Life as an Artificial Lifeform

After the very lovely first day and a good morning session with - and I have gotten his name now - Brendan Byrne - I continued with the narrative lab and Brendans test with surveillance cameras and making a narrative out of them. And yes it was of course working beautifully. The best test I didn´t tape when two of the attending vjs started running around wild and chasing each other and you could follow them to the beat on the cameras. After that I had a little walk around Birmingham. Its hard to describe the town and it reminded me with its feel of some of the cities in middle of China. Old culture that has seen better times meeting 21st century kapitalistik society. Its not the same style as in China nor is it as crowded but the old factory building telling you about the earlier better times next to a giant glass mall and the symbolic katholic church right next to it have a very inspirational feel all throughout the city - not something I would like to live in but very interesting for a visit. The best of it all was probably the greasy car repair shop in an old church like building.
Anyway back to the Custard Factory and therefore AVIT I found out that I missed the Be In Control workshop but since midi controllers are not my kind of main interest I was not to worried and hanged out with the programmers from VidVox telling them what I personally would like VDMX 5 to become. They are very open for the feedback and that will hopefully result in a good program for all of us.
Then I switched Hotels - now staying at this ultra conservative hotel concept called "ibis". All bussiness related and nice clean without personality but with a shower in the room.
Going back after the hotel switch and having some intermediate talks with attending VJs and getting thrown out of our working place in the old library I went straight to the informal meetings in the reception area. Toby/Spark was re:presenting his VJing for Postproduction (link follows) talk he had given at AVIT^C3.
After that is was the turn for Michael and me presenting the VJBlog. The interest in the talk exceeded all of our expectations. About 20-25 people sitting in front of us and more coming by and listening. There was this feeling in the room that we are really hitting a point with the blog and that we will get more contributors for it ones we have a better backend in place. A philosophical discussion about content arouse shortly.
The third talk after this was about NOW! the Movie from Dennise (sp?) manager of the cold cut originated project. She talked about the idea behind the movie and the form of contribution and showed us the pretty trailer. So I have had personal reservations not about the project but about the handling of the project - which seemed to closed and not communicated right - after hearing her talk and show her own contribution to the project I think I will be sending in some of my "world" loops. After that there was the VPEEK with much too loud music and nice but contentless visuals going on in the medicine bar and our table was filling with the "philosophical" crowd that has formed during the first two days - peter rubin, the vidvox crew, michael parenti, brendan byrne, willow and many more. If the music would have been just a little bit quieter a vivid discussion could have aroused - so we had this very intense one to one talks going on until the bar closed and thrown us out (yes to be thrown out is something you have to get used here :/
This morning after a wonderfull refreshing shower and nice breakfeast I arrived and went straight to the telematics and bodydataspace session going on in the old library. So I do respect the work the dancing company does and the interaction with vj mondo and moving the project out of the club into cyberspace and back into the club I thought their project is a little "hollow" without much content or the content burried so deep into the dancing side that I failed to see it as I am really no expert on dancing. Then a small work willing group of people formed in the old library only to be thrown out again and homeless we sit in the theater reception picking up the two bars of hidden wifi network preparing the PDF of our VJBlog session.

PS: Photo from Michael showing Spark at his "VJ Post" presentation.