Day 1 – CreateWorld 2011

CreateWorld kicked off with a bang for me this morning with an introduction to an awesome piece of software called Quartz Composer. Scott Baker, performer for Abre Ojos, was our guide for the morning.

“Quartz Composer is a node-based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X for processing and rendering graphical data”

The great thing about QC is that you do not need to write a single line of code! You do however need to get your head around 3D space and how your image will behave across the X, Y and Z pivot points. I will be posting more about this later, but for now watch the following YouTube clip to get a feel for what it can do.

Following the workshop we all headed over to the Registration table to pick up our ‘goodies’ and mingle over some yummy food. After lunch we had the official opening of CreateWorld 2011. Australian University Consortium (AUC) is a partnership between nine Australian Universities and Apple. So it was no surprise to see so many iPad, iPhone and MacBook Pro devices in one room. The point of this gathering is to learn, mingle and meld the digital creative world that Apple provides into the sea of interconnected beings. From the people I have met so far this is certainly the case. The professions I have encountered so far are: medical, film/photography, design and electronic publishers.

The first performance of the week, Tralala Blip, is a collective group of differently abled artists that use a range of digital media to make electronic music. I was not the only one in the crowd bopping along to the tunes they laid out for us.

After the buzz of the music wore off we headed to another room to hear Judit Klein talk about “Evolving tools, teaching and methods in technology enabled learning.” Then we had the first of our Keynote speakers, Tom Ang. Both talks were very interesting and their content/ideas will certainly turn up in future posts.

For now however, from an extremely warm, muggy, sticky Brisbane I bid you goodnight and retire so I may start a fresh for tomorrows talks.