#berlin 17 Transmediale

Transmediale is Europe’s premiere festival of digital arts, culture and technology. Each year the programme features cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events at the impressive Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in central Berlin.

This year Transmediale celebrates its 30th anniversary, and we attended the opening night on Thursday where more than 1000 students, artists, technologists, educators and designers gathered from all over the globe to celebrate digital culture and creative collaboration.

All the workshops, exhibits and activities centred on theme of 'ever elusive' - the geopolitical turbulence in the modern world, the redundancy of data, and and our reactions to it through audio-visual media.

Highlights of the opening night included a performance by Black Quantum Futurist Collective, a DJ set by James Ferrano, a stand showing a selection of Transmediale's published work since 1987 - magazines, programmes, manifestos and catalogues - and some stunning and original installations as part of the 'alien matter' exhibition.




Transmediale 30 years of printed matter.



Joep Van Liefland 'Video Palace #44' - This exhibit deals with plastic waste and the redundancy of complex data, and consists of a huge sculpture - an enclosed  wall - made entirely of some 20,000 VHS videotapes.



Addie Wagenkecht - xxxx.xxx - a sculpture consisting of five circuit boards and hundreds of flashing green lights connected by a series of Ethernet cables. The circuit boards tap into data streams on nearby Wi-Fi spots and analyse them, resulting in a continuous blinking pattern of the lights - every blink indicating the process at work.  This looked particularly striking in the exhibition environment - pitch darkness.

Transmediale also runs in conjunction with the CTM Festival of experimental sound, with events held at world-famous clubs such as Berghain and Tresor.

More:
Transmediale website
CTM Festival website

Creative Exchange

Thursday of last week Creative Exchange officially launched - Edinburgh’s new workspace for creatives and digital media specialists. The project, a collaboration between Edinburgh City Council and Edinburgh College, is aimed at providing the creative community in Edinburgh with flexible, state-of-the-art studio space. The impressive facilities, situated in the heart of Leith in a former Victorian Corn Exchange, are spread across three floors and include 4G broadband, superb AV meeting rooms, and a range of business support services.

There was a great turnout on launch night, with creatives, business leaders, freelancers and educators all getting their a first look at the awesome space. Our Graphic Design students, alongside Photography and Computer Arts, exhibited a range of work for the opening night, and as part of this project, we've been offered some dedicated space for workshops, seminars and pitches. The branding for Creative Exchange was also designed by HND graphics graduate Jonathan Walton.

Creative Exchange will hopefully be a great new resource for the creative community, and there are already a number of agencies and organisations using the space. Check out the feedback from the launch night via Storify. Full details and pricing plans are available on the website at www.creativeechangeleith.com

The Future of Advertising

On Friday our students were lucky enough to have a visit from Murray Calder, Chair of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and a Director at advertising giants, MediaCom.

Murray, who was recently named in the DRUM's Power 100, gave a great talk on the future of advertising. He looked at the rise of digital and its increasingly dominant market share of advertising revenues.

Some of the emerging ideas he looked at included digital device convergence, interactive video, and near-field communication, along with various the strategies now being used to target smaller groups of consumers who in turn use social media to extend the reach of the message.

Murray described a 'layer cake' approach, where the traditional forms of static advertising – print, TV, outdoor, door drops - can all be integrated via smartphones to create more immersive, interactive content. He also used a nice quote by Smithery's John Willshire that creatives 'need to be making things people need, rather than making people need things'. Inspiring stuff.

More Info:
www.mediacom.com
www.smithery.co/about/
www.ipa.co.uk

Photoshop for the iPhone

Adobe has released a stripped down version of Photoshop for the iPhone. Its still only available in the US, but has already taken 1 million downloads in less than 2 weeks. Apparently it features some nice touches including:

Basics: Crop, Rotate, and Flip
Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White
Filters: Sketch, Soft Focus
Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, Soft Black and White.

You can edit photos in your library and upload them to your account, but not the reverse. Once it is uploaded, you'll need to go to the Flash based Photoshop.com to continue to edit.

But we won't be seeing students (or designers in agencies) ditching their Mac's just yet.

Adobe, recognising the limitations of the app, are only too happy to provide a link to a very funny spoof, where Layers TV announce a full-blown CS3 version, complete with callcentre support: