Friday, 4 September 2015

EARS Helsinki 2015 / Part 2

EARS – Europe-Asia Roundtable Sessions is a platform supporting creative industry collaboration between Europe and Asia. A place for creative professionals from different cultural settings to meet, connect and share ideas. EARS on Helsinki, took place on August 27-30 in YLE Pasila, catered a blend of keynotes, roundtables and networking sessions with topics ranging from virtual reality to Asia’s festival boom. Tailor-made sections are featured for design, music, performing arts, literature, marketing and media.

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EARS Helsinki 2015 / Part 1. Stories continued...

Day 2 of EARS conference, I started my day with cup of coffee and croissant at Yle Pasila studio and then headed to the morning session 'Spotlight on Performing Art Venues'. Anna CY Chan, Head of Artistic Development of West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong, Stuba Nikula, Cultural Director of City of Helsinki, Austin Wang, Director of Taipei Performing Arts Center, Lauri Törhönen, Chairman of the Board of Cable Factory and Keizo Maeda, Program director’s board, Promotion & marketing director of Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre introduced art performing venues in their cities from 4 countries. Although I am not involved in performing arts, I have surely seen performing arts before which it was interesting to hear from people who are working in the fields and how performing venues are important to these arts.

(From left to right) Keizo Maeda, Anna CY Chan, Austin Wang, Lauri Törhönen, Stuba Nikula and panel moderator/ program director of EARS, Jani Joenniemi discussing performing arts related topics. (Photo taken from EARS Helsinki, by Hemmo Rättyä)

After lunch and a good hour of exchanging conversation with Sami Arola about games and virtual reality, and also general discussion about Finnish cultures as well together with local dancer/ choreographer, Johanna Nuutinen, the afternoon session went on with me attending 'Creative Cities and Hubs' which Mediapolis was mentioned during the roundtable session! Anssi Komulainen, Chief Partnership Officer of Yle talked about Yle's strategies of creating new creative hubs all over Finland and Tampere's Mediapolis is one of them. I sincerely hope for Mediapolis to have more creative collaborations between students and professionals to fully realise the purpose of this concept of Creative Hubs.

The 2-day conference ended with great surprises which the organiser announced that EARS conference participants are entitled to attend Modern Sky Festival for the weekend! Refreshment were served and Kikagaku Moyo, one of the band featured in Modern Sky Festival Helsinki, performing for the closing ceremony of the conference. I was so happy to have attended the conference and learnt new perspectives about art and cultural scenes in Finland and around Asia, as well as meeting so many talented and professional people working together for better cross cultural collaboration.
Kikagaku Moyo performing at the closing ceremony.

Modern Sky Festival Helsinki is organised in co-operation with Helsinki Festival and the Live Music Association ELMU ry, first time for the festival taking place in Europe. It was happening in the never before used venue of the Hietalahti shipyards. Modern Sky Helsinki showcased a mixture of Asian and Nordic artists, food and cultural phenomena with a mixed genre line up including indie rock, pop, electro and alternative acts, as well fresh new DJ’s from asian and nordic countries.
Top Chinese Indie band, Nova Heart performing at Modern Sky Festival, Helsinki.

Bass Sekolah from Malaysia playing electronic music at one of the festival stage in Nosturi. The band that is from my home country!

It was really awesome two days participated in the EARS conference and ended in Modern Sky festival listening and discovering great music from Nordic and Asian countries. Definitely a very cultural weekend for me immersing myself in arts, music and people!

Listening and dancing to Drippin, DJ from Norway.





Read EARS Helsinki 2015 / Part 1 here.
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Curious about what happened in the conference? Look at the pictures captured on the 4-day EARS conference.

Stories by 
Student of 12MEDIA
TAMK Media and Arts
Tampere University of Applied Science

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Wednesday, 2 September 2015

EARS HELSINKI 2015 / Part 1

EARS – Europe-Asia Roundtable Sessions is a platform supporting creative industry collaboration between Europe and Asia. A place for creative professionals from different cultural settings to meet, connect and share ideas. EARS on Helsinki, took place on August 27-30 in YLE Pasila, catered a blend of keynotes, roundtables and networking sessions with topics ranging from virtual reality to Asia’s festival boom. Tailor-made sections are featured for design, music, performing arts, literature, marketing and media.
Thursday morning, EARS on Helsinki 2015 Reception. Photo by Hemmo Rättyä
So happy to receive a beautiful tote bag and a free sauna seat cover sponsored by Lapuan Kankurit
I signed up to this conference as TAMK Media student, because cross cultural topics had always been on the top of my interest list. On top of this, Virtual Reality is featured in one of the sessions and I made this trip a part of my thesis research. The conference was opened by Finland’s Minister of Education and Culture, Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, who announced that there are 31 countries participating in EARS! With such diverse participants, I am sure to make full advantages to make some new friends and get as much learnings out of it as possible.
The first keynote session I attended is by Dong Il (Dillon) Seo, ex-partner of Oculus Rift, a company revolutionizing virtual reality headsets and one of the main influencers in the South Korean gaming and start-up scene. Dillon Seo shared his insight on how the VR head mounted display works, as latest Oculus Rift headset will be driving full HD content at 60 to 90 frames per second. He encouraged creative industry professionals to creative better and high quality VR content and shared the basic features of making immersive VR content. The features are head tracking, stereoscopic 3D, wide Field of View (FOV), positional tracking, high resolution display and spatial 3D sound. In this session, I learnt about the huge market opportunities for creating virtual reality content, and was inspired to make creating virtual reality content as my thesis topic, focusing on non-gaming content. What a great day to finally confirm my thesis proposal!


