Let’s Feed the Future
Roots, Openroom, Workshops, Showplace, Cinexin and Mercadillo – these are the names of the areas of OFFF Barcelona 2012, a digital culture festival featuring forward-thinking speakers, events and shows.
fluoro spoke with Hector Ayuso, OFFF Director, about these elements of OFFF Barcelona 2012, and how each area reflects a facet of his vision for the future.
(f) Roots – What is the importance of having a solid core of speakers for OFFF?
(Hector Ayuso) Roots is the heart of our festival, what makes everything else work, what constantly pumps up the creativity, the good ideas, the energy and the inspiration, being highly contagious. OFFF wouldn’t be OFFF without Roots.
(f) Openroom – The future is a fascinatingly unknown area. How does OFFF ‘feed the future’?
(HA) We take a lot of risk every year. Also we try to develop new areas and contents, and new exhibition formats. And most important, we make our guests and crowd face new challenges every year, inviting them to invest in themselves in order to produce new works and proposals that can be featured at OFFF, surprising our audience. This moment of global crisis we’re living in, which is making us think day after day we’re facing a dark future, we must see it as a catalyst for ideas and action!
(f) Workshops – What hopes do you hold for the creations to come out of the Workshops area?
(HA) Creating reduced workgroups, making the participants work as a team, sharing, getting wrong and learning to learn from those mistakes, answering with better ideas. Gaining experience and knowledge in a more intimate and controlled environment.
(f) Showplace – ‘Showplace is the place where the state of the art is gauged.’ How do you go about achieving this?
(HA) We always try to give at least the same value to form than to content. Overall, we try to make expositions that not only are showing a lot of value in terms of knowledge, technology advance and new formats, but also we look for fun, participation and interaction. It all must be focused on experiencing things, and very emotional.
(f) Cinexin – How important is the long-standing tradition of film to digital media?
(HA) Apart from the discipline, be it graphic, interactive, motion, editorial, illustration etc., the cinematographic language is absolutely essential, and if we aren’t capable of understand it, read it, decipher it, we’ll be simply unable to communicate our works to the audience in order to provide an answer/emotion. If we’re able to recognise when a text is well or not so well written, also we should be able to notice when the image in motion is well written or not, and for knowing that you’ve got to sit down and see a lot of movie. Good and bad ;)
(f) Mercadillo – Open exchange of ideas is how true breakthroughs are made. What do you think about this statement?
(HA) It’s essential right now, being the world nowadays as it is. If you’re not able to accept that, you’re just lost and you will never reach your maximum potential.
OFFF Barcelona 2012 will take place from Thursday 17 May to Saturday 19 May 2012
