Digital Media @ CoLab » Festivals

Future Places Recap

mcchris — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:15:02 +0000

The FuturePlaces multimedia festival took place in Porto, Portugal last week. Supported by the UT Austin | Portugal Digital Media Program, the festival consisted of a series of workshops, concerts, and panels, as well as a juried art exhibition. The theme of the festival is how digital media intersects with local cultures, but of course the intersection of transnational and global cultures with the local came into play as well.

The festival offered four workshops for advanced students and professionals in the digital media field. Topics included computer vision using the Processing scripting environment, mobile interface design, mobile documentary narratives, and audio documentation of Porto. Each of these workshops engaged participants by having the contribute to a larger group project or apply skills taught in the short courses.

The exhibition brought sixteen pieces from around the world including places as far as Australia and as nearby as Porto. Pieces ranged in a variety of formats from musical performance to interactive software art, but the show was dominated by installations of various types. The jury chose four pieces for particular merit and prizes. They were:

Honorable Mention: Master and Margarita by Video Jack (André Carrilho and Nuno Correia)
Honorable Mention: Wonderland by Hye Yeon Nam
Second Prize: Oporto-Brooklyn Bridge by Naomi Kaly and Alyssa Casey
First Prize: Outhouse by Brian Cohen and TRAX

The FuturePlaces site has more extensive detail and images of each of the prize winners. The festival was by all accounts a rousing success and thanks to Heitor Avelos, Karen Gustafson, U.Porto, and everyone else who made FuturePlaces such as success!

6th Sound and Music Computing Conference 2009

carlosguedes — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:18:08 +0000

SMC 2009 is the 6th Sound and Music Computing Conference. After previous editions in Paris, Salerno, Marseille, Lefkada and Berlin, it will be held between 23 and 25 July 2009 at the Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal.

The Sound and Music Computing Conference is a privileged forum in Europe for the promotion of international exchanges around Sound and Music Computing. The 2009 edition is organised by the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering of Porto (INESC Porto), the Research Center for Science and Technology in Art (CITAR) of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto, the School of Music and Performing Arts (ESMAE), Casa da Música, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. This edition also has the support of several institutions, including the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, the Catholic University, the University of Porto and the UT Austin | Portugal program.

The conference consists of 3 full days of music and science, featuring world-class speakers, oral and poster presentations of the latest SMC “inspirational” sessions and an exciting music program, specially compiled by 4 invited music curators (Pauline Oliveros, Evan Parker, Nicolas Collins and Robert Rowe). There will be eight concerts in total featuring the state-of-the-art in electronic music performance. The full conference program can be consulted here.

Join us in Porto at this exciting event!

Registration Now Open for U.Frame

mcchris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:29:50 +0000

U.Frame, an international academic film festival sponsored by U.Porto, has opened registration for competitors. The festival will take place from September 30th to October 4th 2009 in Porto. Registration will be open until May 30th, 2009, and submissions of competition works will continue until July 30th. The festival accepts entries in four categories, Documentary, Fiction, Animation, and Experimental. You can download the registration form here or learn more at the U.Frame site.

Last year several UT RTF students competed in the festival, and each of the students enjoyed the experience. We encourage students from UT and around the world to submit their film.

SXSW Interactive on the horizon

carly — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:50:30 +0000

A number of folks associated with the Digital Media Collaboration are going to be participating in SXSW. I’m going to be on a panel interrogating the question, “Are Women Taken More Seriously on the Web?,” organized by Laura Roeder of Roeder Studios.

Ivan Franco of industrial affiliate YDreams is leading a panel on “New Interfaces for Performance.” Affiliated faculty member Bruce Pennycook is participating in the discussion.

The whole panel schedule for the festival is available at the SXSW web site.

Hope to see some of you there — we’ll be posting further updates on festival activities as we near the event.

Additional ZON Prize Winners

mcchris — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:58:42 +0000

The Digital Media Program congratulates additional winners in the ZON Multimedia Creativity Prize. These winners come from a variety of multimedia fields and each of the winners will receive support to study at UT Austin.

In the applications category, the firm Comm Together won first prize for its “Astrolab 0.1” application, a multimedia multi-platform display that allows users to look up information relating to visual representations of spaces and equipment.

The prize in Multimedia Content was split between two first-place winners. Maria Teresa Restivo led a prize-winning team that developed eBook that provides interactive access to measuring concepts, methodologies and techniques for both university students and professionals working in engineering, physics, bio-engineering and other related areas. The prize also went to Luís Madureira Pinto’s website surfertoday.com, which is a web portal for aquatic sports, made in Portugal but accessed all over the world.

Congratulations to all of the winners at the ZON Prizes!

