Futur en Seine 2013 : a Happy Mixture
A happy mixture, as always, the 2013 venue of Futur en Seine let come to air a lot of products and projects, from the most practical digital tools to fundamental research. The stand holders may be as well comercial corporations as humanitarist NGOs or research labs of any size. All that under the cover of Paris City, ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche, National research agency) or Cap Digital (a networking structure for the Ile-de-France region). Art is not central, but is at ease as a neighbour of games for kids.
Networking and social lines blurring are, we think, the most interesting aspect of such a show. Here, in crowded narrow passages between stands, kids can meet scientists and philosophers may ask questions to salesmen. The whole thing makes palpable the digital dynamics of Paris and Ile-de-France region.
Just to make it palpable by our readers, let's tive some typical examples, more or less art oriented.
Cigm a somehow original response. It may be used interactively. The project is developed notably by Judith Guez at H2H (human to human) laboratory, a partnership of Paris 8 University and several business corporations.
Outilnum is an extension of the virtual camera of Rémy Quittard. Design to make easier the integration of filmed scenes into a virtual universe, it is now able to integrate real time operators, usine a Kinect sensor.
Critical, by Anabela Costa detects the presence of spectators faces of spectators, and generate artistic effects (representation of physical phase changes) responding to their distance and attitudes. It uses the Artifract language developed by Inria.
Cocktail is a performance played in 2013 at Centre Pompidou (center of Paris), where the museum as well as the works are progressiveley made liquid, leading to a final drowning of the whole building. It could be transformed in a downloadable individual game. But its use in public requires the solution to image property rights with the museum and the authors of the exposed works of art.
ADN, Digital double agency, creates high definition 3D models of actors, which afterwards can be animated by motion capture.
Cac 40 game, by Florent Deloison, is not more, at first look, than a rather simplistic video game : press the good key on the good time to meet a succession of color spots. But the artistic project gooes deeper, The music, generated from the values of the Cac 40 (the main stock exchange index in France) and is mixed with the inputs from the player. So it can be seen as a way to awaken conscience of the financial constant flow of values and the capacity to respond.
Wifeel stirs emotional dialogue with a simple tool : a palette of some 50 expressions, presented on the screen of a smartphone as emoticons. Combined with geolocalization, it may be used for "emotional trackin" (for instance, generating an map of emotions at a given moment. Or it can be used by somebody to memorize its emotions in different circumstances and afterwards to make a self examination.
Automated car models are presented by Inria. This institute, a major set of research centers in France, has worked on car automated driving for decades (see our interview of Michel Parent in Asti Hebdo no 107. The present applications aim to public services.
Synesthésie, an art center in Saint-Denis present some of the works developed or exposed in this suburban city, notably the works of Pascal Bauer.
Or, just a design gimmick, but cool : wooden keyboards by Orée
At the Centquatre, Futur en Seine, june 14 2013.
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