NEoN Digital Arts Archive
NEoN CONFERENCE
NEoN Conference was a two-day event featuring a cross-sector of inspirational speakers from the world of gaming, digital media, and technology-driven arts. The format for both days will be a morning of speaker presentations with networking opportunities along with afternoon sessions with some of today’s most exciting professionals. This year the University of Abertay Dundee will host the conference at the Centre of Excellence.
NEoN Conference Speakers:
In 1975 Ian Livingstone founded Games Workshop with Steve Jackson, introducing Dungeons & Dragons to Europe and launching the Games Workshop retail chain. In 1977 he launched White Dwarf, the UK’s first interactive games magazine, and was its editor for 5 years. In 1982, again with Steve Jackson, he devised Fighting Fantasy, a series of interactive gamebooks that sold over 15 million copies in 23 languages. Now at Eidos, Livingstone has been instrumental in securing many of the company’s major franchises, including Tomb Raider and Hitman.
Peter Thaler & Lars Denicke - Pictoplasma
Pictoplasma, the Berlin-based initiative of Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke has been a major force in promoting character design. Their dedication to characters goes far beyond purely commercial contexts. The drive behind Pictoplasma’s ambitious program of publications, animation festivals, and events is rooted in the conviction that characters are “a true core stimulus of today’s visual world” and are in fact a universal language that transcends cultural boundaries.
Kathryn has nearly 20 years experience of working in the arts, as a consultant, curator, commissioner, fundraiser, funder, and producer. She has provided strategic advice and support to a wide range of arts organisations in England and Wales, secured over £1million into arts organisations and projects, and developed and run a large number of extremely successful art projects and associated budgets. She has excellent partnership working skills and a strong working knowledge of both the visual and performing arts sectors nationally, with a particular focus on West Wales, where she has worked for the last 8 years.
Currently, she is Director of SPAN in (Narberth), Pembrokeshire, where she leads on strategic development, fundraising, and programming. She is also on the board of Create Pembrokeshire.
Kenneth H. Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, Director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. His research interests include graphics, animation, multimedia, and science education. He developed or was involved with the development of techniques such as Perlin noise, hypertexture, real-time interactive character animation, and computer-user interfaces such as zooming user interfaces, stylus-based input (Quikwriting), and most recently, cheap, accurate multi-touch input devices. He is also the Chief Technology Advisor of ActorMachine, LLC.
Ken Perlin is also credited with developing techniques in Hypertexture and real-time interactive character animation as well as human-computer interaction technology, such as Zooming User Interfaces and stylus-based input. His most recent work has focused on developing cheap, accurate, multi-touch input devices.
Pat Kane is a writer, musician, consultant and activist, based in Glasgow and London. He is the author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living (Macmillan, 2004), and has written for many publications in the UK, including the Independent, the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Sunday Herald, for which he was a founding editor in 1999.
Having spent 3 years studying Classical Animation at Ballyfermot Senior College in Dublin, Louise crossed the waters in 1999 to come to England to work for renowned games company Rare Ltd.
Louise has worked on numerous projects over the years, including Conker’s bad fur day, Conker Live, and Reloaded, and most recently has helped animate the Avatar for the new dashboard on the Xbox 360, and is responsible for many of the female voices that can be found in Rare games. This culminated in her winning an AIAS award for best female vocal performance for her portrayal of Leafos in Viva Piñata.
Tim Pritlove - Chaos Computer Club
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is one of the biggest and most influential hacker organisations. The CCC struggles for more transparency in governments, freedom of information, and a human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody.
Tim Pritlove is a German event manager, podcaster, media artist, and ‘discordianist’, living and working in Berlin and playing a central role in the Chaos Computer Club. From 1998 to 2005 he was the main organizer of the Chaos Communication Congress and the Chaos Communication Camps. In the 1990s he founded the MacHackers initiative, a mailing list and a wiki for the German hacker community based around the Apple Macintosh.
Akinori Oishi - Multimedia artist
Akinori Oishi is a self-confessed ‘drawaholic’ who immerses himself in a landscaped playground where hierarchies have disappeared. Oishi is best known for his typographic language that seems to have no beginning or end.
After studying fine arts at Kyoto City University of Art, followed by a study of multimedia at IAMAS (International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences / Japan), Oishi in 2001 won the MILIA award (the international multimedia conference held in Cannes). Following this success, he worked at the French cutting-edge creative design studio TEAMCHMAN from 2001 to 2003. Now an independent artist, Oishi teaches at Tama Art University in Tokyo and holds the position of guest lecturer at ECAL (Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne / the University of Art and Design Lausanne) in Switzerland.
Tern is a leading UK television and digital production company based in Scotland (Aberdeen and Glasgow), Northern Ireland (Belfast), and London. As an award-winning factual content creator, Tern’s TV output ranges from returning feature brands, specialist factual series, comedy animation & archive, traditional observational documentary, constructed reality and drama-documentary. Tern also has a fast emerging Digital content department, which creates multiplatform content that both supports TV output and is standalone.
Heading up this digital arm is Simon Meek, an accomplished journalist, scriptwriter, content developer, and digital producer. He specialises in multiplatform content development and production, interactive narrative, drama, and children’s media.
Ian Anderson - The Designers Republic
Ian Anderson was still at school when he designed his first record cover. It was an EP for his punk band, the Infra-Red Helicopters, released on his own label, Buy These Records. In 1979, he moved to Yorkshire to read philosophy at Sheffield University and soon became a central figure in the city’s burgeoning music and club scene.
In 1986, Anderson founded The Designers Republic (tDR) a graphic design studio based in Sheffield, England. It was known for its anti-establishment aesthetics, while simultaneously embracing brash consumerism and the uniform style of corporate brands, such as Orange and Coca-Cola. The studio closed in January 2009, but Anderson stated that “[tDR] will go forward after this”.
Chris van der Kuyl is a highly experienced Chief Executive and Non-Executive Director, whose expertise covers the start-up, development and market listed business arena in the technology, media, and entertainment sectors.
The Tagtool, a project coordinated by OMA International, is a performance-driven visual instrument used on stage and on the street The TagTool serves as a VJ tool, a creative video game, or an intuitive way of creating animation. The system is operated collaboratively, with an artist drawing the pictures and an animator adding movement to the artwork with a gamepad. The team at OMA International believes all knowledge acquired within the Tagtool project should be shared and are inspired by the open-source movement.
Venue: Centre of Excellence, University of Abertay Dundee
Date: 11th-12th November 2010