Tables and chairs

Mediamatic Salon

12 Jun 2006
12 Jun 2006

A domestic salon about (il)legal chairs, animated tables, and Romanians you can't get out of the living room. On Otaku, Doringer vs Acconci's Illegal Chair Project, the interface-free RFID media player Symbolic Table, and the Storycatcher project by Imagine IC.

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Stefan Tiron - Mediamatic Salon, June 2006, photo by Marco Wessel

Het programma

Stefan Tiron (Romania) gave a presentation onblooming anime/manga OTAKU culture in his country. Otaku, a typical Japanese term, is a reference to someone who OBSESSIVELY watches anime fils or reads manga without sleeping in between. His travelmates Linda Barkasz and Bogdan Marcu were great examples.

Bogomir Doringer (Serbia) presented his Illegal Chair project. Doringer took the Acconci chairs that were displayed this year in the Stedelijk Museum out of the DUMPSTER and displayed them in Belgrade, where he let visitors vote about the legality of the campaign.

Mediamatic Atelier developed the Symbolic table, a simple but powerful interface-free media player. If you'd put any item on the TABLE, then the table played the video or sound that corresponds with that symbol. Everything works with the table - anything, dead or alive, can be tagged with RFID to communicate with the table. Willem Velthoven demonstrated the table's workings, and Andy Smith demonstrated the open source software he developed for the table.

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer demonstrated Symbolic Dice, the double random RFIDDice prototype.

Liane van der Linden from Imagine IC presented preVerhalenvanger.nl (-storycatcher). She and the Imagine IC team collect STORIES by immigrants from the time when they just arrived in the Netherlands. A SYMBOLIC TABLE with historic videofragments aided the storytelling. Afterwards, the stories were collected in the semantic content management system anystory.nl.