Urban Screens Melbourne 08: Conference: Mobile Publics; October 3-5, 2008 :: Multimedia exhibition; October 3 – 8, 2008 :: Calls for film&video, multimedia projects and poster presentations :: Deadline for poster presentations: May 24, 2008 :: Deadline for film&video / multimedia projects: May 31, 2008.

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide events around the redefinition of a growing digital infrastructure of moving images in public space. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place at Federation Square, Melbourne. Federation Square is a unique cultural and community oriented multimedia precinct, centred around a significant 38m2 public LED screen.

CALL FOR FILM & VIDEO and MULTIMEDIA PROJECTS

The Urban Screens 08 exhibition is looking for Artists, Urban Poets, Filmmakers and Multimedia and Interaction Designers to submit film and videos or multimedia, interactive or participatory screen based projects. A large diverse urban screens infrastructure is available at Federation Square.

Criteria: We are looking for existing and potentially adaptable projects that interrogate screen media as a medium| content and tackle the festival’s key themes of issues of building community and sustainability in relation to water. These two complex themes aim to provoke discussion and spark questions such as: What is community in times of the high-speed, global flows of the new media scape? How can we explore the diversity of water, an element, essential to the existence of life on earth?

For a detailed description of the event and curatorial framework see
www.urbanscreens08.net/art-+-events
For a detailed description of Fed Squares infrastructure see
www.urbanscreens08.net/technical

The projects should preferably employ one or more of the listed existing infrastructure of urban screens of Fed Square and should consider and adapt to the special circumstances of outdoor public spaces, transforming urban spaces to foster dialogue and community engagement. We are looking for:

A) Film and video such as

- Video art, text art, animation, animated slideshows, or fictional advertisements and community information (under 3 min.)
- Silent works especially for the joint broadcasting or daily screenings in-between (under 3 min.)
- Short experimental films, documentary and journalistic content (under 15 min.)
- Small curated programs of the mentioned type of works

B) Interactive, performance based or participatory projects such as

- Interactive software applications for urban screens
- Participatory community projects using creative digital practices
- Live media art merging performance and new media
- Community displays for education and exchange
- Virtual/real world hybrid projects using streaming content
- Real-time generated content
- Screen related sound experiments
- Digital storytelling projects
- Mobile games using urban space as social and educative playground
- Connecting mobile culture of locative media with urban screens

CALL FOR POSTERS

To bridge the Conference and the Multimedia Exhibition, we are looking for posters about the latest development of Urban Screens. They will be displayed in a public exhibition in the Atrium next to the conference venue. Conference will be encouraged to get in exchange with the authors during the breaks. Eight submissions will be additionally shown in an experimental presentation on the four outdoor I-sites around Federation Square. These are equiped with an integrated screen, which offer the possibility to present remotely via scheduled skype sessions, while the audience gathers in groups around them.

Criteria: Posters are aimed at presenting the latest development in this interdisciplinary field of Urban Screens. Posters are ideal for presenting speculative, late-breaking results of ongoing research projects, drawing important conclusions from practical experiments, for giving an introduction to innovative art works or new practical design applications, reports on cutting edge technologies and content management systems under development.

Posters will be reviewed by the Poster Committee, soon to be announced. Authors of accepted submissions must provide a one or two page summary for publication in the conference proceedings. Selected submissions will also be published on-line on the International Urban Screens Association website.

APPLICATION AND DETAILED CALL

Please have a look at the detailed calls and the official online forms for application, available here.

CONTACT: exhibition [at] urbanscreens.net (please use the subject “USM08 - question concerning the CALL”)

Best regards,
Mirjam Struppek

URBAN SCREENS MELBOURNE 08
Artistic Director

International Urban Screens Association
Rheinsberger Str. 68
D-10115 Berlin