Definitely Picnic is all but a no-frills conference. A central salon looking like a slightly under-toned Biennale, wall sized projections, giant faces half open, performance actresses with heart-shaped heads, human avatars you can control though a mike (the Girlfriend Experience), press rooms with floors made of wood scraps, and above all the omnipresent RFID tag machines proposed by Mediamatic, to put to good use the RFID tags you would be given at the conference.

My favorite has been of course the Friend Drink Station, that would print free drinks coupons, too bad I accidentally deleted all the pictures from Amsterdam, and I can’t find a picture of it online.
Here is the iTea Table, that would show information about you to others when you sit,

and the photo booth, to take pictures of you with somebody else and have the pictures immediately published on Flickr and the profiles of both (you need to be enrolled to the Picnic network in order to access all this fun stuff) would become connected on the Picnic network, and so on.

Oh well. This and more you could do with your RFID tags; at the end of the first day, after a lifetime of spy stories and movies, I felt so nervous that I slipped my tag into a nearby lady’s bag on the bus. Just in case.

November 16 is the deadline for the overly interesting call for projects by Cancer UK research, to produce an ARG to raise attention about, and most importantly funding for, cancer research.
There is no real prize (a meagre £1000 per team) but the winners will receive infinite publicity and will get production tips and assistance from some seriously creative (and famous) professionals. Here it is.
One comment: I really hope this will be a great fundraising event, but I also hope the winner ARG won’t create a model for commercial ARGs devoted to less noble purposes..
Also, when I started thinking about an actual game project, after some minutes I begun feeling this urge for knocking on wood, which I guess is also the average reaction of average people when thinking about cancer; I am really curious to know how the winner project will be able to overcome this attitude.

Technorati Tags: alternate reality games, Call for papers, educational, games, participatory, pervasive games, serious games

Very strange conference this Picnic conference - after months of network building on the picnic network site, and very cool network features, like when you see to each event the profiles of the other participants, I was almost hoping you could rank the presentations, before and afterwards. The apparently chaotic organization made so that at each meeting you would meet completely different people (ok, I was missing the main conference, there must have been a stable group there). Anyway, that really felt the social network come alive, the natural emergence of the popular, and the spontaneous aggregation.
I still wonder if that strong feeling of “2.0″ has been only a side effect of a slightly messy although charming organization or a planned strategy to give that “In” feeling. In the latter case, wow.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, Web 2.0

In spite of the warning provided by Christy/cross-mediaentertainment.com last year, I did go to Cross Media Week, mostly because all the side events were free and open to grant-less cross media buffs like me (thank you Picnic) - I followed very interesting presentations about virtual worlds, social networks, online journalism, iTV and advertising, environmental activism, but still the “core” of the conference seemed to be some sort of gravitational void, with many interesting people talking about many interesting things (all the talks are now available at the Picnic website), but often forgetting to even mention cross media.
It is clearly important to promote the concept of “cross media”, even just as a buzzword, among the professionals, although it was very clear almost nobody had actually a reflection on the topic; I guess in Europe the term “cross media” is still interpreted as some futuristic pitch or just another word for repurposing - I wonder what the dutch cross media gurus Monique de Haas and Jak Boumans say about that.

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the Cross Media Week aroused much interest without actually saying what is cross media, from the point of view of structure, production, or business models (actually there is a presentation today about business models, will post about it later); this is why I am going back to Amsterdam next month to the workshop Crossmedia Games @ Cinekid to explain all about it OK, some of it.

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, event, futuristic, iTV, social networks, virtual worlds

This is no news at all, as it happened on April 4, but it is still interesting: the organization Adventure Ecology decided to flood several parts of Second Life for a few hours, to show the (not-so-future) effects of global warming.
Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, and the entire Mediterranean island of Ibiza went under,

although the in-world people would quickly get organized with boats, swimming suits and swimming scripts, watch video on YouTube.
Interesting enough, I am hearing from one of the organizers that the event affected mostly press, while Second Life inhabitants didn’t pay that much attention. I wonder how many other media-activist actions are being performed on Second Life; there is a lot of activism around there indeed, but mostly related to First Life politicians ( Democrat John Edwards’s campaign, and the Front National, french extreme right party (what are THEY doing in SL?!), below you can see some reactions)
) I wonder if this lack of activism from “engaged” members is because of the in-world demographics (not so many engaged members, maybe?) , or simply because I don’t know more about it.

