At this year’s Next 2011 Conference in Aarhus, Mayor Jacob Bundsgaard presented the vision of Smart Aarhus. Aarhus University and the Alexandra Institute are ready to join this opportunity.

Smart Aarhus may soon be a familiar term. Aarhus’ new Mayor, Jacob Bundsgaard, used it during his opening speech at the Next 2011 conference to depict a future scenario where smart city solutions are being developed and deployed in Aarhus.

Tags: Next 2011 | Smart City

This years Roskilde Festival featured an interactive installation developed by Digital Urban Living. The Public Poetry Wall was installed at the so-called Poetry Hall as a part of a collaboration with Roskilde Library. Words supplied by writers Vagn Remme and Jesper Sternberg was projected onto a black curtain and these words could then be moved around in speachbubbles and put into sentences by the audience - an an effect of moving around below the projection.

The installation was originally developed in 2009 by DUL-researchers Rune Nielsen, Tobias Ebsen and Per Henrik Storm. Read more about the original project here.

Unveiled and exhibited at the 2011 SPOT Festival in Aarhus, Denmark – RADARTABLE flipped the conventional view of what to expect from a concert or musical experience on its head. RADARTABLE is an interactive, audiovisual installation, a musical instrument, and a platform for creative and social interaction. It allows the audience to express themselves musically and collaborate with each other to influence their concert experience – even if they normally have no prerequisites for playing music.

Public lecture by Professor Brian Massumi, Département de Communication, Université de Montréal, Canada.

The lecture will examine the status of the virtual in perception. As understood philosophically by thinkers such as C.S. Peirce, Henri Bergson, William James, Gilles Deleuze and A.N. Whitehead (in his notion of “pure potentiality”), the virtual is strictly complementary to the actual. It is a mistake to think of them as opposites or as in contradiction. The virtual is abstract by definition, which means that it cannot be reduced to the empirically present. But neither can it be separated from it. According to the philosophical concept of the virtual, there is a reciprocity between the actual and the virtual that enters actively into the constitution of every act of experience: they are co-gredient to perception. Although the virtual as such cannot appear in perception, its co-gredience to the constitution of experience cannot but make itself felt in some way with each perception’s arising. The question then becomes, in what way does the abstractness of the virtual come with coming perception? How does it make its active implication in experience felt? Applied to vision, this question translates into: what is a virtual image?

Tags: experience | vituality