Student Award finalists announced

The Live 2011 Grand Prix Student Award is over and the finalists have been selected.

Participant works came from all over Finland and differed from games and animations to interactive sonic installations.

The Live 2011 Grand Prix Student Award jury has hand picked 7 works as the category finalists, and the finalist works can be seen at our Youtube channel

And the finalists are:

Brainwave Music Lab: Performative Experiments on Human Test Subjects /Marko Alastalo et al. (Teatterikorkeakoulu)

Dancer as a Painter/ Aku Meriläinen (Lapin Yliopisto)

Digital Captures / Johannes Neumeier (Turun Ammattikorkeakoulu)

Empty Kitchen / Sampo Siren (Lahden Ammattikorkeakoulu)

Product Placement / Matti Niinimäki ( Lapin Yliopisto)

The Third Eye / Niklas Gustafsson (Taideteollinen Korkeakoulu)

Xmasheat / Jussi Karnijoki, Miika Pylkkö and Antti Rantanen (Metropolia)

The jury will select three winners to be awarded, and the results will be announced in January 2010.

Event Awards given in FutureEverything 2010

Turku – European Capital of Culture in 2011 gives out an extra prize of 1500 euro (total) in co-operation with FutureEverything festival (12-15 May, Manchester England).

Prize will be dealt out to 3 works selected by The FutureEverything Awards jury in co-operation with Turku 2011. One work will go directly the Live2011.com Grand Prix media art & new media competitions final round in a category which the work best fits. Total prizemoney in the Grand Prix is over 140 000 euro and submission deadline is 30th of June 2010. You can take part with innovative online games, social media applications, -sites and -services, audiovisual digital artworks, interactive art etc. Live2011.com Grand Prix categories and submission info can be found at www.live2011.com/grandprix. The deadline for The FutureEverything Awards is 15th January 2010, info can be found at www.futureeverything.org/awards.

Live2011.com Event Award @TEKS-Kosmorama's New Submission Date 15.1.2010

Organisers have decided to lengthen submission date for entries for Integrated Art - Nova Facade Competition in order to respond the requests from the artistic communities. New deadline for submissions is 15.1.2010.

New information:
- Submission date is changed to the 15th January 2010 at 12:00 PM (Norwegian time)
- Sumissions from now on must be delivered only via e-mail to teks@teks.no
- Format PDF and/or JPG, max size 10 MB (bigger than this, your mail does not come through to the competition)
- Submissions are to be sent to teks@teks.no. Attention: Espen Gangvik.

Competition information in English (PDF, this information is under editing and can still have the old submission date, also information about postage stamps is no longer valid)

Received: Creative and Joyful Xmas Card

The Regional Dance Centre of Western Finland delivered us a great Seasonal Greetings in form of a dance show telling a story of a Christmas tree thief. A different, sustainable and hilarious card which created many happy faces, laughter and stormy applauses. The best was that we could send the joy further in the city with providing them the next place to visit. What a great idea!

Live team expresses its thanks to the Regional Dance Center: Sometimes digital experience cannot just reach the effect of the physical participation!

External link: The Regional Dance Centre of Western Finland

Culture 2.0 : Also websites and services can take part

Hi,
We have received a lot of contacts from people interested in Culture 2.0 category. Due to big demand we´ve decided to open Culture 2.0 category from applications to include also websites and web services that reinvent social media through artistic and/or innovative ways. Same rules still apply for social media applications.
Check out the additions from the category specific rules.

Greetings,
Live2011.com -team

Digital artwork filling the façade of a six storey building to be awarded in Norway

Turku, the European Capital of Culture in 2011, is organizing an art competition in Norway in co-operation with the Trondheim Electronic Arts Center and the Trondheim International Filmfestival Kosmorama. The objective is to fill a façade of the six storey building of AØF with digital art.

A two-stage competition

The competition will be realized as a two-stage process.

In the first stage the artists will send their drafts and proposals to the international competition committee, which will then pick two to three works to be processed further. The deadline for submissions is 15th of December 2009. In the second stage 60 000 NOK ( some 7200 euro) is handed out by the Norwegian organizers for further preparation of the selected works. The deadline for the second stage is 2nd of March 2010.

