I managed to get the chance to make it to the Tweak Festival held in Limerick City last Friday. Tweak is a festival dedicated to promoting the use of technology as an artistic tool in society, aiming to explore its "social, economic, psychological, aesthetic and functional" potentials. The event ran from Monday, 22nd September through to the 25th. The festival held workshops, talks and live events across the University of Limerick, Limerick School of Art and Design and Limerick City club, Trinity Rooms.
The event was organised by Limerick based, MSc Interactive Media and Music Technology graduate, Nora O’ Murchú, who is now researching her Phd in the same field. An interview with her can be read here.
The event boasted a line up consisting of France Cadet, Digital Slaves, Area10Media La, John Bowers and Limerick based Soundings amongst others.
On the Friday I attended morning (ColourSound & Desaximundi) and afternoon (Digital Slaves) workshops on how to use VVVV, an interactive art and video synthesis tool, commonly used for live musical visuals and interactive art installations. VVVV provides a higher level of abstraction from coding. The user manipulates nodes, which become interconnected, working as input parameters and return values - eliminating the need to explicitly write code. It would be similar to what we would expect to see in a 3D packages node hierarchy and I'm guessing that this is how Softimage XSI 7's ICE programming technology works.
The event seemed to have gone down well. The workshop scheduled for the Wednesday; Michael Gurevich and Peter Bennett's Designing Stylistic Interactions was booked up and both morning and afternoon events I attended boasted promising numbers. O'Murchú didn't commit to future events, but Tweak succeeded in more than just getting the ball rolling. The Interactive Art scene in Ireland seems to be taking off and it would be a shame for this to be left as a one off event. I think it would be hugely beneficial to get more people participating and get a core interactive art community established across Ireland which could help promote and support similar events taking place in cities around the country.
Above photograph of interactive installation by Peggy Sylopp - http://www.generative.org/
VVVV on Vimeo
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