My last week was spent at the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin Texas. It’s a full week of events with three main subjects: interactive, film and music. It’s really a magnificent event that completely overtakes Austin, with people from all around the world presenting their work both as panelists or performing artists. I came to present my own panel on “New Interfaces for Performance” at the Austin Convention Center. Soon I realized that with simultaneous panels happening in around 20 different rooms, there’s so much going on that you just wish you could be in more than one place at a time.

Interactive is mainly dedicated to tendencies revolving around new technologies. There was a big focus on web 2.0 and social networking. It’s not a subject that particularly interests me so I looked for good alternatives.

Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces
As a YDreamer this is a particularly interesting subject, where panelists discussed avant-garde tendencies in ubiquitous computing and respective tangible interfaces in interactive public spaces. I particularly liked Ben Ceverny’s intervention (AFK Labs), where he explained how urban spaces can soon be compared to operating systems, with different interfaces and APIs spread around cities. Think “Spatial CSS”, where you would be able to customize the form/function of your surroundings.

Brave NUI World: The Fearless Future of Device Interaction
There was also a panel on Natural User Interfaces, with people from Stimulant or Xbox. The panel went essentially around multi-touch interaction, although most people agreed that NUI should go well beyond touch technologies and that to use the word “natural” will only make sense once you have a common vocabulary for gestural interaction. Apple or Microsoft is pushing this language with commercial products such as the Iphone or Surface. “Pinching” is now a verb such as “clicking”. Personally I think we still have a long way to go in order to find a killer app for multi-touch technologies, since mostly our thinking is a linear chain of action/consequence. Zooming and rotating photos is definitely cool but we should be able to go well beyond those superficial applications.

How Not To Be Evil (Even By Accident)
With such a great tagline I just had to be there. The discussion revolved around how users are giving up their personal rights in most of their social networking applications and how young startups should seek advice on a strategy for user contracts.

I was hoping for the panel to go a bit further than the mere legal matters and rethink alternatives regarding the relationships between service providers, investors and users, since we all know the biggest asset of such services. Yes, most of them are evil. But from a user point of view the question remains: have you ever read your contract with Facebook and, mostly, would you give up the service even knowing they rightly own your social digital life?

New Interfaces for Performance
My own panel, where I teamed up with Bruce Pennycook from UT Austin, who is a music professor and has also, worked in the field of electronic music. We currently have a common project through Colab, where physical interfaces are also addressed.

The panel was basically an introduction about the rise of new instruments for electronic performative arts and their relationship with the DIY generation. Everybody is building their own interfaces but few are designing with others in mind. If you take Western Music you can argue that most complex harmony structures were developed around a fixed 200 years of the piano existence. The Theremin almost made it, because a whole body of composers and virtuoso players arose but they didn’t really spawn new languages. Will we ever design another piano?

Robert Rodriguez and Henry Selick: A Conversation From the Third Dimension
This was one of the few film panels that I attended, with steering from Robert Rodrigues and Henry Selick (Coraline). Mainly there’s a resurgence of 3D technologies in movie theaters, as the film industry seeks new ways to seduce audiences. Movie theaters have seen a real downfall due to the competitive DVD market and internet pirating. Thus new attractive features must be developed and 3D is one of them. But from a director’s point of view the real issue is on how you take a technological feature, integrate it with your directing and find truly creative ways of using stereoscopy. Coraline is definitely a landmark on the mashup of 3D and traditional animation techniques.

Bruce Sterling’s keynote
This was simply the highlight of SXSW Interactive. I don’t even know where to start but mainly Sterling’s intervention was a satirical critique on how we’ve lost so much with the web 2.0 digital lifestyle. Twitter is really a big thing these days and I agree that it is arguable that 140 characters are enough to develop any kind of idea. The way we previously socialized allowed us all to engage differently and have profound discussions that would eventually question and change our lives. These days we have a true problem with attention span and a difficulty in truly developing critical thought. So Bruce’s advice is: lets all have a couple of glasses of wine with our closest friends, try to figure out how we can really make a difference and, once and for all, change the world for the better.

Screenburn
A small showcase of gaming but with some nice events ranging from a vintage gaming booth to an exhibition of concept art in game design.

After Interactive was over it was time for the Music event. About 900 performing artists distributed all around the city. I had a full pass so I enjoyed what might be the biggest live music event in the world. Oh and yeah… there’s Dinosaur Jr.!

Special thanks to:
YDreams, Colab and UT Austin, Bruce Pennycook, Marta Vieira and Gary Gattis.

Tags: austin, Ivan Franco, new interfaces for performance, panel, SXSW

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 17:47 and is filed under Company Life, Events, Science & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.