/!\ contains personal opinions /!\
/!\ contains some name dropping /!\
the Beyond Tellerand festival is over. It’s always a bit of a sad time ; we expect it for so long, time flies and before you know it, it’s over. this year the speakers were very well-balanced between creativity / inspiration and tech talks.

it was a really really REALLY exceptional edition of Beyond Tellerand.

HUGE THANKS TO MARC THIELE for his generosity, his kindness & his availability.
I can’t imagine how tiring and stressful it is, you did a great job.
BIG THANKS TO THE CREW, everything was flawless thanks to them.

I recommend you to check the links and websites of the speakers.
it’s available here: http://play12.beyondtellerrand.com/conference.php

some people you should follow:

@marcthiele & @btconf
@_pwd_ @subblue @fabriceclosier @robnet @inspirit @Rackdoll @imhugo

Day One:

keynote by Boris Jabes from Microsoft

well, it seems that Microsoft is now clever enough to promote other people’s work and stay well hidden behind.
good for them, it was somehow enjoyable, nice projects were presented, games mostly, session focused on how to make money from that. well… what’d you expect? we discovered – HOW CURIOUS – that Windows 8 would integrate HTML5 extensively. highlighted Grant Skinner’s speech in a dollar-green light. they also showed a feature of the next Visual studio (or is it?): a shaderlab in which you visually connect different generators / shaders and get interactive results.
my take is that few people will use it : coders will go for code, designers for 3D softwares. it’s a good learning/exploratory tool though.

I attended Eugene‘s session ASFEAT – ActionScript Computer Vision

lots of new things, improvements and giant steps on mobile devices. his IN2AR for mobiles is crazy, the solution he found to bypass Flash’s Native Camera slowdowns is very promising too. he showed us his latest works with image and video filtering. some of it should go open source soon, I’d recommend you to follow him on twitter & G+ if it’s not yet the case. as always, I was abashed.

then came Wes Grubbs and his Generative Cognition and Data

after showing us some of his earlier works, he gave us some insights on how the brain works and how we could take advantage of it to do better graphics. he stressed the importance of non-commercial projects and finally showed us a sneak preview of a beautiful project that should go live in a near future. later that night, I could have an informal conversation with the man. I told him about an ongoing personal project (a pointless spam visualizer) and he broke my child’s dreams. well, at least I know I’m not (and probably never willl be) a dataviz artist ^^

then Nico Zimmermann gave this Childlike Curiosity session.

he explained how being curious about technologies led him and his studio to create 3 installations. each of them was well thought of, more or less bankable, more or less efficient, he explained all that with simplicity, generosity and playfulness. that was a very nice moment, I warmly recommend their website: britzpetermann.com and to check if he’s giving a talk you can attend.
later on that night, I hanged around with him and a selection of his friends and this, dear reader, was hardcore. on the way back, we sung mimed the german child song involving rabbits or discussing the use of genders and their social implications in german and french societies… strangely enough, it all felt very natural.

after lunch, I went to Keith Peters’ Playing With Chaos

a step by step, pedagogic, clever, introduction to fractals and chaos theory. I dare say I’ve studied the thing yet I learnt a lot. some of his examples were simply magic. it was a passionate Keith Peters, talking with simplicity of the things he likes ; maths, graphics, geometry, complexity and it did good. all his slides were in JS Canvas, and he said he was pretty surprised with performances. I think he’s one of the few Flash rock stars that has done extensive work with Javascript without breaking anyone’s balls with it, for this, he has all my respect.

then came Tim Ahrens from Typekit with a session entitled New font technologies for new media

it was a rather technical, in-depth, pretty well done talk about fonts and the web. fonts on the web are kind of a clusterfuck and the guy knows his stuff. he explained how font are packaged, some stats about browser support of different formats, ways to deal with async loading, differences between renderers, subpixels rendering, the process of hinting, some workarounds to handle special chars etc. a very dense and very interesting session.
yet later we called it “the typekit incident”. 45 minutes is a short slice of time and Tim had way too many things to show. too bad, because the first word that crossed my mind after his talk was “finally!” instead of “YaY!”

I didn’t attend the last 2 sessions for I needed to play kickers with Frank and Eugene against the AudioTool crew, they never showed up (bastards!).
Tom told me that Marcin Wichary‘s session was really great and I believe him, next time maybe.

Day Two

Frank Reitberger started my day with Illogical(higly)

I’ve followed his talks for a while now, I like this iterative way of building things, one step at a time. he rightfully bashed Adobe on abandoning Pixel Bender3D and not providing anything more friendly than assembler code. he was presenting real-time shaders done in both Flash and WebGL (or was it?) and his last example was kind of massive.

after which Rob Bateman presented Getting some perspective: Away3D 4.0 & friends

an overview of the Away 3D engine and the future developments. it was nice to see the community thing in actions. he explained that most extensions were made by community members, physics, AR, Prefab, game engines etc. are on their way. he finished his talk by inviting everyone to start or contribute Open Source projects. was nice, lots of cool things in sight.

then it was Tom Beddard‘s turn Exploring the Infinite!

It was Tom’s first session in such an event and -so to speak- an orgasm of fractal geometry. he built a WebGL fractal explorer and a 2D fractal app for iOs to be released soon. he has this very quiet, bright way of explaining things that reminded me of Robert Hodgin. mesmerizing, hope he’ll be invited more often to events, he deserves it, we all deserve it. trust me, each time he would change the presets of his fractal lab, my jaws would drop for 30 seconds. it’s simply gorgeous, he managed to hide the insane complexity of what he does behind an elegant set of meaningful controls ; it’s digital jewelry.

after which I attended Grant Skinner’s HTML5: Life in the Trenches

a year and some ago, this former Flash rock star got sponsored by Microsoft to create a game in HTML5/JS/CSS, which he did (it’s called pirates and daisies). on his way he built a clone of Flash to handle the display list, called easelJS + a bunch of APIs to handle the sound, the tweens and the loading.
apparently, he was also involved in the development of Flash CS6 as the spritesheet exporter can target EaselJS. he has an “extension” that “converts” the timeline to his “format” hence creating a sort of HTML5/JS exporter for Flash. everything is open-source, looks stable, light weight, modular, nice.
oh, and the sound is not supported on iOs (yet), got to get used to it.

lastly I attended Seb Lee Delisle‘s talk Pixels for the People

Pixels for the people is an interactive installation where the users connect their smartphones to a specific webpage and hold it towards a camera. then he would film the room and retrieve the phones visually on the camera stream and plays some colors and his “nyanCatch” game. rather tough shit.
the concept is very rich and there is some magic in it yet as he mostly explained how he managed to retrieve the smart phones on the video stream, it was long. not very instructive and apart from some good jokes, rather painful to attend especially as I had already seen the session done in 10 minutes at Flash on the beach (10 minutes is a very good format for this project btw). finally this “//” game he played during his session was unneeded and rather inelegant.

to wrap it up, you can check the flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/beyondtellerrand/pool/

thanks again Marc, you can be proud of your event.
please keep it up and count me in next year :)

Tags: conferences, culture, festival