The Festival della Creativita 2009 in Florence Oct 15-18 was a blast. I had the opportunity to work there as part of the “social media team” that reported through text, photo, and video on the official festival pages that we created on facebook, twitter, youtube, and flickr. This gave me the authority, or rather the guts, to go up and interview people and just to talk a lot both to visitors and to people presenting conferences or products. I highly recommend getting involved in an event like this as “staff” or as a volunteer; you get a whole different perspective than you do as a mere visitor and you feel really involved in something big. Next year Festival will be even bigger and need volunteers once again, so keep that in mind.
I made two short videos; the production’s not great but I hope these show how much fun it was. The first day I explored some of the games being presented upstairs and mounted them in relation to the theme of cities and traffic. Trafficopoli is an environmentally friendly strategic board game invented by a man named Sergio whom I happen to know from my yoga class. I Toscanacci is a trivia board game with questions in 4 languages about tuscan facts (available to purchase online here). I have owned a copy of years, it’s a hoot. I’m afraid that the interviews are in Italian, sorry.
The second video is just a few of the more “alternative” things I spotted. The festival nicely encouraged graffiti art (both painted and electronic as per photo), skateboarding (sorry not in video), interactive design, new technologies, and electronic music (that was late at night, also not documented here). The padiglione ghiaia was the most creative of space of all (IMO), with constant smoke effect and disco ball lighting and weird noises. I watched people being projected virtually onto the moon and checked out the presentation of a new online collaborative music community, Thounds.
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