Future Screens NI has recently participated in the recent ECA Showcase. Please see our contribution in the embedded video.
Future Tuesdays present: The Whalebone Box (2019) with Andrew Kötting, 27 April 2021
Andrew Kötting is one of the most innovative filmmakers who employs Punk multimedia aesthetic to circumvent the conventions of narrative cinema, experimental film and fine art. Kötting is known for his experimental travelogues that form portraits of landscapes and communities. Kötting employs the psychogeographical use of landscape and soundscape as a form of idiosyncratic and frequently playful wandering through and documentation of environments in order to examine the effects of natural and manmade landscapes on the psyche of individuals and communities. Kötting’s unique use of film and sound creates an at times hallucinatory effect that is simultaneously disorienting and familiarly cohesive.
For Future Tuesdays Kötting discussed his projects including a recent Documentary/Drama feature film The Whalebone Box. The film follows the filmmaker returning a gift, the eponymous box, in a reverse pilgrimage from London to the Isle of Harris with his daughter and muse Eden, photographer Anonymous Bosch, and writer Iain Sinclair. Kötting frequently collaborates with his daughter and has previously worked with Sinclair on the films Swandown (2012), By Our Selves (2015) and Edith Walks (2016) and on several writing and performance art projects.
Andrew Kötting was born in Kent and studied at The Slade School of Art. He began making short films in the late 1980s. Kötting has been awarded prizes at international film festivals and won commissions from the BBC and Channel 4 and The Arts Council. He also produces bookworks, CDs, LPs and paintings, many in collaboration with his daughter Eden. Gallivant (1996), was his first feature film, a road/home movie about his four-month journey around the coast of Britain, with his grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden, which won the Channel 4 Prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival for Best Director and the Golden Ribbon Award in Rimini (Italy). In 2011, the UK publication Time Out voted Gallivant as number 49 of Best British Films of all time.
For more information about Andrew please visit:
http://www.andrewkotting.com/ak web/THEWHALEBONEBOX.html
https://lux.org.uk/artist/andrew-kotting
https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/collection/andrew-kotting
Future Tuesdays present: XR Bootcamp Tuesday 13th April 2021
The event featured:
XR Bootcamp Co-Founder Ferhan Özkan and Emilios Eracleous, Co-Founder and Specialist Recruiter from Immersive Search presented their respective companies mission statements, offerings and provided a survey of the current state of XR employment, recruitment and training in the global market.
XR Bootcamp is the world’s first bootcamp for professional upskilling within VR/AR. XR Bootcamp provides cutting edge education experiences that provide participants with the skills, knowledge and ability to create VR/AR applications and assist companies to bridge their skills gap in XR development. Through intensive on-site and online educational programs, cutting-edge curricula, industry-wide known mentors and lecturers, and a focus on industry portfolio projects, participants get the hands-on experience they need to kick off their XR career or get promoted. As a major global provider of emerging technology software upskilling training, XR Bootcamp's vision is to improve the diversity of programmers and technologists, to ensure computing technology is inclusive field and to increase upward social mobility across heterogeneous backgrounds.
XR Bootcamp consists of an amazing network of leaders in emerging and immersive technologies extending across innovation, research, development, design, world building and transformation.
Immersive Search is a recruiting company facilitating businesses across the globe with specialists in XR. Immersive Search’s mission is to provide a support network for professionals seeking to upskill via their training partners, create clear pathways for students entering the XR industry and contribute to the process of making XR technologies safe, inclusive and accessible for the global community.
Ferhan Özkan is leading the mission to create a global ecosystem of XR innovators to be utilised to solve the challenges of industry. His influential journey started when he founded a pre-incubation centre funded by World Bank, guiding 8 start-ups to successful industry exits. Soon afterwards, Özkan established the digital platform Playstore.com for a telco operator distributing games of the top AAA publishers worldwide. The platform continues to become one of the most profitable Value-Added Services overall. As elected Vice-Chair of the IEEE VR/AR Standards Group, Özkan works on bringing the industry closer, while focusing on empowering the major stakeholders with his expertise and global network. He founded XR First, a global organization that has already attracted over 410 startup clusters and 800 universities from all around the world to join on its mission of the democratization of innovation.
