ASIFA Austria Forum

am 05.09.2024 beim Symposium Expanded Animation 2024 auf der Ars Electronica!

Ort: Ars Electronica Center, Skyloft / Linz. Der Eintritt zum Symposium ist frei, keine Voranmeldung erforderlich.

Expanded 2024 – Conference on Animation and Interactive Art

Die Konferenz bietet vom 5. bis 7. September 2024 kostenlos Einblicke in neueste Trends im Bereich der Expanded Animation und interaktiven Kunst. Bei diesem hochkarätigen Event mit internationalen Expert*innen aus Wissenschaft und Kunst stehen Themen wie Interactive Experiences,  AI & Speculative Futures, Hybrid Spaces, Extended Reality, Creative AI und Performance & Animation im Mittelpunkt. Das umfangreiche Programm – 3 Tage, 9 Panels, 35 Vorträge – ist hier zu finden: https://expandedanimation.com/

Die Konferenz startet am Donnerstag, 5. September von 11:00 bis 13:00 Uhr mit dem ASIFA Forum:

11:00 Uhr: ASIFA Austria Forum  – Slow Bros: Making of Harold Halibut, a Handmade Narrative Game

Onat Hekimoglu, Ole Tillmann

SLOW BROS., the games studio we co-founded, has worked on their debut title Harold Halibut for more than a decade. The game consists entirely of physically made models that are 3D scanned and put together in the Unity engine. The result is a wholly unique stop motion-like visual quality that is deeply immersive through its carefully crafted interactivity. This presentation attempts to cover our bumpy, yet fortunate journey and show our unusual asset and development pipeline and the way we got there through experimentation and iteration.

Onat Hekimoglu (DE)
is a game maker as well as composer from Cologne, Germany. Driven by curiosity he has been making various award winning interactive projects, ranging from installations over VR experiences to games. 2015 he co-founded the games studio SLOW BROS. and has worked as their director and composer on their recently released debut title Harold Halibut.
Ole Tillmann (DE)
is an illustrator living in Cologne, Germany and working worldwide on illustration and animation projects for games, magazines, streaming services, TV, research projects, live shows and many more.
Clients/collaborations include Microsoft, Sony, Netflix, TASCHEN, VICE, Disney, WDR, ZDF, amongst others.
2015 he co-founded the games studio SLOW BROS. and has been working as their art director since. Particularly on their debut feature title Harold Halibut.

11:40 Uhr: ASIFA Austria Forum – Irina Rubina: Animation and Mathematics: Partners in Crime or How Curves, Numbers, and Formulas Guide My Creative Process

Irina Rubina

Modeling, character animation, particle simulations and VFX – all these areas of animation are closely linked to physics, programming languages and therefore also to mathematics. This abstract science allows us to capture and describe the world on a very high and detailed complexity and use it to create animated illusions – be it a precise replica of reality or the creation of new worlds based on this reality. But what happens when we move into the abstraction of auteur animation? Do hard, logical numbers and structures still have any place there? Here, intuition, chance and broken rules seem to gain the upper hand. But this impression can be deceptive. In my films, mathematics permeates every level of my work – from the precise, frame-accurate temporal structures to the interwoven animation loops and the design of the auditory levels. In this lecture, I would like to declare an ode to curves, graphs, numbers, geometry and formulas from the perspective of my animation thinking.

Irina Rubina (RU/DE)
is an animation director, producer and animator, based in Stuttgart, Germany.
With her company iraru.films she produces and realises short films, music videos as well as hybrid & collaborative projects that explore the borderland between animation, film, stage-performances, music and dance.
She studied animation and documentary film at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and GOBELINS, l’école de l’image. 2022 she obtained a German equivalent of a PhD-in-practice degree in animation directing at Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg.
Irina’s films have been screened and awarded at international film festivals, including The Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Animafest Zagreb, ITFS Internationales Trickfilm Festival Stuttgart, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Monstra Lisboa Animation Film Festival, Ars Electronica, London International Animation Festival, interfilm Berlin.
She also works as a mentor, lecturer and curator at various institutions. Since 2021 she is a board member of the Animation Association Germany (ASIFA Germany).

12:20 Uhr: ASIFA Austria Forum – Paul Clarke: Participatory Futuring Through Augmented Reality and Performance

Paul Clarke

This talk will present Uninvited Guests’ Augmented Reality performance Billennium, a guided tour of possible futures for a city, and Future Places Toolkit, an AR engagement activity for planning consultation and engagement. Through these examples, I will explore how AR and site-specific science-fiction storytelling can support people in imagining and experiencing alternative futures for their places. In Billennium, future architecture appears around participants as 360-degree AR animations, and spatialised audio immerses them in the sound of utopian and dystopian times to come. Using guided conversation, live Virtual Reality sketching and AR on smartphones, Future Places Toolkit (FPT) makes it possible to see plans and people’s ideas for a building project visualised immediately in 3D, overlaid onto the existing place and context a building is proposed for. Drawing on the Perform Europe-funded tour of Billennium to Bilbao, Belgrade and Budapest, as well as engaging communities in Bristol and Birmingham with Future Places Toolkit, this talk will explore whether AR and collaborating on speculative fictions can help ‘people participate more actively as citizen[s]’ in co-creating ‘more socially constructive imaginary futures’ for their public spaces (Dunne and Raby, p.5). Can intermedial methods of participatory futuring enable more representative people to narrate themselves into times to come and see themselves represented in their own preferred scenarios? Does the in situ approach increase a community’s capability to imagine otherwise, to envision alternative imaginaries, and to take agency in shaping their places/futures? Using live VR drawing, AR and spatial audio, Uninvited Guests materialise virtual possibilities for neighbourhoods and enable participants to explore them physically, in an embodied way. This presentation will address whether such technology-enabled, immersive approaches make possible futures for places more tangible and support people to explore their emotional and affective relationships towards them.

Dr Paul Clarke (UK)
is an artist and Associate Professor of Performance and Creative Technologies at University of Bristol, where he is co-director of the Centre for Creative Technologies. He established Bristol’s MA Immersive Arts (Virtual and Augmented Realities) and is a partner on Immersive Arts, a UK-wide project supporting artists to explore the creative potential of virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies. He works on speculative design and experiential futures with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, and was a co-investigator on Connecting Through Culture As We Age: Digital Innovation for Healthy Ageing. Alongside his academic roles, Paul is co-artistic director of Uninvited Guests, a resident company at Bristol’s Pervasive Media Studio, with which he explores the use of creative technologies in participatory and place-based performance. Founded in 1998, Uninvited Guests has shown internationally (USA, Mexico, Australia, China, throughout Europe), at major UK cultural institutions (Bristol Old Vic, Tate Britain, Southbank Centre, RSC), and online. Work includes The Lost Palace, an award-winning immersive visitor experience for Historic Royal Palaces. The company is currently partnering with Bristol City Council and UK Gov’s Defra, exploring ways interactive technologies can engage communities with policy and local decision-making.