Dillon Seo sharing insights on VR opportunities.

Immersive virtual reality content is heavily depended on hardware technology.
After the keynote sessions, many keynotes and roundtables sessions are held simultaneously and I managed to catch Sanna Lukander, Vice President of Rovio’s Learning unit, which she shared about criterias of fun learning, and how Rovio localized their business in China, which they bring Angry Birds Playground to the world. In the afternoon, I was surprised to learn about Finnish animation company, Anima Vitae has set up a studio branch in Malaysia and I was really happy to talk to Petteri Pasanen, CEO of Anima Vitae Oy about his experience in Malaysia over a beer during the evening party! The first day of EARS conference ended with refreshing drinks and food on the 7th floor of Yle Pasila main building with live performance from Korean singer-songwriter, Sunwoo Jung-A.

Petteri Pasanen, award-winning animation producer giving introduction about Anima Vitae during roundtable session 'Crossover'.

TAMK Media lecturer, Carita Forsgren (right) putting on Samsung Gear VR headset with Dillon Seo (left) guiding her.
Continue with EARS Helsinki 2015 / Part 2 here.

 _______________________________________________________________


Curious about what happened in the conference? Look at the pictures captured on the 4-day EARS conference.

Stories by 
Student of 12MEDIA
TAMK Media and Arts
Tampere University of Applied Science

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Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Gezelligheid, Tam Tam, and Zuid Holland

It has been 41 days since the May Day spring celebration in Finland, Vappu, which is also the day I began my internship with Tam Tam and the adventures in The Netherlands.

The first week was rather exciting as I experienced the nomadic living without proper accommodation arrangement, due to working permit issues. It involved many camping nights and hostel searching, but nonetheless first week at Tam Tam has been wonderful and I was warmly welcomed by many friendly faces and cozy receptions. It is a good reminder for all TAMK Media students with non-EU citizenship to look into visa requirements way before your internship and exchange studies starts in another EU country to save yourself from unexpected troubles.


First day at Tam Tam / My mobile home at Amstelveen’s beautiful camping site
Tam Tam is a full service digital agency based in The Netherlands. Its open space atmosphere, abundant portfolio and spontaneous working culture with more than 120 people working in three offices has been fascinating. Clear table policy, self-service lunch buffet in Dutch style, friendly Tammos and their straightforwardness and curiosity are amongst the cultural discoveries of my adventure in The Netherlands. There are always happenings in the office, such as series of Mobile First sessions presented by the Mobile design team sharing their thoughts and updates on the digital content design field focusing on mobile platform with all Tammos during lunch time. I especially admire such culture of sharing within an organisation and gets everyone (even HR and finance department) on the same page on digital design direction in the field.



Waternet available in app store / Tam Tam visitors from Lillebaelt Academy!
I have been learning much from my coach buddy, Barry and the design team on interaction design in mobile apps helping with building wireframes and animating mobile prototype with Origami, besides doing other visual tasks like motion animation and online ad concept design. Amongst my favourite Tam Tam projects is this award-winning mobile app, Waternet which helps Amsterdammers navigating their ways on canal water. Colleagues at Tam Tam are generous with sharing their cultures with foreigner, as knowing that I am a big cultural observer. Several gezellig lunches made by colleagues are lekker and lunch time has always been interesting to make my own sandwiches. Here I also learnt much about empathy from the people orientated culture portraying from the slight gesture from team leaders with their greetings, HR ladies who have been tremendously helpful with practical matters such as work permit and insurance.

Superlekker couscous on a Friday lunch / Cozy girl-power-pancakes lunch

The first month of internship at Tam Tam had flashed by quickly as time flies. At the same time I have been exploring much of the Dutch culture settling in south of Holland in a beautiful canal city named Leiden. Cycling is a pleasure here and discovering various food and fresh ingredients from outdoor markets are thrilling, too. The Netherlands is located below sea level which formed interesting landscape: you simply cannot see the water as it is higher than you!

Leiden, a city with 120,000 populations / Dutch delicacy, Haring (herring fish)
The multicultural scene and openness of the Dutch people means plenty of topics to talk about over beers and outing sessions especially summer is here. Another month and a half to go before internship ends, and I look forward to more adventures and discoveries in the land of not just cheese, windmills and tulips!
Dutch favourite bread topping, Hagelslag / Exploring Rotterdam with two wheels

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