A report of some of day 1 presentations which particularly interested me at the Subtle Technologies Festival: Networks.

Gabe Sawhney co-founder of Wireless Toronto gave a very interesting presentation about three of his works [murmur] (images above and below), Wireless Toronto and a new project titled Echelon. [murmur] was the project which really caught my attention. Described by Gabe as being similar(ish) to Yellow Arrow, [murmur] is:

a location-based oral storytelling project which collects and makes available people’s personal stories about the places which are important to them.

Mark Shepard gave a presentation where he finished on the idea of an archaeology of the near future. Near future was the key phrase here as he discussed a number of near-field technologies and how these are slowly but surely allowing us to connect everything. Running trough a number of cities of the future and their identities, Solaris, HAL 9000, Ranx (new on me) etc. Mark finished on a number of pieces he has worked on including RFID Under(a)ware (image above) and Ad-hoc Dark (roast) Travel Mug (image below).

Katja Mayer (image above) did a fascinating presentation about illustrating networks and used more diagrams in a presentation (images below) than I’ve ever seen. In brief the presentation demonstrated that the idea of illustrating / mapping networks has been around for quite some time within number of different fields.

Most interesting for me was her key diagram, a sort of triad network of three nodes and how three is a pivotal point for a network (three nodes are better than two). This bears striking similarity to some ideas I will be discussing on Sunday (images below).

More photos of the presentations here on Flickr.