labs.boulevart

This weekend all of the Boulevart flashers went on a trip to Paris to go and visit the Flash Festival France.
It’s been really great. Imagine… 11 guys on field trip to Paris. How bad can that be???

Hail hail:
Maarten, Idris, Indra, Sven, Stefan, Tom, Bert, Jannes, Hans, Frederik for making this a great weekend!

http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/boulevartinparis.flv

As for the festival itself we’ve had some mixed emotions. Everybody who is organising festivals like this should get the support and respect from the worldwide Flash community. Especially the people at the Flash festival in France, because every year the succeed in organising and keeping the festival open and free to everyone. We only followed the sessions on saturday and I must say it was not a success for the full 100%. The big difference with other festivals I attended was that it did not feel very sparkling. Erik Natzke’s, although I had allready seen his presentation, Christophe Bruno and Carlos Ulloa did a very good job.

Here’s an overview:

Erik Natzke on his work.

Erik’s session was about his work and his philosophy as an artist and flash developper. His work is close to that of Joshua Davis and Jared Tarbell. He is a very inspiring person not only by the means of his work but also by who he is. He started out not knowing about code at at all to the amazing work he creates today. He’s like from zero to hero with coding.

http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/eriknatzke_paris.flv

Erik if you read this, check out my work Beautifull Mess. Maybe we can collaborate sometime. Yes this is an open application.

Carlos Ulloa on Papervision3D

Finally we met the man in person. Carlos and his team have been the talk of the town in Flashland the last few months because of the work they delivered with Papervision3D.
Het talked about the origin from the project and where it’s heading. Carlos was a game developer at Sony and worked at Hi-Res. Talent always stands out is what they say…

There will be tighter itegration with Collada and the final 1.0 release won’t be for too long.
The question the PPV3D team get’s the most seems to be (better) integration with button and mouse events.
To make sure people… Carlos has got it and they are working on it.
They are working on a port for designers as well. Carlos showed us a component version of Papervision. In the future it should be possible to import entire scenes including lighting and physics from other 3D software.

PPV3D is on of the most exciting and biggest projects (over 2000 beta testers now) in the Flash OS community and I wonder when Adobe wil start talking with the team…

He showed us a few demo’s and it’s just amazing:

http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/pp3d.flv

Christophe Bruno presenting Logo.Hallucination

Christophe Bruno is an artist living and working in Paris. His work has been displayed and awarded at the most prestigious festivals including the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair and Ars Electronica. He showed us some of his works and shared us some insights.

I was very impressed by the concept of the human browser.

Technical principles: thanks to its headset, an actor hears a text-to-speech audio that comes directely from the Internet in real-time. The actor repeats the text as he hears it. The textual flow is actually fetched by a programme that hijacks Google, diverting it from its utilitarian functions. Depending on the context in which the actor is, keywords are sent to the programme and used as search strings in Google so that the content of the textual flow is always related to the context.

He also demonstrated us Logo.Hallucination.

Logo.Hallucination continuously monitors the images circulating on the Internet looking for hidden logos and sends cease and desist mails whenever a copyright violation is detected.

Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich vs Adobe

Mister Bruno and a mathematician worked on the software and algorithms for more than 6 months. It must have been a tremendous work because pattern recognition is still one of the most difficult disicplines in modern computer science.

One of his works called The Google adwords happening was in fact suspended by Google. Bruno opened an account for 5$ and bought some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, he decided to write little “poems”, non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative. After a while Bruno got kicked out by Google. Check out the Google Will Eat Itself project. They are doing something similar but they seem to be getting away with it so far…

Mister Bruno, if you read this. This is one of my works called Beautiful Mess and yes this is once again an open application for collaboration. It would be my pleasure to discuss our ideas and embrace the web as a medium for art.

Michael Sellam: Training sculptures

Michael Sellam is an artist who worked for incident.net, soundtoys and other projects. He is now supported by the wiiflash team.

This was an exepriment on interactivity with the Wii remote and Papervision3D with the support of wiiflash.
We saw a dancer doing a minimalistic performance with a Wii remote in her hands and a projection of lines in a 3D space on a screen behind her. The lines were supposed to react to the moves of the dancer. Unfortunately it didn’t quite seem to work. It was not clear what the connection between the dancer and the moving lines was (it seemed to be out of sync) and they had a few technical problems. The screensaver started and AS3 debug errors were thrown. Apparently the next day everything worked.

Although this session was not a big succes, I state that, as in the vision of Brendan Dawes, we must experiment with things who seem trivial to most people in order to accomplish greatness.
Brendan’s dad has passed away recently. Our sincere condolences from everybody at Boulevart.

A message to Alain Roussel and agencies around the world:

Alain Roussel is president and founder of one of France’s finest agency’s La Chose. They have created successful campaigns for Ikea, Orange, Fnac and many others. Mister Roussel was announced to talk about: New visions in the world of communication

Dear mister Roussel to be honest, I expected more from your presentation. You presented us a few cases of your work and that was it… Fine cases and fine work, no discussion about that. But still I was dissapointed. You didn’t talk about new insights, new undiscovered ways of content delivery, new ways of interacting with the audience. In fact I hope that the web will not become a tool just to stream commercials. And just putting video’s on Youtube won’t do the trick anymore. You managed to talk about campaigns spreading over different platforms without using not even onesingle screenshot of a website… We only got to see some video’s and that is not the defenition of an advertising campaign that is supposed to cover all media available to us at the moment. I am aware the campaigns of La Chose are more than just video, but that was not what we could make up from your presentation.

Dear agencies around the world. Please do not reduce websites to video portals to put some extra stuff you can’t show on television. A full rich media website is and can be so much more. The key word is: Interaction. People can click stuff on a website and then other things happen. Use it, and use it wisely… We developers will be having so much more fun as well…

Thanks to the crew of the Flash Festival in Paris 2007 for setting this up once again!

Technorati Tags: carlos ulloa, christophe bruno, erik natzke, flash festival, flash festival france, human browse, la chose, logo hallucination, papervision, sellam, wiiflash