fio's first futuresonic

Gave her a numb bum. Probably a bit too much information there, but oh well.

The eyes were also sore after looking at all the interesting things people we're talking about and visualizing with slides. Unfortunately, my little student pass only got me into the conference part of the festival, which saved me trekking around manchester, but limited the fun I could have. But I did see some interesting talks...

I had actually planned to see Usman Haque's talk on real time environmental data, which i'm a bit gutted at missing, but ended up seeing the digital futures talk which talked about next generation broadband as a disruptive technology which i like the idea of. This was followed by a talk by Phillip Trippenbach who disscussed the addictive aspect of games and why we should use them for good. And Toby Barnes discussed the social effect of games and their basis on western ideas of having lots of money and material weath meaning you are winning at the game.

I think i probably ended up in the wrong room in the morning, but I keep getting the feeling I was in the wrong place at the wrong time for much of the day, as something interesting was always going on somewhere.

For the afternoon I went to see Jonah Brucker-Cohen who discussed his rather interesting work, two pieces he discussed that I liked were his drill hit counter, which is a drill connected to a website, which creates physical damage to a real world building whenever the web page receives a hit, and the toy police cars controlled by terrorist keywords found in emails, using the same software as the American government. I especially liked the theme of real world reactions to events in the online world. I also saw the discussion about the site some one once told me, which was victim to the fail wireless network, but I still got some pretty schweet business cards.

Check out my new knitting bag, which actually has a cloud in it...