Free Range Outing
Another long break between posts, sorry. It’s always frustrating, because these long breaks normally mean we’ve been involved in even more stuff to blog about. The vicious circle continues until eventually we’ll be drowned in our own adventures. With that in mind we better get on with it…
Been in London over the last few days at the Free Range graduate shows. We went down to see the Bournemouth New Media course, but also had a good look at the other goings on.
The Bournemouth show (i Heart Play) did live up to it’s title, many of the pieces including gaming to some degree. The pieces ranged from mediocre to damn interesting. They included sonic controlled interfaces, interactive films, alternative reality games, API mash ups, and some good old html and flash interfaces. The show was well coordinated, and felt coherent.
Although no animators/designers stood out, a number of people seemed to know their coding, so I hope to get them working with us at SubSub.
The Brighton Graphics and Illustration courses were also on show. Their work was exceptional in places, with some very powerful graphical pieces. As always it was highly ‘fine art’ influenced, with a conceptual feel throughout, therefore difficult to comprehend employing outside of illustration work.
Epson had a huge show on, with almost 120 students on show, split between new media and graphics. The interactive work was limited, with only a couple of pieces to note, and even these were reasonably unoriginal (although, the guy who had created one of them was particular nice, so good luck to him). There was someone playing with the Wii Remote API, but that wasn’t working when I was about.
The rest of the ‘new media’ course had some great design though, with one guy in particular shining out as skilled with a massive body of work. The rest was mainly motion based, of pretty good quality.
All in all a good show, but I’m disappointed with the lack of digital/interactive courses this year. Perhaps we should move next years exhibition to Free Range and put on the digital stuff?