The winning work will be awarded in the Trondheim International Filmfestival in March 2010 with a 2000 euro Live2011.com Grand Prix Event Award. The chosen work will continue to one of the finals of the massive media-art & new media competition with prizes ranging from 20000-40000 euro per category. Live2011.com Grand Prix is organized by Turku, European Capital of Culture 2011.

Competition organizers are looking after works, that can, based on their content, take part to the categories of Live2011.com Grand Prix´s categories


More info at

English competition guide: www.ifolketshus.no/konk/konkurranse-eng.pdf
Building drawings: www.ifolketshus.no/
Live2011.com Grand Prix info: www.live2011.com
TEKS - Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre: http://teks.no
Kosmorama – Trondheim International Filmfestival: http://kosmorama.no/2010/en/
Turku 2011 – European Capital of Culture: www.turku2011.fi

European Media Art Festival call deadline 15.12.2009

EUROPEAN MEDIA ART FESTIVAL OSNABRUECK
21 - 25 April 2010
21 April - 23 May 2010

www.emaf.de

// CALL FOR ENTRIES

// WE WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO SUBMIT YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO
PARTICIPATE IN THE EMAF BY 15 DECEMBER 2009

// INFOS AND APPLICATION DOCUMENTS FOR YOUR PROJECT CAN BE FOUND AT
WWW.EMAF.DE

The motto of the 2010 festival is MASH UP, reflected in film
programmes, lectures and specials.

Event Award @ Alternative Party

Another Event Award was granted at Alternative Party in Helsinki 24-25.10.2009. Alternative party is a festival devoted to digital culture, that brings art, technology, science and business together in a unique way.

The winning piece is a demo called Bold, makers of which are Dvik, Joyrex & Moran (Daniel Vik, Vincent van Dam and Roman Skvortsov).

Bold was voted by audience as the winner of the main demo series of Alternative Party. The fact that makes Bold special is its realization with an MSX computer standard from the 80's. Since the format of the work is a demo, it is run real time on a prehistoric computer. It must be seen in the context and the performance level of the computers of its time. From a technical point of view the work is quite dazzling. It has required high levels of programming skills, creativity and optimization from it's makers. The main memory of the MSX-1 computers varied mostly between 32 and 64 kilobytes. A modern desktop computer typically has a 4 096 000 kB internal memory.

Live 2011 Event Award @ Mindtrek

Live 2011 Grand Prix Event Award at Mindtrek has been awarded to Donkeypedia.

Donkeypedia is a cross media project with a donkey that travels through European nations, a quest for the identity of children and youngsters. The donkey is very modern, he will carry various devices (laptop, GPS, camera etc). All this equipment is being charged by solar power. The Donkey will be digitally directed by local children, from village to city, from province to province, from nation to nation. Children will collect stories, art expressions, movies and objects that represent something essential about their place and its residents, resulting in a kaleidoscopic platform that reveals the European identity bit by bit, step by step. A donkey has big ears for listening to stories, and he can carry stuff. In this way he can collected and learn about the countries he’s visiting.

Children at home can follow his track live on the website. The pictures and the movies that are being taken, are uploaded and automatically positioned on the route. Also descriptions of images and tags are created by the children online. The website contains spirals where you can uncluster every single event. Every picture has got to be tagged to be traced on a different level. With words like: scary, pretty, challenging or dreamy. This way images and videos are poetically related to each other.

Donkeypedia is a production of 4xM - www.4xM.nl
The Donkeypedia walk is originated by Cristian Bettini

Visit Donkeypedia at www.donkeypedia.nl

Deadline on Sunday for National Student Award and Creative Idea for Mobile City Guide

We want to remind that the deadline for National Student Award and Creative Idea for Mobile City Guide -categories is on Sunday 15th of November. You can take part in the National Student Award category if you are a student and your educational institute is in Finland. We accept works that have been published after 1.1.2009. Remember to read general and category specific rules before submitting your work.

- Live2011.com Team

Noby Noby Boy

A friend of mine suggested that i should blog about this game for PlayStation3 called Noby Noby Boy.

