re:cap
We share our experiences made at #rpTEN last week and give a few recommendations for those who could not make it. Plus: Pictoplasma!
Once more, our crew assembled for re:publica at STATION Berlin. It’s a lovely venue that once has been a, well, rail station with underground tracks still operating above today. re:publica has taken place there for four years, after starting out in Kalkscheune and later Friedrichsstadtpalast and this year marked the ninth year and tenth installment of the social media and web generation conference. Celebrating this jubilee, #rpTEN presented itself with a slightly ugly corporate design that featured a lot of brushed metal. It reflects 💁 on re:publica being a net-community event in its tenth edition and I wasn’t too convinced by its aesthetics, but this is a neat effect indeed:
Still, as the weather was mostly sunny, the reflective visitor’s cards and signs all over the place were giving you an awakening yet blinding glare. ✨👁✨ But this didn’t keep the crowd from socializing in the front- and backyard — the latter being accessible for the first time. The agonizing, omnipresent smell of a raclette cheese food truck did, though — he lasted one day only, to everyone’s relief. RIP forever, raclette truck.
Besides the obligatory talks there have been workshops, exhibits and convention space all over the place, with a whole building dedicated to a Virtual Reality exhibition for the supposedly VR-hungry peers.
Besides VR, predominant topics this year were Snapchat (“we just don’t get it, haaalp”) and Hatespeech on the web and social media.
There are really a lot of opportunities to have a good time at re:publica. Loads of stuff to try, for example a VR-simulation in a wheelchair, a walk-in portal connecting you to another portal in Afghanistan and pay-with-a-tweet-drinks (read: beers 🍺) from @bwjetzt 👏.
On Tuesday, day 2, we gathered at the “Affenhügel” for a quick recap on our experiences so far. We managed to get the whole crew together and we found that we really enjoy this sort-of tradition, being together for the third year at re:publica. 👫
We also agreed that meeting people from the internet can be pretty great. A tad disappointing though: most talks and workshops were beginner-level only, which is nice to give yourself an entry point to an unknown topic or to gain an overview of certain developments, but not much more.
Besides socializing in the sun, one spends a good portion of the time in dark halls listening to a variety of speakers, covering a wide range of topics somewhat related to the web and society interacting with it: for example talks on why Teletext is still being used — or on swearing in Austrian German. This is, if you got in and found a seat or a place to stand, of course. Halls were noticeably more packed than the years before.
As always with conferences with recorded talks it’s a good idea to check out the talks in the smaller areas that don’t get recorded and watch videos of the bigger talks afterwards.
We kicked off our stay at #rpTEN with a press conference concerning the leaked TTIP papers that Greenpeace surfaced the night before.
Over the days there were a few highlights, many good talks — but also two rather disappointing ones. The marketing talk by a VP of Twitter was one of them. He noticably wanted to make the audience believe that Twitter knows best about its own strengths, which foremost is being instantaneous — but focusing on the professional journalist scene rather than the enthusiast citizen reporter or even the common Tweeter. He showed off what he thought were examples of great twentyfirst-century journalism, but it really were just sensationalist shakycam videos of explosions seconds after a terrorist attack had happened. By painting Twitter’s future with phrases like “Twitter will become more like Twitter”, that talk had really jumped the shark.
There was one other disappointing talk on the interesting question of space property (pretty much: who owns the stuff in space?) that unfortunately featured unexperienced speakers and contained too much legalese to be gripping. Bummer.
Many other talks did leave us with a much more positive mood, so I put them together in a small list of things to watch — enjoy!
Kati Krause explored what web journalism might learn from magazines. She stressed that content creators should see their clientele as readers, not users. A good relationship between authors and readers, like in a community, can mean the difference between generic content and relevant journalism and entertainment. Examples, amongst others, were Rookie Magazine and Snapchat.
Panels are a tricky thing. Most times, once the guests are introduced and the general topic is explained to the potentially unknowing audience, there is little time for meaningful discussion and often it’s all about advertising some new book anyway. This one turned out different: Philip Banse, a radio journalist, introduced web-publishing authors of different kinds one by one, asking them questions separately first and opening the round for discussion at the end. That worked out quite well, especially since Philip wasn’t scared to also ask some uncomfortable questions.
Geoblocking is something that you might experience every day, but this practice of arbitrarily restricting distribution of content was actually non-existant before it was again applied on digital media. This and much more about the absurd world of content blocking based on your location in this well-worded short talk by member of the European Parliament, Julia Reda.
Why is everyone online raging and hating and hyperventilating all the time and does that mean that the web isn’t such a good idea after all? Friedemann Karig compared the coming-of-age of our digital society with the puberty of human beings — and it makes so much sense. Maybe there is an adult life for the web and the growth pains stop at some time.
In the face of the various threats that new technology seems to spawn, it was refreshing to see a not-so-dark future outlined by Jeff Kowalski in this talk about future technologies and their applications.
Bonus: Pictoplasma
Right after re:publica some of our gang were still able to attend Pictoplasma, a conference on contemporary character design and art. They experienced a very positive and euphoric crowd that seemed in their work approach a little different from ours as designers: much more gut-based and impromptu than ours. It was quite interesting to see one niche of design come together and to have all the illustrators and animators explain their work. There was stuff to do, too: Vivien for example took part in a workshop by Nathan Jurevicius and Rilla Alexander that was a crash course in character design with a short stop-motion film as a result.
Later, screenings of short films took place in Babylon cinema, those were quite impressive. Many movies featured social criticism and new media and techniques. Have two especially noteworthy ones:
So much for recapping. Tomorrow there’s our next lab, #4 — Print & Type. We look forward to see you there!
