lab Director, Ana Serrano, has been invited to speak at TEDxCanadianRockies. Check out the other industry leading creatives who have been invited to speak: www.tedxcanadianrockies.com/speakers

WHEN: May 21, 2010
WHERE: The Banff Centre, 107 Tunnel Mountain Drive, Banff, Alberta

TEDxCanadianRockies is a full day event featuring live presenters, recorded TED Talks and opportunities for discussion between delegates. Meals will be provided throughout the day through Vistas Restaurant at The Banff Centre. While the live event is open to only one hundred delegates, it will also be streamed live via our website during the day.

For more information and to register, check out their website: www.tedxcanadianrockies.com

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Rose Bianchini, will be speaking at INplay 2010 tomorrow, May 18 at 4 pm at Liberty Grand, in the Centennial Room, located on the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto.

INplay is a unique, international event that connects kids creative industries with insights and opportunities in the interactive space. From the video game business to the broadcast industry, from toys to toons, the INplay conference brings together leaders in the kids space to learn, network and be inspired by interactive.

The conference will feature 3 major streams each covering a different dimension of working with properties for kids aged 2-12:

Inspiration - creativity and content stream
Investment – business stream
Insights – research stream

Rose Bianchini has been selected to speak on an “Insights” panel for Cutting Edge Research: Input Devices. This topic will be addressed through a series of short presentations followed by a moderated Q&A.

The keyboard, mouse and headset are old school. What is coming next to improve kids’ interaction with the digital world?

Moderator: Steve Szigeti (Ph.D Candidate – Knowledge Media Design Graduate)

Other Presenters: Chris Muscarella (Cofounder at Do Crew) and Vincent John Vincent (President of Gesturetek Inc.)

Rose Bianchini prototyped Neighbourhoodie with David McCallum and Kathleen Climie during the Telus IAEP Fall Residency of 2009 at the CFC Media Lab.

Neighbourhoodie is a hoodie that combines the fun and dynamic of street games like ‘zombie tag’ with the technological experience space young people grow up with today, online or with computer games. The ‘Neighbourhoodie’ has the potential to motivate us to leaving not only the couch but the house by playing hybrid games that partly happen in the real world and partly in our all important virtual world.

Neighbourhoodie has been featured on top wearable electronics and gadget blogs, talk2myshirt.com and gizmodiva.com.

INplay is taking place May 18 & May 19. Tickets are still available!
For a full line up or speakers and sessions, click HERE.

The CFC Media Lab will have a booth presence at OCE (Ontario Centres of Excellence) Discovery 2010, a conference that brings together business leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers and students in shared exploration of the dynamic synergy that is the innovation-commercialization process. Stop by booth #912 to slap some high fives with The CFC Media Lab!

WHEN: May 17 & 18, 2010
WHERE: Metro Toronto Convention Centre, (South Building) 222 Bremner Boulevard, Toronto, ON

Ontario’s world-class research and innovation strength has turned remarkable ideas into equally remarkable products and services. Conferences such as this OCE are crucial to building on the momentum Ontario has achieved and to further sharpening our competitive edge on the world stage.

The CFC Media Lab will also be present at the Premier’s Innovation Awards, an event that honours outstanding Ontarians whose innovative spirit, vision and creativity are making Ontario one of the leading knowledge-based economies of the 21st century.

For the full list of OCE Discovery 2010 exhibitors, click HERE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bz0tt0suIw&eurl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGqiPwvFeDU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D73HzM7k_9o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s1wpodo_Gc

A bunch of other talks are also online at http://www.youtube.com/user/nextMEDIAEvents if you didn’t get a chance to get there this year or if you want to re-watch a really great session again.

CFC Media Lab Alumni Shelley Simmons is involved with this fantastic conference:

Community Wind Web Conference May 26-27 Enables Investors, Entrepreneurs, Activists and Engineers to Learn Trends, Hear Practical How-to’s, and Exchange Experiences About Wind Power Projects – All in an Earth-Friendly Format

April 9, 2009 – More than 25 North American experts will discuss opportunities, trends and challenges related to community wind energy projects at a two-day web conference about community wind energy sponsored by Green Energy Web Conferences on May 26 and 27, 2009 (http://www.greenenergyconferences.com/ ).

The web conference is for people who are interested in learning more about community wind projects as well as for professionals already in the business wanting to keep up with this fast-changing alternative energy technology.  “Community wind” denotes mid-scale, locally owned wind power projects designed to maximize the energy benefit to the community.
Presenters at the web conference include experts from organizations ranging from the American Wind Energy Association, Windustry and the World Wind Energy Association to the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy to Atlantic County Utilities Authority and Citibank   Case-studies by Spirit Lake Community School. Jiminy Ski resort, Hyannis Country Garden and many more.
Issues to be discussed include:
•    What does it cost to set up a wind project?
•    Where can I find funding, government support, grants or other financing?
•    How do Green Energy Credits and CO2 Emission rights work?
•    What is the return on investment?
•    How does the approval process – zoning, permits, etc. – typically work?
•    How can I predict the amount of power that will be generated?
•    How can I sell my project and energy to utilities?
•    What have pioneering entrepreneurs in the field already achieved and learned?

