Reporting from the International Week pt. 1


Posters at the entrance to the Mediapolis campus.
The first official workshop day of the iWeek started today with a bang. People are bursting with excitement and anticipation of what is to come. Workshops are happening, exhibitions and installations on the second floor are looking great, and people are still working hard to make everything perfect for the performances in United Studios. It’s a long eventful day ahead of us and everyone is working together to make it as enjoyable and productive as possible. Here we go!

In the United Studios there’s plenty of great pieces of work to see even if you are not participating in the workshops. The morning was spent setting everything up from the exhibitions to the Virtual Gallery and making sure that the preparations for each act and performance happening later were ready. It is always a joy seeing students from different study paths and teachers working together as a team to make something amazing come true.

We’ve had a screening of the final works of the Fine Art Moving Image course and the feedback session. All the works were shown before the commentators gave their feedback individually to each artist or artists. The feedback came from Jonna Kina (visual artist, Finland), Azar Sayjar (AV-Arkki, Finland) and Fabián Barros (digital artist, Uruguay). In the afternoon there will be a MeKu Platform launching, a social media platform created by students for the students of Media and Arts, and a Spanish musician Carmen playing a ukulele and covering different songs.

Alisa Komendova's Moving Image final piece shown in the United Studios during the screening of the Fine Art works.

At three the cocktail bar opens and there is a chance for adult drinks as well. The first show of the evening program is a panel discussion on how to build your network in music business featuring some of our students with experience of these situations. Last but not least there is a fast-paced improv comedy show brought to us by YesFinland performing on the stage making us laugh until our stomachs hurt. Loads of exciting things happening until the evening so it’s definitely worth sticking around for.

Here are summaries of a few of the workshops happening, more to come during the days and look forward to the final report on the event.
“Building a visualisation system for a live music performance” - By Markku Laskujärvi (SWÄG), from Tuesday to Thursday between 10 am and 4 pm-

Two VJs from SWÄG (Tampere-based art, music and event organizing collective) have come to the iWeek to guide the participants on how to make a great visual performance quickly. They will give you tips and help you work through your own footage you were supposed to bring with you to the workshop. The final result is a system for performing live visualisations done be using live programming. The system will be used later in the iWeek to visualise live a musical performance.

"Mixed Reality Experience" - by Jens Herder (HS Duesseldorf, University of Applied Sciences) happening on Tuesday and Wednesday from 9 am till 4 pm.

Starting from explaining the technology behind the different VR applications and continuing with discussing the experiences of viewing the recorded footage. The mixed reality can be used for example in real-life applications like education, entertainment, e-sports, tutorials and cinematic trailers. The idea of the workshop is to hands on produce a demonstration video while thinking about how to convey the experience in a virtual environment to third parties.

"Circuit bending" - By Olegtron, only on Tuesday from 10 am till 16 pm.

Olegtron is bringing us an experimental method of modifying electronics sound devices. The idea is to experiment with discarded sound toys and giving them a new life and a playable interface. The toys are torn apart and fiddled around with to find interesting spots.

Be sure to follow the Facebook page of the TAMK 11th International Week for more live updates during the week. Also, there will be a summary posted about the daily activities every evening in the TAMK Arts and Media blog.