part 1
It's difficult to know where to start with this first blog after returning from the Transmediale festival in Berlin. There was so much to take in this last week or so, and now I'm back and turning my attention to the current briefs, I'm still trying to make sense of vast array of sights and sounds I've just experienced.
There were some very interesting conferences and seminars at the festival, including 'greying the commons' which discussed copyright and intellectual property issues. One of the participants asked anyone to raise their hand if they had NOT illegally downloaded any copyrighted material in the last month, and of the 300/400 people in the room, around 3 people put their hand up. All current measures to stop the flow of copyrighted material over the Internet are obviously not working. Various methods to address the issue, such as prosecution and denial of service policies, to filtering bandwidth and the use of advertiser sponsored legal downloaded have done little to stem the flow of file sharing over the web, and a new model is still needed. There's an ever growing number of artists releasing their work independently from the usual publishers and distributors which have dominated the business for so long, and the plummeting cost of equipment such as projectors has also seen the development of micro cinemas showing films away from the influence of the major cinema corporations. These have grown from a more community driven approach, with a wikiness that many agree is the fundamental to the true nature of the Internet, and one which must be encouraged and developed if the web is to survive and serve any usefully purpose in the future.
'When Your Strange' consisted of a series films and animations, highlights including a movie shot on hand held cameras, a documentary style piece highlighting the pointless of a military border control post. The boredom and banality of life for the young guys during their stint of national service was distinct, as they senselessly 'defending' their country against nothing and no-one, as they idly pass the time to when their posting finishes and they can return to their normal life after military service has finished.
Another screening was an animated piece concerning identity and one's sense of self, as well as US immigration policy. The experiences of several people of different nationalities were taken form anonymous interviews, and set to animations of avatars, which were crudely drawn, or characters from MMOGs. The voices detailed the ordeal they face at customs, as they go through the lengthy process while US officials try to find out about them and discover their intentions. As one of the people mentioned 'your describing what you mean to them, not what you mean to you..... your face belonging to it's heritage, not to the individual'
continued later.........
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