I stopped in Copenhagen on my way back to the US and gave a talk at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) on invitation from David Gauthier who is currently a faculty there and Amanda Parkes, who was teaching a summer course there.
CIID was great and very focused interaction design school, I was impressed by students and overall set up there. Students seemed to be impressed by TeslaTouch. And Copenhagen was a lot of fun.
While visiting Russia I gave a talk in British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow, or simply Britannica. The school was around since 2003, it felt very modern and comparable to many of the international design school that I had visited in Europe and the US.
Talking about my work publicly in Moscow and in Russian was enjoyable yet challenging experience: I have not done for more then 15 years! Students were smart, motivated and asked a lot of questions, so overall it was a really good experience.
And big thanks to Timofey Tararin for taking these photos.
In the middle of October I gave a talk at Coded Cultures festival in Yokohama. The Yokohama event was actually a follow-up from the first installation of the festival that took place in Vienna a year before where I also participated and gave a talk.
The theme of my talk was based on a basic observation that as material and computing technology develops and DIY culture proliferates, we will think about the world around as inherently hackable and programmable. That includes everyday physical objects, society, living organisms and human body. Everything will be programmable, hackable and internet-ready, hence the term – Programmable Reality. The debate after the talk was very nice and some provocative ideas were suggested.
In the end of May I went to Europe to give several invited talks on the topic of Programmable Reality.
First, on May 31 I gave a talk at Coded Culture festival in Viena, Austria (abstract is here). Coded Cultures is a bi-national Austria-Japan festival and a part of the Austria – Japan Year 2009. It introduced work of artists, curators and scientists from Japan and Austria featuring projects that lay on the intersections of the art, technology, science and entertainment.
There was a lot interesting projects (see the list of exhibitions) and I was in particular interested in MOIDS – a sound sculpture built out of small electronic blocks. It produced very pleasant sound and I have not see it before. Overall, the festival was great: the content was interesting and organization was superb.
After Vienna I continued to Lausanne, Switzerland where I was invited to give a keynote speech at the Research Day of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – a major European research institution. The theme for this year was “Invisible Computing: Novel Interfaces to Digital Environments” and other keynote speakers were Dr. Chia Shen from Harvard University, who was talking about projects on multi-touch surfaces, and Prof. Richard Harper from Microsoft Research / Cambridge, who was talking about smart home environments.
For the talk at EPFL, I actually compleately re-wamped the talk that I gave in Vienna, so I think it was much better.
I will give a short talk entitled “The Art and Science of Ballistic Missiles” at the National Museum of Modern Art (MOMAK) in Kyoto on March 28th, 2009 at 5:00 pm.
The talk is part of the “Radikal Dialogue” series that are hosted by Noboru Tsubaki who currently has his solo exhibition at MOMAK. The “GOLD / WHITE / BLACK” exhibition is a retrospection of Noboru Tsubaki art work spanning last 5 years. It will also include his latest art piece which is a full-scale inflatable model of Russian inter-continental ballistic missile.
The full pamphlet of the art exhbition can be found here.