Thinking about our Artistic Game category, it might be inspirational to check out the game, as it is done in a very original way in terms of its looks and gameplay.

Ok, to be frank, it can be seen also as very confusing, stupid and weird, but it has certainly delivered some good laughs because of it's wackyness.

Noby Noby Boy is a kinda physics-sandbox-like toy world universum, where you move this weird wormlike dude. You can eat things in the world and stretch the character and fly to space. Apparently the point of the game is to collectively stretch the character and unlock new levels to the game. So no one can advance in the game alone, but the worldwide community of players progress together.

The funness tough, doesn't come from the goal itself, but from the fun and weird gameplay and world.

Noby Noby Boy is available through PSN and costs about 5€.

Alternative Party, Helsinki 23-25.10.09

Turku 2011 deals out its 3rd Event Award, 3000 euros this weekend in Alternative Party, Helsinki. The prize is given to highlight the importance of demoart and the work of Alternative Party. Alternative Party is a Digital culture festival and demoparty that was first held in 1998 in Turku. The cyberpunk theme this year is called: "Man Meets Machine"

Three days filled with digital art, technology, business and science: developer of ARM Sophie Wilson, the crazy Commodore girl Jeri Ellsworth, cyberpunk rock by Dope Stars Inc, the amazing Super computer demo and other competitions, digital art and technology at the exhibition, mind-blowing visual effects and more.

The winner of Event Award (in this case Alternative Party Demo Competition winner) will automatically participate into one of competition category finals in the Live2011.com Grand prix.

Grand Prix: National Student Award jury members are

SONJA KANGAS



Sonja is specialised in digital games and youth media culture. She has studied computer science (from business perspective) and digital media (technology and design).

Currently she works as Head of GameLab at Paf, is an independent researcher at the Finnish Youth Research Network as well as independent game developer at Souplala. She is the Lead Chapter coordinator of IGDA Finland and in the advisory boards of Nordic Game Program and IGDA Women in Games Special Interest Group.


ANDY BEST



Andy Best was born in the South of England in 1963. He studied Fine Art (Sculpture) in Cardiff, Wales, before coming to Finland with a study scholarship in 1988. He studied sculpture at Kuvataideakatemia, Helsinki, for two years. His first one person exhibition was also the first exhibition to be held at the now defunct Vapauden Aukio gallery in the centre of Helsinki, which was on the site of the new Music House.

Andy has participated in numerous group and one person exhibitions in Finland and internationally. Andy is currently senior lecturer in Digital Arts at Turku University of Applied Sciences, and he has recently commenced his own PhD research at Goldsmiths, University of London, in Arts & Computational Technologies.



JARI JAANTO



The career of Jari Jaanto (born in 1978) is very colourful. Having learned programming at the age of eight, life carried him from the IT department of university to the digitalTV business during the IT bubble. Meanwhile, in the year 2000, Jari was one of the founders of Finlands most popular web community, IRC-Gallery. He has been active in the field of marketing and advertising.

Jari created the community marketing concepts in IRC-Gallery while working as the Business Development Manager of Sulake Dynamoid and as the marketing director of Alternative Party media-art festival. He has had the time to be the technological director of Relevant Point Oy and is currently working as a producer of IRC-Gallery.

Disturb Me Installation

I stubled upon this very nice piece of interactive media art.

A good example of something I personally would like to see in the Open or Participative Media categories in the Turku 2011 Grand Prix.

Artworks containing projections which interact some ways with the environment and the projection surface are not a new idea, but they are something that I think have a lot of unused potential within them .

“Disturb Me” is an interactive installation between human and his environment. It is to make perceptible the reciprocal links and often forgotten contact, that we maintain with our environment. The projection depends on the sound emitted by the spectators and creates consequently, a transitory and colored environment. The projected forms are revealed when in contact with surfaces of the room.

Kseniya Simonova - A Performance which Stunned Live2011 team

From a tip by our co-worker we spent a moment with an amazing Youtube video presenting a sand animation by an Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova. Simonova want her local Talent show with this stunning live sand animation on Ukrainian tragedy during the WWII. Although video is long (08:33), its worth of seeing.



