So I attended the Future Media 2.0 Starts Now! meeting in Riga, Latvia on the 5-6 December, missing the yearly ritual of watching the Finnish president's Independence day gala on television. (Half of the population of Finns did watch it.) Riga was absolutely worth it! 

I had two amazing days of listening to people who tell and/or produce stories is digital worlds, and of getting to know these people, too. The weather was snowy and grey, but that did not disturb anyone from having a good time.


Asta Wellejus of Die Asta Experience was so kind to let me tell about my reflections of the conference at the end of Thursday. I was a bit nervous when getting the microphone, but I still managed to say something like this:

Asta Wellejus

 When Tishna Molla (of Power to the Pixel) showed us the Cinema dell'Arte project, I cried tears of joy, it was so beautiful. Then, Asta made my thoughts go in interesting directions, especially with what she said about sculpting experiences and the need for storyworld architects.
That, again, connected with Gunnar Wille's storyworld designers, and his fragmented narrative structures. There I saw direct links to the quick workshop Mike Pohjola held for us, and of course to Triona Campbell's (of beActive Media) cases of crossmedia through the ages. I especially liked Triona's reference to Walt Disney, who knew how to do successful crossmedia already in the 1930's.
The clusters presentation, on the Filmby Aarhus, and the discussion panel afterwards reminded me of course of our upcoming Mediapolis cluster, here in Tampere. 
Personally, I think that the human mind naturally thinks of stories in a fragmented way, and just like Gunnar said, the consumer experience of a story has always been more or less fragmented.

The workshop judges making up their minds of the winners

Those two days would not have been possible without the First Motion, a partly EU funded programme, where many of the Baltic Sea region countries took part. Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Germany (Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein), Sweden and Norway were at First Motion, but not Finland nor Russia or Lithuania. I was one of three Finns (the others were Mike P and Simon Staffans) present, and the other two belonged to the speakers.



If you want to know more, then go and look at the links! What I think is hot right now is making crossmedia documentaries, such as the Swedish Ghost Rockets project.

- Carita Forsgren 2012 -