Real Time Everything: new directions in media soft

One-day symposium, Wednesday 22nd June 10:00-3:00, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol (www.watershed.co.uk)

Over the last few years, a 'new breed' of media software has emerged, offering a range of new possibilities - indeed, a whole new approach - to musicians, artists, programmers and other creatives working with digital media.

Key features of these next-generation tools are:

1) modular structure - infinite configurability allowing the user to tailor the software to their own needs, effectively blurring the boundaries between different media, software applications, and between programmer and end user.

2) expandability - systems can be configured that use multiple computers to allow for more processing power, or to allow remote collaboration, multi-site projects or telematic perfomance

3) real-time functionality - these tools are built in such a way that everything is immediate and interactive, even computationally-intensive tasks such as video processing and 3D rendering.

This intensive one-day symposium will look at several of these systems with experts from the field alongside examples of creative applications, with opportunities to discuss both the practical uses and the wider implications of these developments.

This event is run as a collaboration between Watershed, Bath Spa University College and Sonic Arts Network.  It represents the launch of RAM (the Realtime AudioMedia group), a new research unit at Bath Spa specialising in the development of realtime media tools and their application, and a lead up to SAN's large-scale The Connectors event in September (also at Watershed).

Provisional schedule

10:00 – 12:00 Poster Sessions

Max/MSP: Dr Barry Moon (Bath Spa University College)
PD: Martin Dupras (University of Western England)
SuperCollider: Martin Robinson (University of Middlesex)
Processing: Yasser Rashid
The OpenCV library: Dr Paul Hill (University of Bristol)
Csound: Professor John Ffitch (University of Bath)
The Composers Desktop Project: Richard Dobson and Dr Archer Endrich

1:00 – 2:00 Practical Demonstrations

Artists Martin Robinson and Dr Nick Rothwell talk about their work using some of these tools

2:00 – 3:00 Panel Discussion

A discussion of some of the wider implications raised throughout the day

There will be a nominal fee of £6.00 (£4.00 concessions) for attendance at the symposium.  To reserve your place, call the Watershed box office on 0117 927 6444.  They can help you with directions etc; for detailed queries on the symposium email Joseph Hyde – j.hyde@bathspa.ac.uk