The Waag Society in Amsterdam developed, already in 2002, a “non verbal remote communication tool to support emotional communication”, targeting 80+years old.
Storytable offers a “multimedia jukebox” to stimulate memory and reminiscing and to encourage social interaction in elderly persons.
The Storytable is “intelligent furniture with footage from the 1920ies ot the 1950is”, also offering an Oral History database, continuously adjourned. Let’s see how it is works:
“This interface, designed in close cooperation with seniors, makes it possible for them to listen to or play digital multimedia clips from a large database. These multimedia clips contain songs, TV commercials, news broadcasts and other images from the 1900’s to present day. These clips are designed to reflect important events in a senior’s life. The Storytable’s navigation system was designed to make modern technology easily accessible to seniors. Thus, two “intelligent” buttons provide access to search and play the multimedia clips”.

Some weeks ago I discovered the educational project “Hole in the Wall” by Sugata Mitra, addressing children from Indian villages, and although that is not the same, it is interesting to note how we tend to forget that a large part of the population lacks the basic “technical literacy” to enjoy the wonders of Web 2.0.

Still at the Cross Media Week, interesting talk today to about social networks and open ID. While waiting for the ideal open ID to use everywhere without worrying about your personal data being stolen by terrorists etc., they were proposing to connect all social networks, so that it would be possible to : federate - have a friend on another network follow my content like it was on his;
synch - make the content visible in the same way from platform to platform;
move - move from one platform to the other very easily;
after this, the talk became too technical for me and I stopped understanding.
What I got, is that : social networks, like cross media, are fighting too to find common standards for more fluid communication. Technical convergence, personalization, and transferability are the main issues. The idea of an open ID, or digital identity, was fascinating, as was the concept of “shared secret”, that reminded me of secret societies where hundreds of thousands could mix with the crowd and still be connected although not personally acquainted (I think free masons and similar), an uncanny thought when related to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
By the way, here you can see Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (who looks exactly like my friend Alvise, ciao Alvise )

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, social networks, Web 2.0

I quote directly :
“The competition jury will award a prize of 2,500.00 euro to the work (published or unpublished) which best represents experimentation between arts and new technologies. The candidates for the prize (a short list of a maximum of 6 competitors) will be guests at the 4th edition of the Share Festival, taking place in Turin March 2008 at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin. In order to be declared winner of the prize, every artist has to take part in the 4th edition of Share Festival, by preparing his or her work of art, to be properly evaluated by jury and public.
The organization is available at offering all the costs regarding the preparation of the 6 selected works as well as travel and accommodation expenses for the artists, and, possibly, the prize itself.

Nomination of 6 candidates for the prize: by November, 2007. The announcement will be published on the following website: www.toshare.it The winner will be announced in March 2008 during the award ceremony at Share Festival”.

DEADLINE : 30 September 2007

Sort of interesting, and one of the first initiatives of the sort to be held in Italy…. I understand it also considers cross media productions

The program for the Come Out & Play festival is finally available - highlights of originality (for me) are “3001 - a new kind of collaborative musical gameplay” where players participate to a musical performance via cell phones - I remember vaguely an art performance employing the same principle, but I ll have to check. The innovation is that each cell phone controls an avatar on the screen and the avatar’s movements determines the music - uhm - really curious about that.
Otherwise we have the classic (human) “Snake”, Bocce games to discover the city of Amsterdam, virtual soccer, water gun fights, Pong projected on a building (in 2006 it was Space Invaders), street tagging, three photo hunts, a spy game, outdoor puzzle game with lasers (! I want to see that!), a game set in virtual Africa (last year it was virtual Bagdad). I was pleased to see that at least one third of the creators of these games were women, then it is true that cross platforms game production attracts creators from both sexes while single platform (PC/PS2 etc) attracts mostly male creators because all the existing productions show a strong gender connotation. Anyway, gender issues are not the topic of this blog, they are the topic of the factory blog, the official blog of Factory Girl, regarding women and games, take a look (a bit of cross advertising