We find it hard to explain how excited Digital-Lifestyles is about ‘May you live in interesting times’, the pseudonym given to the Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology starting in Cardiff on 28.Oct. Karen Price does a great job of capturing the range of events that make it up.
Watch out on Digital-Lifestyles after the event for a series of podcasts from there.
Part two of this preview is also available.
It’s a fact of life – almost everywhere we turn we are surrounded by technology. From mobile phones and digital cameras to TVs and video games. But as well as making our lives easier and providing us with entertainment, more and more artists are now turning to everyday technologies when they create their work.
This will be highlighted during a new three-day festival which is taking place in Cardiff 28th-30th October 2005.
May You Live In Interesting Times – a title taken from a phrase used in a famous speech once made by Robert F Kennedy – is being staged across the Welsh capital as part of the Cardiff 2005 celebrations, and is a major highlight of Cardiff Contemporary, which is promoting the visual arts throughout this month.
Despite being the first event of its kind in Wales, it includes a line-up of international artists, speakers, sponsors and partners who will take part in a series of residencies, commissions, and a two-day conference.
This is all supported by a programme of artists’ projects, outdoor events, screenings, music, performances and projections.
“The event will be held at various sites across the capital and will illuminate the city with dynamic and individual work using a range of new and existing technologies,” said festival co-director Emma Posey.
“The festival will provide a platform for national and international audiences to access the very best works that utilise digital technologies.”
It is already being recognised as a major international event, attracting attention as far and wide as Brazil, Holland, Japan and the USA.
The festival’s Website offers browsers from all over the world the chance to take part online via its live streaming and pod casting.
“We have received lots of positive responses so far both from inside and outside Wales,” said Posey.
“We want to create a vibrant creative technology sector in Wales, with the festival celebrating this every two years.”
The festival’s other co-director Hannah Firth is keen to stress the accessibility of new technology and its use by artists and the public in their everyday lives.
“New forms of technology are commonplace, from mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, videogames and the way we watch television,” she said. “These technologies influence every aspect of our lives, if we like it or not. The festival looks at how artists are using this everyday available technology, not for its own sake, but as an additional tool in expanding their ideas.”
Richard Higlett, Visual Arts Coordinator for Cardiff 2005 added “May You live in Interesting Times is an important addition to the Capital’s cultural calendar and an opportunity to see art made using digital technologies by Welsh and Internationally respected artists. The festival is a reflection not just of the way art is made today but is about art which is resonant, depicting the current condition of society at the start of the 21st century.”
Karen Price is Arts Correspondent for the Western Mail.
Part two of this preview is also available.
May You Live In Interesting Times
Chapter
Bloc
Cardiff Contemporary
Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay 
___What does eBay add?
Quickly earning a We Want One Now Please accolade, Garmin have announced the nüvi, a feature packed GPS travel assistant the size of a deck of playing cards.
Garmin are claiming that the built-in lithium ion battery offers between 4-8 hours of battery life.
With the guide, travellers can look up and translate more than 17,000 words or 20,000 phrases per language with a text-to-speech interface letting users talka da lingo.
Sold exclusively in Europe, the nüvi 300 comes with approximately 200 MBs of internal memory for storage of supplemental maps, MP3s, and audio books (available from Audible.com). Pricing to be announced.
Panasonic has announced a new range of attractive music players with battery lives that make the Duracell bunny look like a fag-smoking sloth in lead boots.
The SD350V/ SD300V models come with a smaller display (5 lines), less fancy navigation buttons and a battery claiming up to 94 hours of SD audio playback.
The site also bangs on about Panasonic’s “Double drive in side phone” which, apparently, has separate drivers for bass and treble raising, the, err, “shelter density”.
The SV-SD750V/700 measures up at 87.3x46x11mm and 48.4g, while the SV-SD350V/300 is marginally smaller at 87×40.5×10.3mm and 47.9g.
Call us cynical if you like, but when we get a press announcement trumpeting some kind of ‘world first’ or another from someone we’ve never heard of, our eyebrows tend to arc skywards.
