day 7

sunday, 11.15pm GMT+2

Just got back from Sonorous Embodiment at the Brucknerhaus. It was raining for the first time since our arrival.
The event was a mix of traditional music forms and visualisations (VJ style). The results were quite interesting and even tough we had to leave early due to the early closure of the tram system, we enjoyed every minute of it.

Today, as every day, started with the morning call that was apparently 30 minutes late. I guess we are all a little tired from the late nights, early morning and tiring days. The day started with a trip to the Art on the Move exhibition. We had met Tiago Martins at the OK centre the previous day and we said we would meet him at the gallery in the morning. While waiting for the opening of the gallery we met Mauro Arrighi that is also one of the poeple we wanted to meet and interview. Both people had been giving talks the previous day and had been captivating us. Helen, Nick and Andy chatted with Mauro and another student from the Linz Kunstuniversitat while I runned to the Bruckner haus to pick up our tickets for todays events. Apparently there was no need to do so since the Festival passes granted access to those events without extra tickets. It saved us 150 euros.

When coming back, the keymaster was still not there so we kept on chatting with Mauro about the life in Linz and his studies. Mauro is originally from Italy and has a strong art background. He is now studying in Linz and finds it quite nice to be able to study with people form such different backgrounds.

After interviewing Mauro and Tiago (when he finally arrived) we tried both DADAgear and Wolves and Sheeps. Dadagear is a set of wearable computers (ie: bluetooth arduinos) that produce sounds or words when touched. Wolves and Sheeps are a tool for ubiquitous gaming. They use Nokia mobile phones and software written in Python to guide us through the city in the quest for sheeps. The pack of wolves is attached to the phone through a GPRS connection and a GPS chip. It was quite funny to run around the city with such a device.

After lunch we went to the OK centre to see if we could grab any award winners to interview. Sadly that was not the case, but we left our contact details and we luckily got to interview them. We met the MobileLab outside the OK centre and they showed us the “rain coat” of their troley as well as the types of reports and measurements they make. Off we went to the Brucknerhaus, to meet someone form the OpenFramework team. We were lucky enough to grab Theodore Watson, one of the co-founders of the OpenFrameworks programming framework. His framework is cross-platform and he recommends Xcode for Mac, Eclipse for Linux and VS for windows.

We also went to see a couple of forums during the afternoon. They were conducted by the award winners so we could simply pick them as they exited the forum and get a couple of words with them. We successfully interviewed Markus Kison from the touched echo, Clement Picon that animated Musicologie and Sergi Jorda from the reactable.

Now, nostalgic as we are, or simply because all the shops are closed on sundays, we are earting cup noodles and dicussing the upcoming events.
Tomorrow we will go and meet some of the people from the future lab, then we will try to meet some of the people form Linz Kunstuniversitat. Hopefully we will also be able to get some souvenirs and postcards and have a little more relaxed day on wednesday.

bye for now,

morgan