Announcing This happened – Utrecht #4

Four weeks from now we’re run­ning the fourth edi­tion of This hap­pened – Utrecht (the last one for this year). It’ll take place in The­ater Kikker again, on 26 Octo­ber and we’ll start at the usu­al time: 20:00 hours (doors op 19:30 hours). Ianus, Alexan­der and I have been debat­ing this edi­tion’s line-up fer­vent­ly, and have come up with the fol­low­ing three great speak­ers for you:

Elmo Diederiks will talk about the Ambi­light fea­ture in Philips flat pan­el tele­vi­sions. In 2002 Elmo worked as design­er and researcher at Philips Research and lead the research on how dynam­ic light­ing in the back­ground of the TV image enhances the view­ing expe­ri­ence. The research result­ed direct­ly in the most dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fea­ture of Philips’ flat pan­el tele­vi­sions that remains a unique sell­ing point today.

Sue Doek­sen, mem­ber of the new media art col­lec­tive Zes­baans, will present De Metronoom. Six con­nect­ed instal­la­tions point six laser beams into the room. Vis­i­tors play the lasers like instru­ments and com­pose a sound­track, arrang­ing sam­ples from clas­si­cal instru­ments, street artists, beats and the machine room of a print­ing press. De Metronoom was present at the Mood Ele­va­tor par­ty at Trouw Ams­ter­dam and Stekkertest at Fes­ti­val aan de Werf in Utrecht. Sue gives us a look behind the scenes of De Metronoom’s devel­op­ment — which Zes­baans is hop­ing to con­tin­ue in the com­ing peri­od — and shares their ideas on tech­nol­o­gy, per­for­mance and interface.

Emi­ly Gob­eille and Theo Wat­son will present the process behind Funky For­est, an inter­ac­tive ecosys­tem where chil­dren cre­ate trees with their body and then divert the water flow­ing from the water­fall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees con­tributes to the over­all health of the for­est and the types of crea­tures that inhab­it it. The Moom­ah Edi­tion of ‘Funky For­est’ expands on the orig­i­nal by intro­duc­ing four sea­sons, each with a unique envi­ron­ment and crea­tures to match. Each sea­son also fea­tures an inter­ac­tive par­ti­cle sys­tem. The Moom­ah edi­tion is per­ma­nent­ly installed at the Moom­ah Children’s Cafe in New York City. 

This edi­tion is made pos­si­ble by the sup­port from the Utrecht School of the Arts and Utrecht based web agency Rhi­nofly. Many thanks to them for their generosity. 

Reg­is­tra­tion opens Octo­ber 12 at thishappened.nl at 12:00 hours. Hope to see you there!