It was indeed an awesome festival. I am glad I finally met Julian Oliver and heard his talk “The Computer Game as Musical Instrument”, comparing contemporary sound-based games with 20th Century experimental instrument design, positioning such games as the grandchildren of early, radical ideas within Western (noise) music. Since the first time I saw his Levelhead, an Augmented Reality spatial-memory game, I wished I could meet him in person.

Keiichi Yano gave an inspiring and witty speech about ‘The Future of Music Games’. He also shared his insight of how the next generation of music games can continue to push the genre forward into new gaming plateaus, respectively, physical, social, education and fantastical. Martin Pichlmair talked about ‘Tracing the History of Synaesthetic Video Games and Media Artwork’, presented the game Radio Flare Redux and traced the history of synaesthetic video games and media artworks – from Kandinsky to Rez, from Frank Malina to wipeOut. It was interesting to know that he stopped making art in order to pursue the development of digital games. I guess somehow, life is a big game and we all have to enjoy playing. I also liked Leonard J. Paul’s talk ‘Droppin’ Science: Video Game Audio Breakdown’, stripping away the layers around how game audio works down to the core.

So many interesting things going on, and creative folks are exploring digital media. The world is getting so exciting!

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The short visit also gave me quite a lot to think about. Certainly, there is much potential for applying digital fabrication in architecture design and production processes. Digital fabrication is the process of translating a digital design into a physical object. Its techniques such as rapid prototyping, stereolithography and laser cutting enable the production of physical objects directly from digital models. It allows creating new forms or structures, and exploration of the aesthetics of space.

But I am thinking about the possibility of mapping invisible data, not just concrete/hard data such as body movement, breath, and temperature but also some more abstract/soft information - for instance, memory, emotions, cognitive processes, thoughts, etc. into the architectural space generated by digital fabrication technology. And when these data could be embedded into our living space, in turn they would affect the way we interact with the environment.

Apart from this, I am always fascinated by how basic geometries with simple algorithms can be aggregated and emerge into extensively complicated forms. I’d like to see more creative or experimental digital fabricated works.

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It was definitely an amazing workshop. Some sketches I presented at the end. I was quite happy that I finally started to mess around with openframeworks. A big thanks to Zach and people from the Fabrica. I had such a great time, fantastic food, wine and lots lots of fun….!

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Artists have always been exploring different technologies to make animations - from early zoetropes to hand drawn etched film - while with programming, there is another emerged animated form. The workshop will look at the animation and animated form through the lens of computation and mainly focus on coding to move things in a natural way. Zach will also give us an introduction of openframeworks.

Well, surely lot of things to learn and creative pals to meet, I am really looking forward to it now.

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