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We Hacked The Festival!

Marcus Holmes
Marcus Holmes

Hack the Festival 2015 was an innovative attempt to bring the arts community and the tech community closer together, with the aim of making digital art and exploring some new frontiers.

It ran at Spacecubed between Feb 20th – 27th (a whole week, unlike most of the hackathons). We covered the event previously and wondered how the event would turn out.

There were 17 entries in the end, with quite a few solo entries and a few projects that were continuations of existing work, though only 15 teams made it through to the end of the week intact.

Tamryn Barker, one of the organising team behind the event, commented:

We were impressed by the diverse interest in a first-time art hack and how willing participants were to support each other and to experiment with totally new ideas and formats. 15 teams is a large number for any hackathon, and to have an almost equal male/female participation is especially important. Hack the Festival has opened up demand for new opportunities where local artists and those with a technical background can co-create and has potentially established a new contributing forum for our creative industries.

She also relayed an email comment from John McBain, one of the many positive email comments she said the team has got since the event:

The Hack was fantastic – for all teams to create something new in a week was amazing. The networking that happened was also amazing – collaborative teams formed that often hadn’t met prior to the Hack, and the networking that happened outside of the teams was also something that will have great outcomes long beyond the last 2 weekends.

The winning team was a group of makers from the Artifactory, who produced a sonic bollard that looked and behaved exactly like a Doctor Who prop.

Aisling Blackmore, who formed a team to build a video game about non-violence called “Choices”, said the event was a revelation to her:

I was quite nervous and shy at the information night, wondering what I could possibly contribute – having no background in coding or art – and if it would be a cliquey, impenetrable affair which I would leave with tail between my legs, ashamed for having poked my head in such an interesting liminal space.
Not at all! For the participants to the organisers and mentors, each person I met over the week and a bit of Hack the Festival was warm and genuinely interested in discussing all kind of ideas.
Joy is the only appropriate word for how it felt to see an idea I’d never felt confident enough to discuss with friends come together through the combined expertise of people who had until that weekend been strangers. Overall, the experience was overwhelmingly positive: professionally run, easy to join in, and a fantastic introduction to an exceptionally friend community of coders and artists in Perth.

Becky Lee, founder of virtualiis, and a member of multiple teams at the event, said:

Art hack was a great week! I got the opportunities to work on a idea I’ve been sitting on for years, and make it a reality. I’m definitely going to continue the project, I currently have new pixels created daily from people in the community.
From here I’m going to work on improving the site design and more promotion to get more of the community involved to grow the art work.

You can contribute to her artwork directly yourself by visiting http://peopleperinch.com

 

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Marcus Holmes

Marcus Holmes

Gentleman Technologist and co-founder of Startup News. His vision has made //SN a sustainable media cheerleader for the startup community. Former CEO of Phnom Penh Post, he can be found somewhere in S.E. Asia coding away...
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