Story Riikka Hiekkaniemi and Kaisa Hakala

The Operaatio Hurrikaani women team headed off to Graz, Austria 27.-30.11.2008 to present the project and TAMK University of Applied Sciences School of Art and Media.


The festival took place for the most part at Kunsthaus Graz, a modern art centre located in the heart of the city. Graz was full of Christmas atmosphere and we fell in love with it totally!

During the festival, the Kunsthaus was full of seminars and nominees from all across the Europe. All 23 Top Talent nominee projects presented their work on Saturday afternoon, and in the evening the winners from all categories were celebrated at the Multimedia Awards Gala 2009.

The overall winner of the Europrix 2009 was a French project called mü. It’s an fairytale based interactive multimedia device targeted to kindergarten kids. Pretty cool!

The winner of our category, Interactive TV was Kika & Bob from the Netherlands. We were even more happy to be nominees, and will still keep on working hard with Operaatio Hurrikaani. The production will continue and we will make the new series even better and bigger.

During the festival we heard that Tampere is almost the capital of Finland, at least when it comes to multimedia & culture. Maybe it has something to do with MindTrek? The new TAF festival’09 is also awaited.

So, stay tuned….

Greetings,
Riikka & Kaisa
aka The Hurricane Angels

Pictures:

Picture 1: The Exhibition of the projects took place in the Kunsthaus’s ”Needle”. Kaisa is checking out some cool project.

Picture 2: Riikka is testing some touch-screen technology by Amigos from Germany.

Picture 3: RoboVox has a little brother, RoboVoice who made it to Graz. The Robot speaks based on SMS messages you send to it. 8 meters heigh installation can be spotted for example at the marketplaces.
See all Europrix nominees
mü-project
Robovox

Operaatio Hurrikaani
Operaatio Hurrikaani (In English)

MindTrek
Tampere Art Factory (TAF)

Riikka Hiekkaniemi studies Media Production, Kaisa Hakala has completed interaction design studies at TAMK School of Art and Media. Both work with the Operaatio Hurrikaani, Riikka is assistant producer and Kaisa web-designer at YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.