Festival Workshop Evaluations Reflect Enthusiasm, Success

Karen — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:59:39 +0000

Most of the evaluations are in for the Future Places Festival workshops Interface Design for Mobile Devices and Introduction to Arduino, and so far they show a unanimously positive response from workshop participants.
People taking part in the workshops were asked to fill out brief forms which included questions about how the sessions met the participants’ expectations, the relevance of the workshops to participants’ career development, and what characteristics of the workshops were most valuable and least valuable. In every case, the workshops were reported to fulfill participants’ expectations, and respondents were enthusiastic in describing how the topics covered were pertinent to their academic and professional development. Two of the most valuable elements of the workshops, according to the participants, were the opportunity to work closely with experts and the chance to network with people of similar interests and professional backgrounds. Criticism of the workshops was limited almost exclusively to concerns about the workshop sessions’ length; the majority of the workshops’ activities took place over a two-day period, and some participants wished they could last longer.
I am really pleased to see how satisfied participants were with their workshop experiences, and I’m hopeful that this initial response predicts future successes in digital media-related workshops.

Outcomes from the Interface Design for Mobile Devices workshop

riddle — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:32:20 +0000

An outcomes document from the Interface Design for Mobile Devices workshop is now available [5.7 MB PDF].

Teams developed projects in user interface design and information structures for using mobile devices to explore a physical location, the Serralves Foundation in Porto. The workshop was held October 7-9 at Serralves as part of the Future Places festival.

Back from Portugal

lucasamann — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:57:48 +0000

Just back from Portugal and 16 hours of sleep. Oporto rocks all day and all night. It was tough to keep up. I don’t know how those who had to be in school today did it.

But it was a blast.

As we were a particularly large group (both of the Ryans, Molly, Keith, Nazanin, and I), a few of our guides picked us up when we arrived in Oporto to take us to our dorms. They set us up nicely with a private room each. Afterwards, we met up with Sergio, Ruwan, and Keeley and grabbed some lunch. Then we received our festival packages and went straight over to the opening session. A few glasses of port wine later I was meeting many of our generous hosts and having a great time. As an intermission between this and the opening party, our hosts took us out for some beers and dinner, where I tried francesinha for the first time. Deciding, however, that we were too tired after our 24 hour travels and a packed schedule upon arrival, Molly, Ryan K, and I decided we needed to sleep. Ricardo, one of the guide with whom we were later to become good friends, hailed us a cab.

This first night was a great precursor for what was to come: extreme generosity from our hosts and guides, many activities packed into each day, and much port wine.

We went to Andrew Shea’s masterclass, partied at a karaoke bar, saw some great short films, explored Oporto, cruised the river, visited a museum, had a picnic on the beach, and tried McDonalds in Portugal (it was the same).

Everyone involved with U.frame was extremely generous, friendly and fun, taking it above and beyond to make us feel at home. Our guides Carla, Nuno, Ricardo, and Andre became great friends. I want to go back. Soon.

U.Frame Prizes

paulofrias — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:49:33 +0000

Here it is, the Prizes list at U.Frame – International Academic Video Festival, organized by University of Porto between 01 and 05 Oct:

MediaLight Prize
“15 Frames”, Rui Coelho, Portugal

Audience Prize
“Red Wednesday”, Nazanin Shirazi, University of Texas at Austin, USA, Fiction

Experimental Prize
“Alkhass”, Vasco Portugal, Restart, Portugal

Special Mention / Experimental
“Echo”, Benjamin Moritz Gronau, Filmakademie Baden-Wutenberg, Germany

Animation Prize
“Solos”, David Cobo Diaz, CICE – Escuela Profesional de Nuevas Tecnologías, Spain

Special Mention / Animation
“Bad Habit, Little Rabitt, Christian Effenber, University of Applied Sciences at Mainz, Germany

Documentary Prize
“Conversations II”, Marianela Vega Orosa, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Special Mention Documentary
“Gentes do Mar”, Dânia Lucas, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Portugal

Fiction Prize
“Dark Red”, Frauke Thielecke, Hamburg Media School, Germany

Prize of the Jury
“Roads”, Lior Geller, University of Tel-Aviv, Israel

Andrew Shea and UT at U.Frame

paulofrias — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:34:11 +0000

Yesterday Andrew Shea made a great presentation in the master class “The border between fiction and narrative in student filmmaking”, at U.Frame – International Academic Video Festival, in Porto.

We had the opportunity to see and comment some UT students fictional and documentary films, and think about the blurred boundaries between those paradigms (if it’s possible to find them…).

The high quality level of the films was impressive, and Andrew (a great communicator) made a wonderful contribution to the Festival.