It is significant that content is breaking on mobiles before it’s in the shops and we’ve no doubt that mobiles will continue to play a greater part in the distribution of music and video, but we can’t really get excited about someone (even if they have got dazzling teeth) releasing a few snippets of a DVD for mobiles and then expecting the Guinness Book of Records to be calling them up.
In fact, we’re so unimpressed that we can’t even be bothered to give you the name of the video, but you can find it somewhere on Vodafone’s Dutch Live TV website, or just click around chirpy Frans’ website.
The world of film and video games come ever closer as Electronic Arts (EA) team up with Steven Spielberg to develop three original video games.
EA has been, how shall we say, “inspired”, heavily by The S before, as anyone who’s ever played the opening scene of the first Medal of Honor, and heard of a film called Saving Private Ryan may have noticed.
* I downloaded and installed iTunes6. Takes 5-10 minutes. No big deal. iTunes6 has the same basic interface and purchasing/sampling system as previous versions of iTunes.
* File sizes: Killers video: 20.1 mb; Desperate Housewives episode: 208.6 mb. Both were MPEG-4 video files.
* I’m sure there are some underlying copyright / “rip-off Britain” issues at play here. I’m just not smart enough to figure them out. But there is a problem when the popular television shows are not available on iTunes-UK and the same music video is 1.89 GBP or about $3.30 – that’s $1.30 extra for each music video that UK customers must pay.
After weeks of frantic speculation that a video-capable iPod was on the way, Apple have sure enough announced the very thing at their event in the California Theatre in San Jose and BBC Television Centre in the UK.
New iMac G5. A bit faster, but the big thing is FrontRow. It’s Apple’s Media Centre-killer. The new Apple Remote, a svelte 6 button remote control that looks like a shuffle, controls any media you have on your iMac. Makes the MS Media Centre 26+ button remote look very wrong – too tech. Simplicity reigns. iSight camera is built in. Parallel output to bigger screen, projector. Price is very tempting starting at $1,299 (17″ £899 inc vat, €1379) (20″ £1199, €1799).
Video-capable iPod. Next gen iPod with 30% thinner than current generation player but with a bigger 2.5″ colour screen. 320×240 QVGA (quarter VGA), but not wide screen as rumoured. Video playback supports MPEG-4 and h.264 playback. 30Gb & 60Gb. S-vdeo out through the doc, but video will appear pixelated on full size TV screen. The 30GB should go for $299 (~£219~€349), and the 60GB for $399 (~£300~€469). They’re on the Apple online Store and will be shipping next week.?
UK-based software developers Xara, have announced an update to their sophisticated vector graphics program Xara X, adding new functions and renaming it Xara Xtreme.
In this latest version, the Xara Picture Editor has been updated and a new Live Effects tool allows Photoshop and Xara plug-in effects to be applied to photos and vector graphics.
Linux, Mac and Open Source versions planned
Moir table-thumped “We’re going to a place that Microsoft and Adobe cannot go. The Open Source world is the acknowledged largest threat to established giants such as Microsoft. We felt it was necessary for us to shake up the graphics world a bit, and making one of the most powerful, easiest to use graphics applications Open Source should do the trick.”
With the corporate might and phenomonal R&D budgets of Nikon and Canon continuing to create cameras that dominate the dSLR (digital Single Lens Reflex) market, smaller brands are discovering the benefits of pooling their resources to produce rival products.
The partnership will draw on Samsung’s digital image processing technologies, brand recognition and digital convergence technologies while Pentax can offer an established dSLR brand with a huge range of interchangeable lenses. It can’t hurt that Samsung currently are one of the biggest players in LCD screens production.
Samsung’s recent Pro815, an advanced prosumer compact digital camera, attracted praise for its innovation while Pentax’s *ist dSLR range has won many friends, although failing to match the popularity of rival Nikon and Canon products,
Continued growth is predicted for the world-wide digital camera market, with pundits expecting the tally for 2005 to be around 82 million unit sales, soaring to 89 million in 2006.