Future Tuesdays presents Neoco: Tools & Patterns for Progressive Operations with Ben Bland 11th of May 2021

For Future Tuesdays Ben Bland presented his Future Screens NI Rewriting the Narrative funded project Neoco: Tools & Patterns for Progressive Operations. The Neoco Toolkit & Playbook is a collection of “pathways to brighter business”, built during lockdown by Ben Bland and partners. The new web platform aims to help people find ways to improve the way they work, collaborate and build successful lives for themselves. Neoco includes over 240 tools, 50 published guides, 16 case studies and much more. Ben shared key insights from researching and building Neoco over the last year.

More information on Neoco can be found here: https://neoco.io/

Ben Bland is a leader within the digital industries, spearheading developments in online marketing and e-commerce, digital strategy, and wider tech startup consulting & entrepreneurship. He is a partner at a newly-founded innovation practice, Loopers. http://loopers.co/

Ben has a twenty-year career split between London and Belfast, working within agencies, small-to-medium size businesses, NGOs, and as a freelancer. Ben's creative industry experience includes working with dozens of local startups, agencies and industry bodies. He led operations at Belfast-based AI company Sensum for five years, and serves as Chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ P7014 working group to develop a global standard for the ethics of empathic technology.

More information on Ben can be found here: http://benbland.me

Future Screens NI Host Policy Roundtable with the DUP

Future Screens hosted a policy roundtable with the DUP on Friday 30th of April.  The roundtable was attended by representatives from across all levels of the party including Carla Lockhart MP and Paula Bradley MLA and Chair of the Assembly Communities Committee.

Professor Paul Moore opened the session noting the strength of the creative industries within the local economy. 

Greg Maguire Founder of HUMAIN Studios provided a presentation showcasing cutting edge innovation in emotional, facial and body rigging which have stimulated significant global relationships within the region.

Lucy Baxter Founder of Mental Abuse Matters provided a thought provoking presentation of her VR training pilot Mental Abuse Matters.  This project has played a significant role in the advancement of Coercive control legislation within the region.

Watch again here:

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

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.

https://xrbootcamp.com

www.immersive-search.com

XR Bootcamp Co-Founder Ferhan Özkan and Emilios Eracleous, Co-Founder and Specialist Recruiter from Immersive Search presenting their respective companies mi...