Some viewers migh recognize Finnish heavy band Apocalyptica in a music line behind the animation.
----
Turku is the European Capital of Culture 2011 together with Tallinn, Estonia. The Turku 2011 Foundation has been commissioned by the City of Turku to oversee the implementation of the Capital of Culture year.

Guests can follow the process of putting together the 2011 programme with its around 150 productions online at www.turku2011.fi – Programme and Projects.

The final programme is scheduled to be announced during the summer of 2010.
---
The writings and stuff in this blog are personal notes of the Live2011 team at Turku2011 Foundation and do not represent an official view of the Foundation. We wish to bring up interesting things we have popped into in the interesting field of digital media, social media and media technology.

Speech at European Cultural Tourism Network

Last week I held a presentation in Turku at European Cultural Tourism Network. I started the presentation by comparing different fresh Nordic visit.com sites: visitfinland.com, visitsweden.com and visitnorway.com from the social media point of view. I went through the sites and described how they utilized social media.

The aspect for utilizing the social media varied from a lot. Visitnorway.com had practically no social media elements and the channels they had in other social media sites were not very active - taken that they had had YouTube channel for the site for one year and published about nine videos over there - with pretty marginal hits. It seems that visitnorway.com lacked social media strategy. Implementing social media to the sites and utilizing existing channels is not a easy task: it demands lots of resources and time and it is often not a task someone can do alongside with his/her ordinary tasks.

Visitfinland had some functions which utilize personalisation of the service according to user's wishes. The recommendation tool based by action/tourism images (alternative was traditional tick boxes) was a nice concept and worked actually pretty well and gave interesting suggestions. Two of the recommendations I got were from lake district and Carelia - which is very nice since I come from Southern Carelia. How did they mangage to do that?! LOL.

But visitfinland lacks more deeper levels of connectivity to the personal profile and utilizing the UCC/UGC aspect - personalised e-mail from the tourist officials is not an answer nowdays, because people are practically using less and less e-mails for they personal communication today. Email accounts are becoming more and more spam accounts for storaging subrcribed newsletters - which no one reads.

Absolute winner for the Nordic comparison was visitsweden.com. They had produced a nice looking, fresh and multimedial community communityofsweden.com which - though - was not integrated part of the country portal, but offered a fresh social site for the fans of Sweden (which I am too). Community had a clever strategy for profile building and it actually works for collecting visitors' memories and material from the Sweden. What could have been done is the more closer connections to the existing social media sites.

Then I moved towards marketing and why the social media matters from the marketing point of view. Statistics and the data is somewhat the same I had in my earlier presentation I held at Creative Economy and Beyond conference, but not in so close details (so if you are interested in that, check out the other prezi presentation in this very same blog).

Impementation of the social media is not a easy task. But in order to go in details to that issue would need another presentation.

Lastly I presented some shots from the live2011.com site - which is Turku 2011 projects digital European Capital of Culture. We are going to build new tools for participation, interaction and community for the cultural sector. Follow this site, it will change gradually towards an interesting cultural portal.



---
Turku is the European Capital of Culture 2011 together with Tallinn, Estonia. The Turku 2011 Foundation has been commissioned by the City of Turku to oversee the implementation of the Capital of Culture year.

The Turku 2011 Foundation provides partial funding for the programme content. The Capital of Culture year will comprise a total of 150 projects and numerous individual events. The projects and events will form an interesting and diverse programme that comprehensively involves different cultural fields and encourages interaction between these fields.
The main objectives for the Capital of Culture year are to further develop creative industries and cultural exports, strengthen internationality and increase well-being. All activities are aimed at having long-term impacts.

Guests can follow the process of putting together the 2011 programme online at www.turku2011.fi – Programme and Projects.

The final programme is scheduled to be announced during the summer of 2010.
---
The writings and stuff in this blog are personal notes of the Live2011 team at Turku2011 Foundation. We wish to bring up interesting stuff we have popped in to interesting field of digital media, social media and media technology.

Turku2011 Will Grant Extra Award at MindTrek 2009

Turku2011 – European Capital of Culture wants to support MindTrek, the major new media event in the Nordic Countries, by granting one of its Live2011.com Grand Prix Event Awards during the MindTrek conference. 1000 € award will be granted for an entry which fits to some of the categories of Turku 2011’s Live2011.com Grand Prix. The awarded MindTrek entry will automatically continue to the final jury round of the Grand Prix.

