from a social perspective.com

I had to make a tough decision after lunch. The organizers had set up Jonathan Harris and Shashi Seth at the same time. Money and YouTube or Innovation and exploration? Since the rest of my colleagues mainly are salespeople I decided to stop following the mainstream and see Harris instead.
His presentation was one of the best and most inspiring I have seen in a long time. For those of you who haven’t heard about him, he is an artist who specializes in telling stories in new ways digitally. The first project that he presented was “We feel fine”. To sum it up short, they harvest blogposts and if there is a sentence that has the word “Feel” in it they take that sentence out of context and present it as a feeling. I presume they have done some work grading the adjectives if they are positive, negative or whatever and then they present it as a dot on a screen. They have several views of interacting with that data, so I encourage you to check it out. It’s simply amazing and very entertaining.
He also talked about several art projects that he has done, one from the state of Bhutan that made a big impression. The project isn’t quite finished yet, so you’ll have to look out for it.
One thing that also amazed me was the story from when he went whale hunting. The idea was that he would take a picture every 5 minutes, however when his heart rate increased he would take more pictures. Check out the “Time line view”.
You should also check out his site and other work. I see a great potential to adopt some of the techniques in telling news stories in new ways that may bring out emotions to the readers.

The second session after lunch I had some high expectations. The session was held by Michael Stib and the topic was Google TV ads. Interesting to see what Google thinks about TV commercials and how it could be sold, however the presentation was a bit dull.

I then took a leap back to the “Creative” stream and watched David Eriksson who talked about how a Creative Digital Agency make it work far north in Sweden while almost exclusively working with International clients. It was mainly a presentation of their work and you may see it at their website. Apparently during that session the other stream had been simply amazing with Amy Africa blowing the minds of marketers by telling them how design should be and presenting some of their research.

The final session was a presentation of Reactable, a new digital instrument. I’m having a hard time trying to explain it; however you may see a video of it at the end of this post. They are planning to commercialize it and they plan to have it ready by the end of 2008. I want one of those!

Just another small remark. The room that Harris held his speech in is the same room that I saw Johan Gielen and heard the banging hit The beauty of Silence by Svenson and Gielen for the first time. AGES ago… Brought back good old memories!