It’s my pleasure to announce that “Lively Dreams”, my latest dance piece with Lígia Teixeira, has won the entertainment category of the National Multimedia Award. This prize is awarded by the Association for Promotion of Multimedia and Digital Society (APMP). Our thanks to the team, that helped us give live to our own dreams.

Pecha Kucha is a very interesting approach to sharing ideas and knowledge.

from Wikipedia:

“Pecha Kucha (ペチャクチャ), usually pronounced in three syllables like “pe-chak-cha”) is a presentation format in which content can be easily, efficiently and informally shown, usually at a public event designed for that purpose. Under the format, a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds.

It was devised in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo’s Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa), who sought to give young designers a venue to meet, network, and show their work and to attract people to their experimental event space in Roppongi.^[1] They devised a format that kept presentations very concise in order to encourage audience attention and increase the number of presenters within the course of one night. They took the name Pecha Kucha from a Japanese term for the sound of conversation (“chit-chat”).”

In the meantime Pecha Kucha grew into an international network, happening in around 196 cities by now. Lisbon is not behind and thanks to the work of Pedro Ferreira, Pedro Louro, Pedro Melo and Rita João, we now have the chance to exchange ideas on this new platform.

I’ll be talking about a rather different subject, also because of my work at YDreams. It seemed like an opportunity to discuss important issues regarding interaction design and it’s potential consequences.

You can find more information about the Lisbon edition at:

http://www.pechakuchalisbon.blogspot.com/

OFFF Festival is back in Lisbon and will take place during three days, from the 7th of May. This year’s moto is a very interesting one: “Fail Gracefully”. It’s an interesting subject, particularly for electronic performance arts, so unstable and willing to fail in the most crucial moment. There’s nothing worst than an onstage computer chime. Also if you develop tangible interfaces you’ll be mapping your natural environment through sensor acquisition, which naturally glitches. But we’ve learned to encompass these failures in our area and OFFF proposes that we embrace it, learn from it and even laugh at it. Error is also natural to the digital world.

I’ll be talking and maybe performing so make sure you drop by and pay us a visit at OFFF in Oeiras.

South by Southwest is a media festival in Austin/Texas and its better known as an international showcase of new talents in the music industry. SXSW as grown in the last 20 years and now also includes many other activities, such as discussion panels or screenings, and has come to encompass other disciplines of culture and media like “Film” or “Interactive”.

Late last year I  proposed to do a panel and the news is I got picked!

So, on March the 17th I’ll be discussing with an audience about on “New Interfaces for Performance”.

“Realtime computation allowed new media artists to develop interactive performances but typical computer interfaces don’t offer appropriate interaction models for these contexts. In the DIY generation artists learned new techniques to build their own instruments.

Novel interfaces have surfaced and this presentation is a reflection on New Interfaces for Performance.”

I’ll be joined by Prof. Bruce Pennycook from UTAustin for happy chatting on the subject.

So see you in Austin!

Tonight I’ll be playing in Barcelona, at Espai NIU. This event is part of the Luso-phonia Exhibition, an event that wishes to address the relationships between sound art and the social space. It’s also a showcase of Portuguese sound artists and electronic musicians in Barcelona. You can check the details at:

http://www.luso-phonia.org/ (portuguese and spanish only)

Lively Dreams is the title of a new contemporary dance piece, produced by me and Lígia Teixeira, and with the collaboration of an extensive array of programmers and designers. It will premiere next weekend, on Temp d’Images Festival, at CCB. You can find more details on Lígia’s website.

8 and 9th of November, 19:00pm, CCB (Portugal)

Next Friday will be playing on the Future Places Festival. This event is organized by Colab, which was created to promote collaboration in the area of emerging technologies between Portuguese Universities and Austin Texas University.

Curated by Heitor Alvelos and Karen Gustafson, FUTURE PLACES is a meeting of people with one question in mind: if digital media can do so much for global communication, knowledge and creativity, how can it contribute to local cultural development? October 2008 marks the start of this challenge. The first edition of FUTURE PLACES will survey current successful projects from very diverse backgrounds and fields of knowledge, and it takes place in Porto, Portugal, where these challenges and this potential are very evident. Join us for thirteen days of exhibitions, films, performances, concerts, lectures, parties and workshops – and bring your ideas and your stories!

Last month I was invited to present a work for the Interact online magazine. Interact is dedicated to new media art and culture, where they have a space named “Laboratory” as an online gallery. I thought that possibly an online gallery of this kind would essentially be dedicated to net.art but I was very fond of being allowed to freely choose whatever I wanted to present. So the result is “Piano Migration V”, a video piece produced in Max/MSP by me and Kathy Hinde during our last N.I.P residence. Kathy filmed a lovely nature moment and during some conversations we realized the beauty of combining natural and artificial into a pretty poetic and intertwined moment. You can find the piece on:
http://www.interact.com.pt

(under the section “laboratory”)

This year I submitted a panel to the South by Southwest 2009 Festival, in Austin Texas. This panel addresses the state-of-the-art on New Interfaces for Performance and its future challenges. Since these panels are chosen by the audience I encourage you to vote for my panel at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/, under “New Technology, Next Generation”. Deadline: 29th of August.

I have teamed up with André Gonçalves, for an evening performance at Europa, next Saturday, the 19th of July. Europa is a club in the center of Lisbon, in Cais do Sodré. The event is sponsored by Pampero, a Rum brand that has been tapping into an interesting niche of contemporary art.