Cinecities

Film is how we read the 20th Century city: soundtracks, panning vistas, the language of light and shadow, remembered through a thousand movies. But the 21st Century city is cinema itself: interactive displays, LCD advertising billboards, reactive installations and architectures, mobile phones, laptops and bluetooth headsets. As the technology matures, the city is becoming a huge interactive cinema - a place where film makers can project their films on and through the architecture and personal communications devices of its inhabitants. This day explores emerging technologies and the opportunities they are creating for film-makers to imagine what the city-as- cinema could be.

Technical Workshop, led by Wojciech Kosma

The technical workshop will introduce participants to 'interactive cinema' tools used as integral architectural features, and also to lower-level technologies that power light-screens and interactive displays. Mobile media: phone, wifi and laptop-based film will also be demonstrated and demystified. Although the technology can be advanced and often expensive, the workshop will focus on the potential for taking a film-maker's approach to this medium, will point out the 'low-tech', budget options that still have creative potential, and will provide participants with the language, technical nous and conceptual framework for moving into this emerging market.

Production Workshop, led by Usman Haque

The production workshop will focus on creative, and also commercial considerations for this emerging market. What are the languages, technologies, tools and prominent agencies in the 'scene'? What large scale projects stand up to critical scrutiny? What simple small things have worked well? Is there such a thing as 'best practice'? And where could interactive architecture go from here? These questions will be explored with a focus on the concerns of creative producers and how tricks and techniques learned in film and the film industry might be applicable to this new area.

Workshop Leaders Biographies:

Wojciech Kosma

Wojciech Kosma lives in London and works as an artist and composer, creating sonic, spatial and interactive/poetic artworks and performances. His fluency with technology is useful in his extremely diverse practice as a co-producer, collaborating with many visual artists, film makers, media artists and musicians. In the last three years he has performed, exhibited and undertaken residencies in a wide variety of institutions, arts organisations as well as informal networks of cultural producers in Paris, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Paris, London, Budapest, Krakow, and Belfast, and has recently been a visiting lecturer at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

more info: http://wojciechkosma.art.pl

Usman Haque

Haque Design + Research specialises in the design and research of interactive architecture systems. Architecture is no longer considered something static and immutable; instead it is seen as dynamic, responsive and conversant. Our projects explore some of this territory.

Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and choreographed performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan and has also worked in USA, UK and Malaysia. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.

He is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the SwissCreation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize. His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Hillside Gallery (Tokyo), The National Maritime Museum Greenwich and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work has also been presented at international conferences including Siggraph, VSMM (International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia) and Doors of Perception.

for more info see: http://www.haque.co.uk