OFFF Barcelona // Seeper

The guys at COSALUX were kind enough to send me to OFFF Barcelona the week before, a festival celebrating digital design, culture and art. It was a great three days despite some logistical issues with a shortage of seating and overloaded wifi. But, the quality of the speakers, the venue, the friendly people and general good vibes more than made up for the sore feet and backlog of emails at the end of the day. The tapas and cerveza available within three blocks in any direction was definitely a massive plus as well!

There was a great lineup of talented speakers and I’m going to try and do a series of posts about the ones that stood out for me. So without further ado, this was Seeper.

Evan Grant from interactive artist and technology collective Seeper gave a talk that went over their creative output, lessons learnt, and revealed a project that they have been doing intense R&D on for a couple of years that is best described as a three dimensional pixel display, codenamed “Straws”. It’s essentially a grid of RGB pixels that’s depth in physical space can be manipulated independently with the aid of a little mechanical wizardy. In hindsight, it’s a logical step that builds on their experience in architectural projection mapping, but it blew everyone’s mind in the room when he presented it.

Evan didn’t impress me because he’s an outrageously talented interactive artist and technologist (which he most certainly is), but because he’s a futurist with a vision who has assembled a company to realize it. In under an hour he covered topics as broad as the importance of humanizing technology, advocated biomimicry (borrowing solutions from the natural world), creating responsive environments that delight us, and designing buildings that are sympathetic to their occupants and adapt to their needs and moods. For a self-described “wannabe architect”, Evan’s ideas in architecture and spatial design seem right on the money.

And he’s achieved a kind of creative utopia. Do amazing stuff creatively and technologically, and some brand is bound to pay for it just to be associated with it. I mean, what’s not to love about that!?

To get a bit more of feeling for him and his outlook, this interview after his talk is well worth the watch:

And this isn’t the talk he gave but it’s a slide deck I found that describes some of their projection mapping work and what value it has for brands for those interested:

The Seeper Vimeo channel is a great place to checkout more of their work as well. I’ll try and keep momentum up and get another speaker up soon, if anyone else saw the talk or has seen Evan speak, please add your thoughts in the comments!