E-Culture Fair was an international marketplace of creative and innovative concepts, processes and products in the field of new media. The emphasis was on new forms of communicating, learning, and playing in a broad social and cultural context. E-Culture Fair was joint venture between Doors of Perception, IJsfontein and Virtual Platform – the latter being a club of Holland’s eight buzziest new media organisations, including Doors.
Some 50 projects, selected from graduate design schools and new media centres from the US, Europe and South Asia, were presented in four themed zones:
Zone 1 Staging: audio, video and live programming (streaming media). An example was the Mixed Reality project, a network environment in which communication takes place with all the senses. Other projects included Klubradio, a commercial livestreaming channel on the Internet for Germany’s most famous nightclubs.
Zone 2 Interacting: With the advent of mobile telephones, and so-called ‘pervasive computing’, exciting new ways to interact are possible – using voice, touch, movement, indeed all the senses. The project Living Memory provided members of a community with means to capture, share and explore their collective memory in multiple media, accessible in the public space.
Zone 3 Learning: New technology is leading to changes in the whole process of learning. This zone presented innovative applications for individual learning and examples of on-line learning environments. These include the results of the two-year international ‘School of the Future’ project (i3 net) in which scientists, artists and education specialists design and test visionary interactive learning tools and processes.
Zone 4 Playing: games developed in different contexts for different purposes and placed in a social and cultural context. Re:gossip is a multimedia online game about gossip and social status. The more you gossip the higher you climb up the social ladder.
