Here is a run-down of the most interesting talks:

Day 1

After the interesting keynote which was kicked off a Mexican band, a few of us went to see Visualising Voice: Using the Flash Microphone for advanced interaction by Chuck Freeman. Chuck discussed his quest to persuade Adobe to extend the microphone feature in Flash whilst impressing us with his examples and research.

Dr Woohoo! was next up. We were all blown away by just how much incredible work this guy was doing and his imaginative combination of technology. In one example was using face tracking in openFrameworks to plot 3D points in Maya. These point where then used to create a stunning digital painting of 3D ribbons. Impressive stuff.

The inspiration session that evening was Epiphany by Joel Gethin Lewis. This was right up my street as an interactive artist with visions of grandeur. He introduced us his impressive body of work which included the Massive Attack sound reactive light shows, the world’s first interactive Christmas lights on Regent St and the breathtaking interactive multi-screen floor, Contact.

DAY 2

Leaving the Sandbox by Joa Ebert resulted in a thoroughly well deserved standing ovation, and the longest round of applause I’ve ever heard. The guy is working on some truly intense frameworks including a plug-in for eclipse that checks code for any possible optimisation and a library to manipulate and optimise ActionScript Bytecode. He also showed us his AS3 decompiler which automatically generates UML diagrams and class hierarchies. He finished off by compiling a SWF from C# and then another from Java! He nonchalantly mentioned that he knocked it up in his room the day before.

Hacking the newsroom by Jeremy Thorp was up next. Jeremy guided us through his Data Visualisation experiments that came from toying with the New York Times API and Processing. His work was both beautiful and informative. I found it fascinating how his visualisations would reveal trends of public thought in relation to events and periods of time.

The inspiration session was Choose your own adventure by Craig Swan. This was just the most awe-inspiring talk and one of the best of the conference. It was a personal journey in which we were introduced to the phenomena that is Cymatics, the formation of fractals and patterns from sound waves vibrating a substance. There was a great discussion on the power of intention.

He played a clip from The Secret Lives of Plants that astounded me. It appeared that positive or negative thoughts were having an influence on the plants.

His multi-directional speaker was a truly strange experience. It seems to project this sound to wherever it was pointing. It was extremely unsettling having the sound seemingly travel through me as he brushed it past the front row. Chilling stuff.