Prior to Emilios Eracleaous’ role as Co-Founder and Specialist Recruiter for Immersive Search, he was New Business Executive and Regional Accounts Director for the international technical support company RIZE Worldwide Limited, focusing on Europe and Africa respectively. Prior to his posts at RIZE, Eracleouswas Networks Delivery Consultant with Nokia Siemens.
For more information on XR Bootcamp and Immersive Search please follow the links below.
Future Tuesdays present: Visual Facilitation in VR During the Pandemic with Stéphanie Heckman 30 March 2021
On 30 March 2021, Future Tuesdays hosted visual facilitator Stéphanie Heckman. Heckman with the support of Future Screens NI has pioneered visual facilitation in VR during the pandemic. When the Covid-19 Crisis emerged Stéphanie identified the challenges of facilitating collective working during the pandemic. In response she developed a hand drawn immersive space for collaboration in response to Covid-19. Stephanie has also tested and developed prototypes for generating VR illustrations to support collective working through visual facilitation.
Stéphanie is a visual facilitator who had observed the unique set of challenges digital platforms pose to a streamlined communication experience. Heckman has pioneered immersive technology to explore visual facilitation in response to the risk of missing nonverbal cues and clues, proper eye contact and attuned ‘turn-taking’ in speech, and everything from gesticulation to the tactility of whiteboards, paper, and post it notes that are employed in collective planning. With VR drawing apps Stéphanie created live streams in zoom and developed immersive worlds for visual facilitation generating new platforms for collaboration during and beyond the Covid-19 Crisis.
For Future Tuesdays Stéphanie took us through her journey with VR and introduced us to her beautiful and inspiring immersive work.
Alongside her work as a visual facilitator and graphic recorder, Stéphanie is a singer-songwriter under the name Soma Saloli. Hailing from the Netherlands, Stéphanie lives in Belfast where she combines her passions for the arts and the outdoors with academic and professional training in sustainable leadership development.
You can find more about Stéphanie’s work here:
Future Tuesdays Presents: Performance Without Barriers with Zach Kinstner, 23rd March 2021
On 23 March 2021, FSNI Future Tuesdays and Performance Without Barriers hosted Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive for a presentation and Q & A about the musical VR programme EXA: The Infinite Instrument. EXA is a programme for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens. In the presentation, Zach discussed his experience of developing for the virtual musical environments in Virtual and Mixed Realities.
‘Performance Without Barriers’ (PwB) is a research group at Queen’s University Belfast, established in 2015 by Dr Franziska Schroeder in collaboration with the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland. Together, they work with disabled people to identify more accessible and open ways to designing music technologies. They hold a firm belief that music, performance, and improvisation are powerful mediums for expression and communication across difference, as performance can give a voice to individuals in society who are marginalised and remain ‘silent’ because their language or mode of communication cannot be heard. For that purpose, the PwB team is committed to research activities that promote social inclusion through creative performance practice, accessible and enabling technologies, while challenging dominant assumptions or exclusive identities.
In 2018, as part of the AHRC/EPSRC funded project 'Immersion and Inclusive Music Technologies’, they joined forces with Zach Kinstner’s EXA: The Infinite Instrument programme, which offers a customisable tool for music interactions in Virtual Reality. It was adopted and re-designed by PwB to be an accessible virtual musical instrument for the disabled musicians who are so integral to the design processes.
The work of the PwB teams has been showcased at two European music conferences for disability, the Soundform Conference in Hamburg/Germany, and Zukunftmusik in Bern/Switzerland in 2019.
The agenda-setting research of the group was recognised by the Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast with the 2020 Prize for Research Innovation!
Zach Kinstner, CEO of Aesthetic Interactive. A musician and developer who created the musical VR programme EXA, The Infinite Instrument for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Microsoft HoloLens who will discuss his experience of developing for the virtual musical environments in Virtual and Mixed Realities.
Dr Franciska Schroeder is a saxophonist, theorist, and a Reader at the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University Belfast. She is a Fellow of the HEA (Higher Education Academy in the UK). She serves on the peer review panel for the UK's AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and is a registered expert for the EU's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Franziska was awarded her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006, and has since written for many international journals, including Leonardo, Organised Sound, Performance Research, Cambridge Publishing and Routledge. She has published a book on performance and the threshold, an edited volume on user-generated content and a book on improvisation entitled "Soundweaving".
For more information please follow the following links.