In a JOVA first we attended a festival virtually, thanks to two cyberspace souls that were able to Represent us at the last minute at the PICNIC Crossmedia creative festival in Amsterdam last week. They've kindly blogged the highlights for us, big shout outs and thanks go to Laetitia Dam and Bertrand Robinne for hanging out on our behalf. Of special interest to us was the Suprising Africa day, that they covered in detail for us. See their photo-story here (video still to come) and read their review below:

 

A new Ecosystem conference

Being music lovers we first stepped in the Flexbar where “A New Music Ecosystem” conference took place. “The music industry is changing. Artists and developers everywhere are working on new ways of connecting fans and bands and developing new businesses along the way”. As MySpace users we were mostly interested in the presentation of new Music websites. The one that caught our ears was Twones introduced by the dynamic and young Tim Heineke. Twones is a music service and a new way to store, organize, find & share music played all over the web

 on your computer (i.e. iTunes) to one single point of access.  We found out a friendly interface with the ability to listen freely to tracks, watch videos, store music and create a library, follow-up on friends and heroes updates and discover new music genres. All in one seems good enough to us. Once home we rushed on internet, registered to Twones but sadly discovered we had to wait the public beta starts. Who said new way of connections?

Surprising Africa
Francis Kere  “New African Architecture”
We were just delighted by the persona of Kere. Humble with a sense of humour and practical with simple words as his architecture, Kere first took us in a real African daylife visual. While projecting a picture of a Burkinabe man carrying on his tiny motorcycle a dozen of alive chickens and next to who stands a giant street advertisement for a mobile phone, “Africa”, said Kere is “between the middle age and the modern life”. This is the paradox of Africa and this was what Kere had to focus on his project: ‘Building by means of local resources’. He designed a simple and beautiful mud brick primary school house in Gando his homeland of Burkina Faso and taught to his fellow villagers, skilled at building with clay, ways to use local techniques and materials to build practical, long-lasting structures that can be locally built and maintained. Even if the school is a complete success, and his hosting today over 500 pupils, Kere will still need to fight to receive commissions from the Burkinabe authorities.

Nontsikelelo Veleko

'Lolo' Veloko is a fun South African photographer who digged into the urban life from which she revealed a funky street fashion. Her signature “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder” is a series of portraits offering a glimpse of pure and simple youth culture and fashion in South Africa. Veleko draws attention to issues of beauty and poses questions around how identity is perceived and how fashion constructs identity. The Funky and colorful photographs got our vision going a bit psychedelic and we left her filled of good mood and happiness. Nice spirit.

Zina Saro-Wiwa
Nigerian guerilla filmmaker Saro-Wiwa did not talk much about her film “This is my Africa” as the video speaks for her. During a 15 minute film sequence we were caught within the Zina spiral. Through the eyes of a dozen Africans we got a close look at the continent, the African culture shared through a good laugh, Fela and other music heroes that we just love, statements and fun interviews all brilliantly and dynamically assembled into the film. We literally took off of our seats and couldn't hold back our excitement as the whole film unfolded. Zina thinks about allowing viewers to record and add their own contributions to it in the near future. How fun!

Discoveries

SPINNXS: A new movement in digital signage 
We met Rick Wagter from OPALIO (Mind moving media). He introduced us to the rotating digital billboard spinnXS, a mind moving medium that offers 360° visibility and attracts attention to movement. The spinnXS has thin, double sided displays in portrait mode, built in an elegant housing which can be personalized. It can be synchronized with variable speeds and can be set up in a nation-wide network over it’s Wi-lan connections. The client targets are the out of home ad-networks, exhibition rentals, retail chains and can be installed in shopping malls, megastores, airports, fairs…. The spinning style is fun but there is not enough interaction with people. It would have been maybe interesting to install a video camera in and catch people faces or attitude?

Augmented Reality; The Totaal TV 3D Beyond Reality Special
Augmented reality consists of adding virtual content to real life environments/objects. It creates interesting possibilities for advertisers to augment their print advertisement with interesting multimedia but also 3D objects and 3D animations. We tried it and on the user interface it is pretty simple. We stand in front of the computer, took the Totaal TV magazine and faced in front of the screen faced an already programmed picture. This is when the magic appears, the pictures becomes alive in 3 dimensions. It is amazing, lots of programming beyond that just for our visual pleasure. We liked it! Watch the video demo here .