After a short flight we were welcomed by Diego when we arrived at the hotel in Murcia. The first thing we did was checking in at our hotel and we went out for dinner with some spanish people we just met at the hotel. They turned out to be involved in the conference too, so it was nice to meet them in such a short notice.
In the first few days of our trip we were invited to visit the Media, Art and Futures festival in Murcia. This festival was all about new media art and consisted of several presentations, roundtable discussions and a beautiful exhibition. The presentations were very interesting, with topics like: the conservation of new media art and how museums should adapt to them, how new media art can help the development of new innovative techniques and about the funding of media art. We also saw some amazing examples of new media art projects that were really inspiring. However the main language of these presentations was Spanish and we sometimes had a hard time following them. Luckily for us, we were given headsets at most of the presentations, so that we could hear an English translation.
Of course we also had to give a presentations ourselves. Jill and Anne had prepared a very good presentation about our project and we even demonstrated our game on the stage. The girls were kind of nervous beforehand, but they did a really good job and the presentation went very well. The other participants of the Interactivos? workshop also presented their projects and they all were very interesting and diverse. We can’t wait to see how the projects of our spanish colleagues will develop over the next week. The Media, Art and Futures festival ended on friday with a little party, which was a lot of fun and a perfect way to relax a little.
The next morning we left Murcia (slightly hungover) and went to Ceuti, a little village nearby. Here they had a huge center for contemporary art called the Conservatory, where we can work on our new prototype for the next ten days. We get support from some very experienced technicians and programmers and we already received a lot of tools and equipment to start tinkering with. So we’re really excited for the coming week and we can’t wait to show you our new prototype!
To be continued…