The first day of the festival started with an afternoon of lectures that were streamed and followed by more than 100 people in the venue and more than 100 people online. Lined up were some models of medialabs and networks.
The first speaker, Felipe César Londoño, dr in Media Design leads a medialab inside the University of Caldas in Manizales, Colombia, where he also directs the Department of Visual Design. They mainly work for and with students in Visual Design. The same Department of the University also organises the (here) famous International Festival of the Image. Afterwards I met Offray Luna, a mathematician who is doing a Phd in Design as a third way of praxis (parallel to science and art) and part of Hacklab Bogotá, who told me the Department is maintaining strong links with hacklabs and collectives by inviting them on a regular basis to teach and work with the students.
Felipe César Londoño, Medialab Universidad de Caldas, Manizales
Isabel Cristina Restrepo, Hipertrópico, Medellín
The second Colombian intervention was by Hipertrópico, a group of researchers who are part of the Art Department of the University of Antioquia in Medellin. They were represented by two women, Isabel Cristina Restrepo who is leading the group (and someone else who is not mentioned in the program :-)). Hipertrópico has two main research threads of which one is very interesting: looking into ways of implementing free software in art education by proposing models of working and teaching Gimp, Inkscape, Blender. One of these days I’ll visit ‘Código abierto’, the exhibition with results of the research, artistic works made with free software only. The other thread is looking into the idea of Augmented Reality, collaborating with companies and proprietary code. Some researchers of Hipertrópico are following the workshop on Digital Technologies and Performance and have plans to bring back OpenCV, Gamuza, Puera Data to their fellow collaegues.
More news on this day in the next post!
