I’m off to Canada soon (hurrah!) to present various pieces at this:

The New Screen: Interactive Futures 2007
November 15 – 17, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

http://cfisrv.finearts.uvic.ca/interactivefutures/IF07/

The seventh annual Interactive Futures forum for showing recent tendencies in new media as well as a conference for exploring issues related to technology. The theme of this year’s event is The New Screen.

Interactive Futures 07 will explore new forms of screen-based media from a diverse body of artists, theorists, writers, filmmakers, developers, and educators. Interactive visual environments, screen-based performances, new forms of narrative experiences, web-based environments, and innovative educational models will all be explored in The New Screen.

Featuring: David Hoffos (Lethbridge), Kate Pullinger (London, UK), Fiona Bowie (Vancouver), Mirjam Struppek (Berlin), Lilia Pérez Romero (Mexico City), Peter Horvath (Toronto), Kate Armstrong [Vancouver], KikiT VisuoSonic (Southampton, UK), Don Ritter (Berlin), DJ robot_mixeur (Zurich, Santa Barbara), Jackson 2Bears (Victoria) and much more.

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Kate Pullinger will be giving the keynote talk on the first day, entitled ‘From Print to Screen and Beyond: Digital Fiction and the Networked Book’, where she will discuss our forthcoming project ‘Flight Paths’, a ‘networked novel’ which is an experiment in creating a mass-collaborative traditional and/or multimedia fiction from scratch. We’ve only just been awarded some Arts Council funding for this, so it’s exciting to be able to go out there and start talking about it with people for the first time.

Later on the Thursday I’ll be presenting a CD of work together with Randy Adams and Christine Wilks called The Devil’s Rope Journal, that gives a taste of the digital art, sound and poetry mashups that having been happening all year at remixworx.

Following that will be the first public showing of Episode 4 of Inanimate Alice created by Kate Pullinger and myself. This is the point where I wish for somewhere to hide with a blindfold and headphones! I always find watching premieres of my own work excruciating, particularly in front of large crowds of some of the top digital artists, writers and perfomers in the world. It’s not so much that I’ll be nervous (although obviously I will be!), but rather that by the time of a premiere I’ve already seen the piece literally hundreds of times, and all I can see now are the mistakes and imperfections. However it is always really helpful to get feedback, good and bad, and the episode isn’t due to be officially launched until later in the year, so there will still be a little time to make changes to it on the basis of any particularly negative comments from the IF audience ;)

I’ll also be trying out two things I’ve never attempted before – a screen-based installation piece to be created during the event called Photocollagen, and then some VJing on the Saturday night at the hilariously titled Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable redux event.

Phew! And around all that, a wealth of fascinating lectures, screenings and performances… many thanks to the organisers for their hard work in putting together such a fantastic schedule.