“When you include the savings from travel, hotel, and restaurant costs, a web conference costs only 10 percent of attendance at a traditional conference,” says Mathijs Gajentaan, CEO of Green Energy Web Conferences.  “We’ve set it up interactively, so you can ask the speaker questions, browse the attendees’ profiles to see what they are doing and looking for, and connect with them.   And if you can’t attend any of the live sessions, you can review the presentations at your convenience.”

The complete list of speakers can be found at http://www.greenenergyconferences.com/conference/wind/featured

Through May 1, the cost of a conference pass ranges from $149 to $199, with 50% discount codes available upon request for professional associations, non-profit organizations and academic institutions to extend to their members.

Sites / Blogs can also sign up for an affiliate program. Affiliates receive a commission for every sale that goes through them.

About Green Energy Web Conferences Inc.

Green Energy Web Conferences Inc. (www.greenenergyconferences.com) facilitates and organizes annual web conferences about Green and Alternative Energy. The company’s objective is to increase to accessibility to information by using the web as its primary medium. By offering high quality and relevant content online and interactive communication web tools to connect participants with each other, Green Energy Conferences Inc. offers an efficient and effective conference experience.

For more information, contact:
Green Energy Web Conferences Inc.
Mathijs Gajentaan
CEO and Founder
480 Oriole Parkway, Suite 203
Toronto, ON M5P 2H8
Tel: +1.416.551.7200
Fax: +1.416.546.0900
Email: press@greenenergyconferences.com
web: www.greenenergyconferences.com

FITC recognizes that females in our industry are underrepresented. We feel there are some amazing women working in this industry, and want to see them at FITC Toronto 2009. As such, FITC is stepping up and offering 100 festival tickets to any women who would like to attend.

FITC Toronto 2009 (website) The Design & Technology Festival April 25-28, 2009 // Hilton Toronto. Canada

So, how do you get your ticket?

Simple. Tell us in a video post WHY you want to come to FITC Toronto. We thought about different ways of giving away tickets, and felt this was a fair way to help ensure that the tickets go to those who really want them. We may use the videos to help market the event, so make them good! Please make sure that you tag your video as PUBLIC so we can view it, as well as share it on this site for others to see.

http://www.fitc.ca/female

<Call for Projects> * Interactivos?’09: Garage Science*

Deadline for entries: *December* *14, 2008 12 midnight* (GMT+1) Call for collaborators: December 30, 2008 – January 25, 2009 Dates of the event: January 28 – February 14, 2009 at Medialab-Prado (Madrid, Spain)

Open call for the submission of projects to be collaboratively developed within the framework of the *Interactivos?’09: Garage Science* international workshop and seminar. The aim is to design and build experimental and critical prototypes such as mechanical, digital, and biological devices, using open software and open hardware tools, as well as low cost materials.

The medialab will then be transformed into a “domestic lab” where a maximum of 8 proposals will be developed with the aid of teachers, assistants and interested collaborators (call for collaborators: December 30). With the participation of the Critical Art Ensemble.

Keywords: Garage science, critical design, bioart, mechanical devices, automatons, robots, impossible machines, Rube Goldberg’s machines, pataphysic, energy, physical computing, free hardware, fabbing, recycling, biocomputing, biology, biohacking, biopunk, “license to fail”.

*Interactivos?’09* also includes a Seminar (January 28 and 29, 2009) with lectures by artists and experts where selected papers will be presented (see call for papers: www.medialab-prado.es/interactivos).

More information and access to the online submission form: http://medialab-prado.es/article/interactivos09_ciencia_de_garaje-_convocato ria_para_proyectos

Contact: interactivos AT medialab-prado.es

*MEDIALAB-PRADO*
Plaza de las Letras
C/ Alameda, 15
28014 Madrid (Spain)
+34 913 692 303
www.medialab-prado.es

If you’re interested in learning what trends are shaping the digital content industry, then this is the event for you.

Find out how Canadian companies like Nexopia.com, PlentyofFish and Idée become million dollar success stories. Learn how Revision3 is creating TV for the Internet generation. Tap into the emerging Indian market and meet with the sub-continent’s biggest players in broadcast, mobile and publishing.

Last year over $13 million in new business deals were generated during nextMEDIA – The Future of Digital Content.

For a complete list of speakers and full conference schedule, go to http://www.nextmediaevents.com/fdc