Richard Vickers

Story: Minna Eloranta
Yesterday our students introduced Chiara Boeri, who made a great show on Monday. Yesterday two visitor workshops run in parallel. The reason we have many international experts this week is the MindTrek Conference. Below please find two reports written by our students.

24-hours.in

On September 27th, 2011, six students from the Interactive Media program had the pleasure of attending Richard Vickers (University of Lincoln) documentary workshop. This is the second time that Vickers has visited TAMK to work on an exciting interactive project entitled “24-hours.in Tampere”. Last spring’s results, and a deeper description of the project can be seen at: www.24-hours.in.


Vickers began the workshop by showing us Dziga Vertov’s 1929 documentary, “Man with a Movie Camera”, which portrayed a rather avant-garde style of film-making.  We then looked over the existing material of the project, and Vickers gave us some helpful hints and techniques for filming. Armed with our cameras and freshly absorbed knowledge, we set out into the city to begin capturing our material. After going around and collecting our first few clips, we met up with Vickers to review the footage and discuss what we felt was still missing.

For the next 48 hours we will all capture short video footage from around Tampere to enrich the project, and hopefully showcase our own unique perspective of the city we live in.

So go check out the project so far, and stay tuned for our new additions!

Story: Anna-Kaisa Nässi
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An intriguing lecture with Cesare Massarenti

Cesare Massarenti from the University of Milano-Bicocca came to the Finlayson campus to give a very interesting lecture to some of the Art & Media students.

Cesare Massarenti

The topic of the lecture was as comprehensible as "The development of multichannel content delivery and reorganization of production: examples, workflow methods." Didn't really ring a bell to me either when I first read it, but it was worth coming to the lecture to figure out what it meant! He went in-depth in subjects as transition from analogue to digital, to media culture and social networks we have today and on to the predictions of the future followed with examples.

A few decades ago we could easily separate media from each other: TV, movies, radio and prints were individual. The Internet and mobile platforms have changed the way we experience all media. Massarenti explained that we can not separate media from each other anymore, nor can previous methods on traditional media be applied straight to digital platforms. Ways of doing things have changed, from the very fundamentals of experiencing the world. Attention spans have shortened, multi-tasking has become usual and stress levels risen. A linear provider-to-consumer -based monologue has evolved into a dialogue.

Massarenti's lecture emphasized video content and the progression of displays, access and resolutions. Mobile platforms have become the most important display at the moment, which grant access anywhere. 720×576 pixel PAL-television has evolved into the HDTV we know today (1920×1080px). But did you know that a U-HDTV was presented just a few weeks ago? The resolution is sixteen times HDTV with a massive 7,680 × 4,320 pixel resolution.

Even though things have become more accesible and easier to produce compared to the analogue era, Massarenti introduced us with problems of the digital age: different video formats and interoperation issues because of the huge amount of different platforms we have. Artists are forced to expand their knowledge to different fields to fully understand their own methods. Massarenti expanded his lecture to the marketing of today and to things such as UI design and web design. Mobile devices and tablet devices are getting more and more frequent, why it is important to acknowledge their capacities. I truly learned a lot!

Massarenti lectured with a fresh, convincing and innovative style and really went in-depth with the subjects. The amount of information was overwhelming, especially for me who knew nothing about the history and evolution of video and film and how much of an importance it is today.
The lecture continues tomorrow morning, I'm looking forward to it!

Anna-Kaisa and Minna are students of our international Degree Programme in Media
Read more stories from/about IMPs, the Media students
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The Cesare Massarenti workshop will continue until noon today. The international setting will continue with Nokia Ubiquitous Media MindTrek Award winners workshop at Demola in the afternoon. Read more...