Live2011.com Grand Prix is a digital media art and new media challenge with eight categories ranging from social media applications, games, av-content, interactive art to robotics to name a few.

It is basically open for huge variety of works to participate in the field of IT, arts, media and electronics. The total amount of award money is 140,000€ in eight different categories. the first deadline for Finnish students is 15th of November, 2009. More information can be found at http://www.live2011.com.

Live2011.com team will be in MindTrek from 1st to 2nd October. Please, stop us and find out more from the Grand Prix or get information on the Live2011.com development activities.

Star Wars: Uncut

Me and a bunch of my friends just finished our (first) submission to the Star Wars: Uncut project.

If you're into remakes and mashup stuff and possibly also a Star Wars nerd like me, you might enjoy this. The website of the project displays the Star Wars: A new hope -movie divided in 15sec clips, which can be then reserved to be remade by you and your gang.

When all the clips are ready, the project mastermind Casey Pugh will stitch the whole thing together into a complete movie with a soundtrack.

So if you have time and inspiration (or maybe if you lack inspiration), try this. It's a nice mini project you can do in a few days or hours with some pals and couple of beers.

Also check out the original HERE

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 374 from Valtteri Mäki on Vimeo.

StarWarsUncut.com/#/finished/374

Lecture Series on Game Development in Turku

Major Finnish professionals within game development are giving open lectures in University of Turku's and Turku University College's joint game design and development course Game Tech & Arts Lab. Lecture series is open for public and it is held on Fridays 13:15 - 15:00 at ICT-House (Joukahaisenkatu 3-5) in Hall Beta (B1032). Lectures will be held in Finnish.

Coming programme (in Finnish):

2.10. Mikko Karvonen (Universomo): Universomo Dogma – mobiilipelejä rajoituksia rakastaen
9.10. Teemu Haila (IGDA/Neogames): Peliprojektin toteutus opiskelijaporukalla sekä pelikerho Scoren tarina
16.10. Joonas Peltola (Sulake Corporation): Ketterästi globaaliksi – eli miten MMO-palvelua kehitetään
30.10. Jukka Wallasvaara (Microsoft): Opiskelijoiden ja oppilaitosten mahdollisuudet pelinkehityksessä sekä XNA
6.11. Markus Saari: Turkulainen näkökulma pelialaan
13.11. Tony Manninen (Ludocraft): Peliprosessit ja -tuotanto
20.11. Antti Hattara (Digital Chocolate): Mobiilipelien tuotehallinta ja -markkinointi
27.11. Sonja Kangas (IGDA): IGDA sekä itsenäisiä kehittäjiä aktivoivat initiatiivit
4.12. Matti Kari (Sulake Corporation): Sosiaalinen media – sukupolvien välinen kuilu

More information from: http://www.iki.fi/smed/pelinkehitys

Japan Media Arts Festival submission deadline 25.9.09

This comes in the last minute, but you can still make it!

You can submit your work online , deadline friday 25.9.2009, here:
http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/english/festival/2009/entry/submission.php

Thursday, 16 July 2009 to Friday, 25 September 2009 (arrival due not later than the closing date)

Interactive Art, Installation, Visual Image, Still Image (including digital photograph), Web Work, etc.

Game, Play Equipment, Visual Image (VFX, CM, MV, etc.), Character, Web Work, etc.

Long Animation (Movie, TV, Original Video Animation), Short Animation, etc.

Story Manga, Frame Manga, Web Manga, Independent Manga, etc.

We are inviting submissions of work using new media technologies such as computer, video, and the Internet. Regarding animation and manga, not only digital works but also works using existing methods are welcomed. The competition is open to both professionals as well as amateurs, commercial and non-commercial works without distinction.

One Grand Prize, four Excellence Prizes and one Encouragement Prize are awarded in recognition of works of outstanding artistry and creativity in each division. Based on the recommendations of the jury, one Special Achievement Prize is presented to the artist who has made significant contributions to the field of media arts.

[Grand Prize] Certificate (Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister's Prize), Trophy, Extra Prize of 600,000 yen
[Excellence Prize] Certificate (Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister's Prize), Trophy, Extra Prize of 300,000 yen
[Encouragement Prize] Certificate (Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister's Prize), Trophy, Extra Prize of 150,000 yen

We want flash-demos too!

Live 2011 Open- and Digital Turku 2011 -categories have no restrictions for the medium of production. As long as it is a digital, audiovisual work of art, we're happy.

Therefore we would also like to see flash, actionscript or java demos ready to roll in the browser window without conversion.

It's probably needless to say that actionscript 3 and java are powerful coding languages to produce super cool effect mayhem and even eye-candy realtime 3d, but also something simplish and still awesome!

I stumbled upon this somewhat mindless piece of flash animation/demo.

http://512kb.net/flash5.htm

I'll just post this here as inspiration and as an example of stuff that we gladly accept as an entry.

(crazy japan kawaii warning)

IBC - What Left an Impact II: TriCaster, a Compact Streaming Box

One of the tasks in IBC was to look for solutions for Live streaming. Digital Capital of Culture, Live2011.com, will bring events of the European Capital of Culture to the internet by utilizing streaming technology. There are several solutions around but few which can handle the critical issues of the mobility, easyness to set up on the event and high quality output. From the different solutions especially the one left an impact. Tricaster by a company called NewTek. Their solutions is used from major sporting events (like NHL and NBA) and big TV companies (Fox, MTV) to small organisations as many universities around the world.

A box which you can bring to the site with backbag and which also is relatively economical compared to other solution is a combination which might pass well to the many of the live productions we envision in our minds.

IBC - What Left an Impact I : Visualisation and Projection

Jarmo from Live2011 took a trip to IBC conference in Amsterdam over the last weekend (11.-15.9) in order to find out technologies within visualisation, projection, AV production (whole workflow from shooting, streaming, editing, storaging etc.). On next few days I will reflect back over the five hectic days in this large conferance starting from visualisation technology.

One of my tasks was in the conference was to find out solutions for projections/screening in public spaces spanning from small public transportation screens to large visualisation. From the latter category the most impressive one was Pandora's Box technology delivered by Coolux. Coolux technology has been used widely in cultural productions and the speciality of it is projection to the different structures and shapes.

Legendary modern circus company Cirque de Soleil uses the technology in its shows. Here's an example what the technology is good for. Enjoy:

:o) Jarmo

Can Social Media Raise Participation in Culture?

Yesterday I was attending to Creative Economy and Beyond conference in Helsinki, Finland. I held there a presentation about social media, it's rolling strategies in a organisation and said couple of words about Live2011.com platform. Of course I was a bit biased to answer to that question (You're right, the answer is "yes").

Presentation was made by the wonderfull presentation tool, killer of Powerpoint and Keynote, Prezi. An Hungarian based company has developed this fantastic nextgen presentation tool with which you can create easily stunning, mind blowing presentations.

Enjoy!:) Jarmo

PS. Of course you miss the talk around the presentation - the smash up images of the author (as a Love Guru and Hannibal Lecter) illustrate one of the central ideas of the social media: smash up. It was widely discussed on the presentation. Since you missed that part: Smashing up the content is one of the coolest Hi5 honour any content producer can get within social media platforms and organisations presenting content (if that's cool) will get smash up honorations eventually (and that's a cool thing!) :) You need Flash 9 in order to see the presentation.

Hello World! Live2011 Starts Blogging

Live 2011.com team starts blogging from today. Here you can follow what Turku2011 Foundation's team does, thinks and develops for the digital arena for the European Culture Capital Year at 2011 in Turku.

Gradually on the spring 2010 you can start to follow the developments of the Digital Capital of Culture, Live2011.com, through this URL. Live2011.com will be a new kind of Content Management System/Social media community build around the cultural events/festivals/happenings. Since our patron is no one else than Linus Thorvalds himself, we will build our services with Open Source technology and cultural events and fans everywhere are welcome to use our platform.

Digital Capital of Culture will be also developing new interactive mobile services and you will be getting much taste of the events also through existing social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and so on.